In the current Western anti-Putin environment, it’s tough — perhaps even hazardous — to suggest he may have had grounds for his aggressive position with Ukraine. And even if there may be some rationale for his Ukraine intervention, what about the email hacking into the U.S. election and the numerous allegations of domestic fraud, oppressive treatment of opponents, even murder?

None of these latter accusations, if proven, can be excused or defended. But what about Ukraine, where the Western sanctions appear to have escalated, rather than reduced, East-West tensions, and in the opinion of some knowledgeable internationalists, have increased the risk of revival of the Cold War?

It’s difficult to find in our media much non-partisan, evidence-based analysis of the reasons for the growing escalation of conflict with Russia over the last decade. However, Foreign Affairs, the highly-respected bimonthly international publication, has devoted considerable space to this matter.

In its September/October 2014 issue, following the imposition of sanctions by the West, the distinguished political science professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, wrote a scathing piece entitled “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.” His supporting contentions include the following.

In the mid-1990s President Clinton began advocating NATO’s eastern expansion to “contain” Russia when Mearsheimer says there was no evidence there were expansionary risks.

As proposed by the U.S., however, NATO did move east, in 1999, bringing in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland; in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia; and since then has continued to openly target both Ukraine and Georgia.

This expansion was opposed by many Western international realists, perhaps most prominently and ironically by the architect of postwar Soviet containment, the diplomat George Kennan. Following NATO’s first round of expansion, he is quoted as saying, “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatever. No one was threatening anyone else.”

The European Union, Mearsheimer also observes, has also been “moving eastward” under its Eastern Partnership Initiative, aimed at fostering greater prosperity in adjacent countries. In March of 2014, the President of the European Commission is quoted as saying, “We have a debt, a duty of solidarity (to Ukraine) and will work to have them as close as possible” — and in June, the EU and Ukraine signed an economic agreement that the previously democratically elected and Putin-supported Ukrainian President Yanukovych had rejected.

As well, the U.S. Government is said to have “bankrolled” by more than $5 billion the anti- Russian National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for more than 60 projects aimed at promoting “civil society” in Ukraine.

NED’S president, Carl Gershman, is quoted: “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” Those also actively promoting Ukraine’s membership in NATO included vice-president Joseph Biden, senator John McCain, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the then-current U.S. Ambassador in Kyiv.

Foreign Affairs has devoted roughly equal space to other internationalists with views conflicting with those of Mearsheimer, who is described by one opponent, Michael McFaul, as “one of the most consistent and persuasive theorists of the realist schools of international relations.”

McFaul of the Hoover Institute and Stanford University, Stephen Sestanovich, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and other published authors advance the opposing “democratic” theory repetitively expressed by our media. This emphasizes Putin’s expansionary objectives, as well as the implication that to negotiate with Putin — a territorial invader flouting national sovereignty, a fraudulent, anti-democratic, criminally irresponsible leader — risks repeating the tragic folly of the Munich negotiations with Hitler.

To be clear — Mearsheimer does not support Russian interference in, much less control of, Ukraine. He concludes that the West should switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine that serves as a buffer state and avoid the troublesome Russian justification for its actions, namely that it is motivated by precisely the same concerns that led the Kennedy administration’s response to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 — i.e., an unwillingness to having a nation associated with a powerful adverse military entity on its geographic doorstep.

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Despite his appalling public performances to date, is it conceivable that President Trump has a supportable notion about the preferred approach to this critical Russian issue?

Tim Armstrong, a lawyer and former Ontario deputy minister of Industry and Trade, was agent general for the Asia-Pacific Region and now chairs the Radiation Safety Institute of Canada.

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