Our Dangerous World . . .

Just a few stories this week from a world grown increasingly terrifying . . .

Liberia has closed its border, quarantined many communities, and has seen even top experts stricken with the dreaded Ebola virus.  Sick officials made it onto international flights despite stringent precautions by the Liberian government.  West Africa has seen the most serious outbreak of the extremely contagious disease yet.  No end in sight.

Libya faces its worst violence since 2011, causing several nations to shut down their embassies there. The country's "fragile government and fledgling army" currently struggle to keep control of the capital's international airport.

War continues in Gaza.  Secretary of State John Kerry continues to undermine the cease fire agreement supported by Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority in an effort to kowtow to Hamas extremists.

Boko Haram crossed the Nigerian border, raiding Cameroon.  The terror group best known for kidnapping hundreds of young girls seized the wife of Cameroon's vice prime minister.  Cameroon has suffered three attacks from the terrorist group.

European Jews, particularly in France, are fearful of a continent wide spike in active anti-Semitism.  Could this produce an exodus from Europe to Israel and the United States?  An ambassador appointed by Hungary to represent that nation in Italy resigned after criticism of his "raging" anti-Semitism.

US intelligence officials released images that seem to show Russian artillery firing into Ukraine in support of separatists there.  This threatens to escalate the conflict into a full scale war between two of the European continent's largest nations. With Ukraine the home of some of Europe's most productive farmland, a full scale war could disrupt food supplies for millions.

While the female mutilation edict attributed to ISIS may be fake, Christians have fled areas under its control by the thousands. Islamicist officials have imposed prejudicial sanctions on Christians which have not existed in Iraq in generations.  Islamic State officials also ordered the destruction of the tombs of Jonah and Daniel, figures holy to the Jewish, Christian, and other faiths.

Meanwhile China, which has threatened the neighboring countries of Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines in recent years, has accelerated its naval program. Iran also continues its quest for more effective weapons capable of hitting Europe and North America.

Ukraine and the Woodrow Wilson Problem

Vladimir Putin currently uses his ideas as justification for Russian moves in the Crimea.  Although the situation is not the same, Hitler referenced the same intellect?  Whose world shaking words served to justify slicing away chunks of weaker states?  Woodrow Wilson.

The end of World War I spelled the end of three multi-national empires, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.  Each one of these states formed around core ethnic groups, Great Russians, Austrians, and Turks.  Each group established a powerful state that absorbed surrounding territories peopled by different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups.  Another tie binding the three lay in their belief that they fulfilled the Roman Imperial tradition.  This, they believed, gave them the legitimate right to rule others.

The 20th Century challenged that notion and tore it down.  Long standing dynasties and loose ties to the Roman Empire no longer mattered.  Legitimacy remained a powerful word, but what made a government and its power legitimate?  The Bolsheviks substituted class warfare for czarism and kept their empire going.  The other two broke up.

Austria-Hungary challenged the West.  About 15 different ethnic groups populated the empire and many wanted free of Austro-Hungarian imperial power.  Wilson suggested that the peace treaties ending World War I reorder the world on national self-determination.  No one, however, defined what that meant.  It has remained a staple of US diplomacy ever since, but not without raising puzzling questions?.

Does it mean that each ethnic group has the right to rule itself?  Wilson certainly did not think that extended to black Americans and Indian nations.

Does self-determination require democracy?

Does every group have this right, or only groups large enough to form a viable country?

No one knows for sure and we have made it up as we went along.  This mostly resulted in good results.

But it also provides justification for National Socialists, white supremacists, and ethnic cleansing.  The logic of national self-determination carried to its logical conclusion leads to messy problems, such as Hitler demanding that Czechoslovakia hand over the Sudetenland because it had Germans there.  Of course after World War II, to prevent such a thing from happening again, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other countries expelled every German from fear of this happening again.  Serbs and Croats later feared the influence of minority Bosnians in their countries and drove them out.

Crimea is mostly populated by Russians, but is under Ukrainian control according to international law.  Putin is, as many have done, appealing to the Wilsonian ideal of national self-determination.  The Russian implemented vote in the Crimea chose Russia (whether or not that was a fair vote is highly debatable.)

Putin has put the West in a bind by turning the ideals of Woodrow Wilson and the imposed treaties ending World War I back against it.  When addressing Putin, the West will have to deal with the hundred year old specter of the idea of national self-determination as well.  Not that it was a bad idea, but a clear definition is way overdue.

Putin, Ukraine, and an Abysmal Failure of US Foreign Policy

It did not have to be this way.

Today, Vladimir Putin's forces hold the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine.  Barack Obama looks weaker than ever, his presidency's previous shambles even look good by comparison.  Pundits decry the loss of US influence.  The stark truth is that there is little that the United States can do to alter the situation.

But why?

First, Putin actually has defensible reasons to enter Ukraine.  This is not to say that he could not have achieved better results with a less dramatic move.  But a border country approaching chaos gives Russia a powerful excuse to protect Russian ethnics and Russian facilities there.  What if Mexico devolved even more into violence and instability?  At some point in the near future, US forces may have to occupy parts of that country to bring stability and protect Americans living there.  Before criticizing others, a nation must consider what it would have to do in a similar situation.

The West failed in Ukraine because the United States abdicated its role, dating back to the Treaty of Versailles, to bolster free societies and free markets around the globe.  US policy has, at times used the Franklin Roosevelt philosophy of "he's a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch" in backing friendly authoritarian regimes.  But the overall goal has always been transition into free societies with economic opportunity.

That does not happen by dumping money or bombs on a nation.  It comes from a consistently articulated vision by the US foreign policy establishment that natural rights, free markets, rule of law are essential to human happiness and world peace.  Praising democratic friends, such as Britain and Israel, helps to broaden the "city on the hill" ideal articulated by Democratic and Republican presidents alike in different ways.

The vision does not just come from talking about freedom.  Diplomatic, other government, and private groups must engage fragile societies to help educate and develop faith in the essential aspects of freedom and prosperity.  Internationalize the values that Americans and others take for granted.

Instead, Obama tore apart the fabric.  He blamed the United States for the trouble in the world, never realizing that wise use of American power and influence more often puts us in the referee role.  We are keeping more conflicts apart than anyone realizes.  Until the influence and respect dissipates and the world runs riot.

We are not the world's policeman, nor should we be.  But constant engagement of rhetoric, policy, and economic influence has helped to keep the world at peace.  Obama could not see the overall benefit of US power, only the rare times that it has not turned out right.  He tore it down and now instability hits one country after another.

Power seeks a vacuum,  Obama created one.  Putin and China have been happy to step in.

And so you get what we had here last week.  Which is the way he wants it.

As for Putin, he is more Bismarck than Stalin.  He's willing to bend his own region to his economic and security goals, use social issues to rally his supporters and alienate his political opponents.  Russia's sudden worry about gays smacks of Bismarck's kulturkampf against political Catholics.  But Bismarck did not want to completely revise the international system, just strengthen Germany's position within it.  The Russian Czars acted in the same way.  Russia traditionally seeks security on its borderlands and will aggressively move to ensure it.

Had the United States remained engaged in Ukraine and kept its near century old commitment to supporting freedom, that country may have solved its own problems.  It may have remained solid enough to deter Russian fears or thoughts of aggrandizement.

China is more worrisome for a number of reasons.  As is Iran.  Both countries have more revisionist fantasies.

A Short History of Ukraine

Protests and civil violence have rocked the Eastern European nation of Ukraine for several days now.  The Texas sized country of nearly 45 million is physically one of the largest in Europe.  Its plains have some of the world's best farming soil outside of North America.

Here is a brief description of its history.

In the early Middle Ages, Slavic tribes resided on the Dnieper River, a stream flowing roughly from north to south and emptying into the Black Sea.  By the 800s, the kingdoms and principalities of Scandinavia had grown rich from both plunder and trade.  They traded with those too powerful to plunder, like the Byzantine Empire.

A Swedish trading nation called the Varangians began using the river system in what is now Russia and Ukraine to build commercial ties with the rich Byzantine Empire which straddled the Balkans and Middle East.  The Byzantines were the remaining rump of the old Roman Empire, much more compact, but still rich and still formidable.

The Varangian trade with the Byzantines drew more Slavs and Varangians to the river banks.  Some combination of the two formed a state around the town of Kiev.  Originally the state was called the Kievan Rus.

No one can say for certain how much of the original state was Nordic and how much was Slavic.  Regardless, Slavs quickly dominated the early state.  In the 800s and 900s, Kiev grew into a wealthy trading state, extending their rule along the rivers and to the east.  It traded heavily with the Byzantine Empire and established dynastic connections with the impoverished European kingdoms emerging in central and western Europe.

Modern observers would find the early structure of Kievan rule unnecessarily complicated since they did not practice true primogeniture.  The Grand Prince ruled at Kiev.  Brothers, sons, or cousins could rule under him at other prominent cities.  Succession was complicated and sometimes contentious.  Hostile groups from the flatlands and Caucasian Mountains to the east often tried to play different princes off against each other.

One of the momentous moments in the history of Kievan Russia came during the reign of Grand Prince St. Vladimir the Great.  He ruled from 980-1015, modern calendar.  During his rule, he determined that his state ought to be Christian.  By this time, however, Christianity was very close to its first major permanent schism.  St. Vladimir had to choose between the Pope of what would be the Roman Catholic Church and the Emperor controlled Patriarch in Constantinople.  Vladimir may have stacked the deck.  He sent emissaries to describe each church to him so that he could decide.  Some went to the glittering capital of Constantinople to survey what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church.  They saw the mighty St. Sophia Church set in a dynamic metropolis.  Others went to examine the Western church in not Rome, but the Holy Roman Empire. Its poverty had not yet produced the fantastic cathedrals that would appear later in the Middle Ages.

St. Vladimir tied the fortunes of his nation to the East, selecting Orthodoxy.  This would form one of many barriers between Russia and the West for centuries.

Kiev met its ruin in the 1200s when the Mongols came.  Kiev chose to resist and was annihilated much as Carthage in the Third Punic War.  A papal nuncio to China who had seen Kiev intact wrote back on seeing the devastation.  His letter recounted the leveling of numerous beautiful churches and other buildings.  All that remained of the once thriving metropolis was a few mud huts and a few hundred Slavic slaves under the Mongol yoke.  To the east of the city, he saw endless fields of bleaches bones and skulls.

The Mongols controlled Eastern Europe until the 1400s.  Toward the end of its rule, some Russian cities started to assert themselves.  Chief among these was Moscow.  One of its successes lay in convincing the Orthodox patriarch to move the office of Metropolitan (analogous to Catholic Archbishop) from Kiev to Moscow.  That gave the future Russian capital spiritual predominance in Eastern Europe.  When it freed itself of the Mongols, it became the only Christian ruled leadership city in Orthodoxy.  That happened because Constantinople finally succumbed to the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

By now, Russian civilization had split into three parts.  The country around Kiev now had the name "Little Russia," or Ukraine.  To its north sat Belarus or "White Russia."  Moscow expanded to the north and east, becoming the center of "Great Russia."  But Ukraine was not yet fated to come under the rule of Russia.

As the Middle Ages closed and the modern era commenced, the great power in the East was Poland.  This Roman Catholic Slavic state united with the also Catholic Germanic state of Lithuania.  Through the 1400s until the 1700s, this state ruled a vast area of plains and swamps.  During the early 1600s, it even aspired to conquer Russia itself.  Southern Ukraine fell into the hands of the Ottoman Turks who controlled the northern coast of the Black Sea.

From the rule of Peter the Great down to the end of the 18th century, Russia and its czars labored to gradually bring Ukraine under its own imperial rule.  Despite the changes in government, Ukraine developed its own culture and language.  It remembered the traditions of old Kiev and took pride in its heritage.

World War I ushered in significant changes.  First, the Germans steamrolled Russian forces and in 1918 made Ukraine a protectorate under its guidance.  This short lived situation dissolved with the German defeat in November, leaving Ukraine to the ravages of the Russian Civil War and eventually Bolshevism.

The Communist Soviet Union exacted a devastating toll from Ukraine.  Stalin, who had run press gangs in the city of Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad, now Volgograd, determined that Ukraine's wealthy and productive peasants must surrender their lands.  The peasants, as they had done under the czars, resisted.  They burned their homes, slaughtered and ate their livestock, and denied the Soviets the fruit of their labors.  Stalin ordered millions rounded up and shipped off to the open plains of Siberia where most froze to death.  Resulting famine killed millions more.

When Hitler invaded in 1941, many Ukrainians welcomed his Wehrmacht as liberators.  Instead, they found the Germans more ruthless than Stalin.  Hitler's Einstatzgruppen teams rounded up professionals and other leaders to be massacred, often by burning churches around them.  Hitler's defeat brought more suffering.  The Soviets demanded from British and American allies the return of all expatriates, many of whom had fled the Communists right after World War I.  Shamefully, British and American officials approved the "return" of these people, most of whom suffered torture and death.

Ukraine's own Nikita Khrushchev  succeeded Stalin as Soviet leader.  His schemes and risky policies, however, led to his being removed from power.

Communist control led to disaster when a series of foolish decisions led to the late 1980s meltdown of the Ukraine located Chernobyl nuclear power plant.  Soviet authorities for days refused to order a mass evacuation, exposing hundreds of thousands to contamination.  Even today, Ukraine and Belarus still suffers high levels of cancer and birth defects as a result.  Chernobyl broke down what was left of loyalty to the Communist system.

In 1991, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia seceded from the Soviet Union, marking the end of its existence.  Ukraine since has wavered between its former Russian masters and would be Western mentors.  In the meantime, it has allowed its system to grow increasingly corrupt and authoritarian.  The present and future is unclear.  The resources and strength of the people, however, mean it still has potential to thrive.

Ukraine Continues Tilt Toward Russia

In the Middle Ages, Kiev served as the capital of Russia.  Now it serves independent Ukraine in that capacity.  Over time, Russia and Ukraine separated culturally, linguistically, and nationally.  Now Kiev once again looks to Russia for leadership and support.

Ukraine in terms of size is about the size of Texas or France.  Next to the North American Great Plains, its soil potentially can produce more than any region on Earth.  Its 45 million people live in a state of chronic underdevelopment.  The nation suffers from severe corruption and holds the fifth lowest international credit rating.

Twenty years of independence from the old Soviet Union brought disastrously bad government to a nation with energy reserves, a seaport, and food production capacity that could easily provide for a continent.

Ukraine naturally shied away from Russia at first.  Russia dominated the old Soviet Union which in turn terrorized Ukraine.  Stalin ripped away from the land tens of millions of innocent farmers and others.  Over the USSR's entire history, Ukrainian language and culture were stifled.

Ties to Europe and the United States grew.  Ukraine wanted to participate in institutions such as the European Union and NATO.  Economic instability in the past several years has made help from the EU come with conditions.  These include applying to the IMF and signing a free trade agreement.

Full free trade with Europe would help Ukraine develop itself.  It can cheaply produce enough food to sell to all of Europe.  France, Germany, and other countries, however, continue to cling to agricultural subsidies.  For Ukraine to get ahead, it needs to be able to exploit its competitive advantages in land and cheap labor.  A free trade pact would merely open the door to European manufactures without helping Ukraine develop its agricultural sector.  Some in the United States have floated the idea of a bailout, but with the US and the EU experiencing their own debt crises, this will not happen.

Enter Vladimir Putin and Russia.

Putin seems to have figured out what Britain learned after the American Revolution.  Gain influence over an independent nation's economy and get the benefits of colonialism without the costs of administration.  Britain, the United States, Japan, and others have all adopted that lesson at some point after hard lessons learned about war, conquest, and colonialism.

Russia has extended its hand to Ukraine, offering a trade deal and other forms of assistance.  This will tie Ukraine more strongly to the nation that served as its overlord during Czarist and Soviet times.

Many in Ukraine see this as too risky.  Thousands have rioted in protest against rising Russian influence.  Russian ties to Belarus have resulted in the near merger of the two states.  This will likely not change Ukraine's official position.

Putin will continue to channel efforts into building an informal empire dependent on Moscow.  This is a less risky strategy than China's new belligerence in the Far East, but it is no less important.

As for Ukraine, its potential remains untapped.  But a country the size of France with oil, gas, and food capability is not a forgettable part of the world's balance of influence.