Table Of ContentCrimea, Global Rivalry, and the
Vengeance of History
Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the
Vengeance of History
Hall Gardner
crimea, global rivalry, and the vengeance of history
Copyright © Hall Gardner, 2015.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New
York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
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ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 54676- 0
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First edition: September 2015
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Contents
Preface vii
General Introduction: The Vengeance of History 1
1 Renewed Cold War? World War II?
World War I? Or Nothing of the Kind? 17
2 Genesis of the Russia- Ukraine Conflict 29
3 Soviet Collapse and the Russia- Ukraine Conflict 43
4 Origins of the Russian Backlash 59
5 Uneven Polycentrism and the Global Crisis 81
6 A Cross- Historical Method 99
7 Why Major- Power War Is Still Possible, Though
Not Inevitable! 127
8 Future Pessimistic Scenarios 149
9 Once, and If, the Dust Settles 169
Notes 199
Selected Bibliography 235
Index 239
Preface
Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History picks up on my previous
two Palgrave- Macmillan books, Averting Global War (2007) and NATO Expan-
sion and US Strategy in Asia (2013). Averting Global War warned of a potential
Georgia- Russia war in addition to the possibility of a Russia- Ukraine conflict.
NATO Expansion and US Strategy in Asia had proposed the “internationaliza-
tion” of Russian port of Sevastopol, plus the formation of a regional “peace and
development community” for the Black Sea and Caucasus regions involving a
system of joint NATO-E U- Russian security guarantees, with the deployment
of international peacekeepers.
These options were proposed as an alternative to a NATO enlargement
to Georgia and Ukraine and in order to prevent the eventual partition of the
Black Sea region into pro-N ATO and pro- Russian states. These proposals
were made precisely in the hope that it might still be possible to avert the
burgeoning Russian pan-n ationalist threat to retake Crimea in opposition to
both NATO and EU enlargement in the midst of Ukrainian bankruptcy and
sociopolitical strife.
Now, however, the Crimean crisis represents the return of history with a
vengeance in that it impacts political-e conomic and financial relations between
Russia, China, the European Union, and much of the world, in addition to
interlinking directly and indirectly with a number of regional conflicts through-
out the globe, including the “wider Middle East,” South and Central Asia, the
eastern Mediterranean, and the Indo- Pacific.
While the Crimean crisis represents the latest manifestation, but not
the root cause of the decline of US-E U- Russian relations in the post–C old
War period, the annexation indicates the need for the United States and the
European Union to begin to work toward a coherent global strategy toward
Russia that includes consideration of China, India, Japan, and other ris-
ing powers and socio- political movements and that is designed to avert the
potential for much wider regional conflicts— if not the real possibility of a
major- power war.
viii l Preface
Proposals for the internationalization of the Crimea and Black Sea region,
among other options involving power sharing and joint sovereignty for island
and resource disputes in the Indo-P acific and elsewhere, would represent steps
toward peace and reconciliation with both Russia and China and with all other
states concerned— that is, once, and if, the dust begins to settle.
I would like to thank Sara Doskow and Jeff LaSala for their support for my
third Palgrave-Macmillan book project, plus Megan Bailey at Scribe for her
assistance in finalizing the text. My AUP assistants, Anna Wiersma and Hannah
Victoria, were of great help with the index. Andrei Grachev, William Hartung,
Robert M. Hayden, Jan Kavan, and Nick Petro all provided useful information.
And I thank my anonymous reviewer for his praise and positive suggestions!
And finally, I thank my wife, Isabel, my daughters, Francesca and Celine, and
Celine’s husband, Alan, for putting up with another book project, with more
soon to follow!
Hall Gardner
(Paris, June 11, 2015)
General Introduction
The Vengeance of History
In March 1997, I was invited to Warsaw to participate in the Committee
on Atlantic Studies conference, “NATO and Peacekeeping,” sponsored by
the Polish prime ministry and the Ministry of Defense. As I did not see
any Russian representatives present, and as at least two Ukrainians had been
invited as observers, my suspicion was that the conference was already symbolic
of the beginning of the end of efforts to sustain positive relations with Moscow.
As I was preparing my discussion on NATO- Russian- European peacekeeping
deployments in ex- Yugoslavia, a dark- haired, pale- faced man in a black suit
came out of a back door with my first book, Surviving the Millennium, in his
hands.
He opened the book and pointed to a page in the last chapter in which I
had outlined a number of pessimistic scenarios for the future including one
in which “secessionist movements in a bankrupt Ukraine could demand Rus-
sian (and/or Polish intervention).” It was a statement that had been preceded
by the sentence, “Russian pan- nationalists may claim to protect the Russian
‘diaspora’ while concurrently seeking to secure access to the Crimea.”1 With
piercing eyes, the man asked whether I was “trying to be provocative” and then
abruptly pivoted 180 degrees and disappeared into the maze of offices. It was
Kafkaesque.
As depicted in that book, which was written during a period of triumphal
optimism just five years after the demolition of the Berlin wall, that pessimis-
tic scenario may actually have been too extreme, but only because the book
had assumed that Kiev might attempt to retain its former Soviet nuclear arse-
nal as a “Gaullist” deterrent. (The book had argued against Kiev retaining its
nuclear weapons, an option that had been supported by the neorealist John
Mearsheimer, among others, at that time.) Written before NATO had begun
its new eastward expansion as pushed by the US Congress since 1992, the book
clearly pointed to the possibility that a crisis in a bankrupt Ukraine could lead
