Realism and US-Russia policy

Gilbert Doctorow of the American Committee for East West Accord looks at Henry Kissinger's views on Russian foreign policy in Trump and Revenge of the ‘Realists’ Consortium News 12/31/2016. He argues that despite his reputation as a scholar-statesman - and war criminal - Kissinger's basic view of Russian policy assumption in some ways is surprisingly simplistic:

... Kissinger’s thinking about Russian history is so clear one might imagine he knows what he is talking about. The question is of key importance because the Realist School is built upon the assumption that one can accurately appraise the strengths of all players and that one has a solid knowledge of the history and traditions of the players. In this it distinguishes itself from idealism, with its focus on universal values and disinterest in regional knowledge.

From Kissinger’s own academic career in studying European diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century, Russia should have been on his plate, given that the country was one of the three decisive players in the first half of the century (Holy Alliance) and one of the five or six decisive players in the second half of the century. However, that was manifestly not the case.

Kissinger is widely reputed to be a voracious reader. Yet, it is obvious that Russia has never and does not now figure among the topics he reads. In Diplomacy, for his analysis of Russia, he relied on the very dated Nineteenth Century classics of Russian history like Vasily Klyuchevsky that he read in translation during his graduate student days at Harvard.

Klyuchevsky is unquestionably a good starting point for students of Russian history. He was the father of the historiography that came down to Kissinger in the person of Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies at Harvard. But his notion of Russia’s manifest destiny of borders moving out across the Eurasian land mass was part of a Liberal and anti-tsarist historiography. By today’s standards, reading Klyuchevsky has mainly curiosity value. To put the issue in terms closer to an American reader, it is as if Kissinger were using de Tocqueville as the key source for writing about contemporary America.

Doctorow also discusses the mixed nature of on Kissinger's positions on Russia. On the one hand, he places Kissinger "squarely among those responsible for getting us into the confrontation with Russia that reached its climax under Barack Obama." And, "beginning in the 1990s, Henry Kissinger modified his message of realism to accommodate the then-dominant American school of idealism, or values-based foreign policy."

But he also gives Kissinger credit for a more pragmatic, realistic view of Russia than that shared by neoconservatives and liberal hawks: "he is correctly perceived as a champion of the art of diplomacy, which is another word for compromise and deal-making. It is precisely diplomacy that has been sorely lacking in the U.S. government in recent decades. Under both Republican and Democratic presidents, ideology has held sway at the State Department and in the White House."

Doctorow also calls attention to this Spiegel interview, 'Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?' 11/13/2014, in which the former Secretary of State says:

SPIEGEL: So let's talk about a concrete example: How should the West react to the Russian annexation of Crimea? Do you fear this might mean that borders in the future are no longer incontrovertible?

Kissinger: Crimea is a symptom, not a cause. Furthermore, Crimea is a special case. Ukraine was part of Russia for a long time. You can't accept the principle that any country can just change the borders and take a province of another country. But if the West is honest with itself, it has to admit that there were mistakes on its side. The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.

SPIEGEL: What was it then?

Kissinger: One has to ask one's self this question: Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine. So one has to ask one's self why did it happen?

SPIEGEL: What you're saying is that the West has at least a kind of responsibility for the escalation?

Kissinger: Yes, I am saying that. Europe and America did not understand the impact of these events, starting with the negotiations about Ukraine's economic relations with the European Union and culminating in the demonstrations in Kiev. All these, and their impact, should have been the subject of a dialogue with Russia. This does not mean the Russian response was appropriate.

SPIEGEL: It seems you have a lot of understanding for Putin. But isn't he doing exactly what you are warning of -- creating chaos in eastern Ukraine and threatening sovereignty?

Kissinger: Certainly. But Ukraine has always had a special significance for Russia. It was a mistake not to realize that.

SPIEGEL: Relations between the West and Russia are tenser now than they have been in decades. Should we be concerned about the prospects of a new Cold War?

Kissinger: There clearly is this danger, and we must not ignore it. I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

SPIEGEL: But didn't the annexation of Crimea by Russia force the EU and US to react by imposing sanctions?

Kissinger: One, the West could not accept the annexation; some countermeasures were necessary. But nobody in the West has offered a concrete program to restore Crimea. Nobody is willing to fight over eastern Ukraine. That's a fact of life. So one could say we don't have to accept it, and we do not treat Crimea as a Russian territory under international law -- just as we continued to treat the Baltic states as independent throughout Soviet rule. [my emphasis in italics]

Doctorow also observes of Kissinger's 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?:

In his specific remarks on how America should conduct its foreign policy towards Russia, he urged moderation, continued readiness to assist the country with its transition to democracy and free markets, and attentiveness to Russia’s voice in international forums.

Note especially his comment on prospective NATO expansion into the Baltic States, which Kissinger believed in 2001 would be provocative, saying it would put NATO forces within 30 miles of St Petersburg, one of Russia’s largest population centers. He correctly foresaw that “Advancing the NATO integrated command this close to key centers of Russia might mortgage the possibilities of relating Russia to the emerging world order as a constructive member.”

Doctorow also describes what he calls "the soft underbelly of Realpolitik: realism can be only as useful as the expertise and judgment of its practitioner." Although that broad characterization could be made of any foreign policy approach, it's useful here in calling attention to the fact that the pragmatic calculations that the Realist school of foreign policy offers to provide can be highly misleading and even dysfunctional if the key information and assumptions are insufficiently grounded.

Eric Levitz takes a look at some of the anti-Russian hawkish sentiments among some foreign policy figures associated with the President-elect's incoming administration, Trump Allies Argue That Obama’s Sanctions on Russia Are Too Weak New York 12/30/2016:

The Heritage Foundation — which has played a central role in staffing Trump’s White House — argues that Obama’s sanctions are “too little, too late.” Is this the conservative think tank’s sly attempt to pressure Trump into adopting an even more hard-line stance against Russia?

Meanwhile, the man who was one mustache away from becoming Trump’s deputy secretary of State offered similar talking points on Fox News.

“I don’t think they will have much impact at all,” John Bolton said of the Obama administration’s sanctions on Friday. “The Russians have walked all over the Obama administration for eight years. It’s really been a pathetic performance. So what this last burst of activity has to do is hard to say. I do think it’s intended to try and box the Trump administration in. I think it will fail. This is simply an executive order. If President Trump decides to reverse it, it’s easy enough to do.”

Bolton went on to accuse the Obama administration of having “politicized” the process of intelligence gathering — a claim that’s belied by the president’s decision not to impose sanctions or release detailed intelligence reports until after Election Day. Nonetheless, Bolton suggested that Trump was correct to treat public intelligence reports with some skepticism.

Of course, it remains to be seen which of the major foreign policy factions in the incoming administration (neocons, America Firsters, Islamophobes) becomes the most significant.

International relations scholarship uses a term that doesn't seem to have become very common in the public discussions of Russian policy with neighboring states, "de facto states," to describe situations like South Ossetia in Georgia. Sergey Markedonov writes in De facto statehood in Eurasia: a political and security phenomenon Caucasus Survey 3:3 (2015):

... new internationally recognized states are not the only result of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Another major consequence was the appearance of new formations also declaring their sovereignty. Known variously as “unrecognized states”, “quasi/pseudo-states” or “breakaway republics”, they play a significant role in geopolitical rivalries, conflict resolution processes and post-Soviet nation-building development despite a lack of formal-juridical recognition. In this article, we use the academically and politically neutral term “de facto states” to describe them.

De facto statehood is not, however, a phenomenon or product exclusively associated with the Soviet (or, to include the former Yugoslavia, socialist) disintegrations. Entities emerging as a result of revolutions, various practices of national self-determination (which was post-factum called liberation), or foreign policy games, but which did not gain broad or even limited recognition, had existed long before 1991. Even some European countries, such as France (after the French Revolution), the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Ireland, were not recognized for some period of time in the past. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the USSR existed for some time without international recognition (e.g. the USA recognized the “new realities in Eurasia” only in 1933). The People’s Republic of China had no representation in the United Nations (UN) from 1949 to 1971. China’s interests were represented by the Republic of China (Taiwan). The situation changed only after the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2758 (“Restoration of the Lawful Rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations”) on 25 October 1971.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union’s disintegration produced an impressive list of entities that exist in reality but lack recognition by UN member countries. At present, there are six such entities: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic and the two alleged People’s Republics of Donbass (in south-eastern Ukraine). Two of these, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have received limited recognition by individual countries. [my emphasis]

Crimea does not count as a "de facto state" in the same sense as those entities, because Crimea has been integrated into the nation of Russia itself, despite the widespread lack of international recognition of that annexation.

Argentina and Russia

Argentina currently has good relations with Russia. And Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned Argentine President Cristina Fernández to thank her for publicly complaining during her recent trip to Europe about the double-standard of countries like Britain and the US complaining about the illegal and normatively invalid referendum Putin held in the Crimea as a prelude to re-annexing it to Russia, while Britain held an equally invalid referendum among the British colonists of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands while the US tacitly approved of it. The Malvinas are a long-standing claim of Argentina and large undersea oil reserves go with possession of the Malvinas. So it's a big issue in Argentina and South America.

And there are broader concerns, as well. Fernando Cibeira, Una llamada para apuntarle a la doble vara Página/12 26.03.2014 reports on the conversation:

Es que Argentina evalúa lo sucedido en Ucrania como otro caso de los llamados "golpes blandos", iniciativas motorizadas por partidos opositores minoritarios junto a grupos económicos y mediáticos afines con las que buscan desestabilizar a los gobiernos democráticamente elegidos. Evalúan que así cayó en su momento Fernando Lugo en Paraguay y que ahora una movida por el estilo busca voltear a Nicolás Maduro en Venezuela.

Y no es sólo eso. En la Cancillería destacan las similitudes entre el caso de Crimea y lo sucedido años atrás en Kosovo. En aquel otro conflicto europeo – Kosovo se separó de Serbia, que respondió con una invasión militar –, Occidente respondió de forma inversa. Estados Unidos no sólo no apoyó a Serbia como ahora lo hace con Ucrania, sino que la bombardeó durante más de dos meses. Esa discusión ya se dio en los últimos días entre los diplomáticos que se desempeñan en los organismos internacionales. Lo que dicen los norteamericanos es que Serbia estaba llevando adelante en Kosovo una limpieza étnica que urgía detener. En la Cancillería aseguran que en las resoluciones que se votaron sobre Kosovo nunca figuró la limpieza étnica como determinante para el ataque.

Ya en el detalle del derecho internacional, en el gobierno argentino hacen una distinción más, referida a la cuestión de los dos referendos. Así, señalan que en las Islas Malvinas existe una población – que no es originaria sino implantada – mientras que en Crimea hay un pueblo, por lo que incluso tendría derecho, de acuerdo con lo que determinan las Naciones Unidas, a un plebiscito para decidir sobre su futuro, cosa que no podrían realizar los kelpers.

It is that Argentina evaluates what happened in Ukraine as another case of the so-called "soft coups," motorized initiatives by minority opposition parties together with economic and media groups close to them with those who seek to destablize democratically elected governments. {Argentina} considers that in his moment, this occurred to Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, and that now a move in this style seeks to overthrow Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

And it's not only that. In the Chancellery {Foreign Ministry} they emphasize the similarities between the case of Crimea and what happened years before in Kosovo. In that other European conflict - Kosovo separated from Serbia, which responded with a military invasion - the West responded in an inverse form. {The West backed the Kosovar separatists.}

And in the details of international law, in the Argentine government that make one more distinction, in reference to the question of referenda. So, they signal that in the Malvinas Islands exist a population - that is not original but implanted - while in the Crimea there is a people, for which there are also had the right, in accord with those the United Nations has determined, to a plebiscite to decide on their future, a thing that the kelpers could not achieve.

The last is a reference to Argentina's contention that Britain's referendum in the Malvinas was invalid, not least because Britain restricts Argentine immigration to the Malvinas. This is a colonial tactic Britain has also used in Gibraltar, which is controlled by Britain but also claimed by Spain, in a situation under international law very similar to that of the Malvinas.

Tags: argentina, crimea, falklands, malvinas, malvinas, russia

Ukraine/Crimea crisis

Masha Gessen in Crimea Is Putin’s Revenge Slate 03/21/25014 argues that Russia's Vladimir Putin sees his takeover of the Crimea as in significant part as a payback for the NATO war over Kosovo:

On March 24, 1999, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was on his way to Washington when he got word that NATO had begun bombing Kosovo. He ordered his plane turned around. A few hours later, he landed in a Moscow that was reeling from the insult of not being consulted. Russians had only a vague idea of what Kosovo was but a very strong concept of Serbia being a land of fellow Eastern Orthodox Slavs and of Yugoslavia being a rightful part of Moscow's sphere of influence. Not being consulted—or even, apparently, warned—sent the very clear message that the U.S. had decided it now presided over a unipolar world. There was no longer even the pretense of recognizing Russia's fading-superpower status: President Bill Clinton had chosen not to wait the few hours it would have taken for Primakov to land in Washington, allowing him to save face by at least pretending to have been in on the conversation.

The mainstream press does a generally poor job of reporting on foreign policy, even on European matters. That and the triumphalist mood of American politicians - and that really is something where "both sides do it" - mean that events like the Russian annexation of the Crimea pop up like events in a vacuum and gets discussed in schoolyard terms like manly-man Putin versus Obama the wimp, to use the Republicans' favorite framing.

Gessen points to the continuity in Putin's nationalist policies:

In August [1999], Yeltsin anointed as his successor, a virtual unknown named Vladimir Putin. Within a few weeks, Putin became spectacularly popular by launching a new war in Chechnya. Politicians formerly known as liberals praised the Russian army for its performance there; one said it was “regaining its dignity.” He did not mention Kosovo, but he was referring to the general sense of humiliation that had stayed with Russians since the spring.

In December 1999, Putin became acting president, and the following March, he was elected to the office. Over the course of the following 14 years, he nurtured in the Russian public a sense of nostalgia for the Soviet Union and especially for the fear it inspired in the rest of the world. In 2008, Russia invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia and effectively annexed part of its territory. And now it has done the same with Ukraine. This time Putin mentioned Kosovo. Indeed, in his speech to parliament on Tuesday, he made it very clear that by annexing Crimea he had avenged Russia for what had happened with Kosovo.

"It was our Western partners who created the precedent; they did it themselves, with their own hands, as it were, in a situation that was totally analogous to the Crimean situation, by recognizing Kosovo's secession from Serbia as legitimate," said Putin. And then, as he cited American statements on Kosovo, he got more and more worked up until he said, "They wrote it themselves. They spread this all over the world. They screwed everybody—and now they are outraged!" (The Kremlin's official translators, who are forever civilizing the Russian president's speech, translated this sentence as "They wrote this, disseminated it all over the world, had everyone agree, and now they are outraged!" The expression Putin used, however, was "vsekh nagnuli," street slang for having had nonconsensual anal sex with everybody, rather than for having everybody agree.)

Here's an Argentine report on the situation with the Crimea, V7inter: Tensión en Crimea trás la anexión a Rusia TV Pública argentina 22.03.2014:

We see in this report Argentine President Cristina Fernández using the occasion of a joint press conference with French President François Hollande to compare the attitude of the NATO powers toward the referendum in the Crimea to the supportive position taken by the United States on the referendum Britain held in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands.

She has a legitimate point.

Eastern Europe has been a sphere of influence and target of annexation for Russia in various forms for centuries. So has Latin America for the United States. One famous Russian push for control in eastern Europe was the Crimean War of 1853-6, just a few years after the United States seized Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico in the Mexican War of 1846-8. Latin American leaders have had to have be very aware for a long time before Cristina Fernández was born.

She doesn't mention it in the TV Pública argentina report above, but the situation in Venezuela has to be on her mind in connection with the Ukraine. Protests and violent clashes are still going on in Venezuela, with the death toll now up to 34. (Massendemonstrationen in Venezuela: Bereits 34 Tote Profil 24.3.2014) An overthrow of an elected government that has significant differences with the United States is inherently a matter of concern for Latin American democratic leaders.

It's worth noting in this connection what Masha Gessen recalls about the eventual ousting of demagogic Servian leader Slobodan Milosevic:

Could the United States and its allies have undertaken anything other than military intervention to resolve the Kosovo crisis? In fact, they did. After the bombing campaign, which strengthened support for Milosevic and weakened his opponents, the U.S. poured cash into rebuilding the Serbian opposition. The funding was contingent on the disparate opposition groups agreeing to work together and attending regular coordination meetings held in Budapest, Hungary, and run by people whom participants understood to represent the State Department. The plan for the anti-Milosevic revolution was worked out in these meetings down to the smallest detail, including where the leaders of each of the 18 participating political organizations would be if mass protests broke out in Belgrade. They did, in October 2000, and Milosevic didn't seem to know what hit him. [my emphasis]

Do Latin American leaders have reason to worry that the US government and corporations are up to some mischief in Venezuela. Of course they do. See also: Chile, 1973; Venezuela, 2002.

Oh, my regular reminder quote on Venezuela: "Venezuela is Latin America's biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world's largest petroleum reserves." - Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne, Venezuela death toll rises to 13 as protests flare Reuters 02/24/2014

By the way, check out the photo at that Profil link on Venezuela. US and European media seem to have two favorite images for domestic unrest: a guy with a clenched fist standing in front of something burning, and the "protest babe." This article says this photo from Venezuela has gone around the world, although this is the first time I've seen it. (Or maybe getting from Caracas to Vienna and being featured on one website counts as going around the world.) But I swear this looks for all the world like an men's underwear ad. Though I guess if the photo just showed a bunch of bored and irritated people sitting around planning a demonstration or a fundraiser, I wouldn't be pointing it out here, would I?

Tags: argentina, crime, cristina fernández, ukraine, venezuela

The (German) politics of the (hoped-for but not really) "new Cold War" over Ukraine

... Obama was blindsided by events in Ukraine, but why the administration didn't see this coming remains a mystery. No matter what Putin says, Yanukovych's ouster was not the result of some deep Western plot, and in many ways Yanukovych deserved to go. But the United States as far from a neutral party in this process, as top U.S. officials -- including Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt -- either took actions or made statements that showed clear support for the demonstrators and a clear U.S. preference for interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Unfortunately, they intervened without considering how it might look to Russia, especially after 20 years of NATO expansion, the deployment of missile defenses near the Soviet border, and George W. Bush's 2008 proposal to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This was geostrategic incompetence of the highest order, but that is what happens when presidents and secretaries of state are too busy with a zillion other things and stop paying attention to what their ideologically driven subordinates are up to. [my emphasis]

- Stephen Walt, The Solve-Everything, Do-Nothing White House Foreign Policy 03/18/2014

Über-Realist Walt isn't making excuses for Russia's misdeeds and violations of international law in the Ukraine/Crimea crisis. Nor is he drooling like many American conservatives do over Putin's shirtless manly manliness. But he is pointing out that the United States does not control the Ukraine and that Russia has a perceived stake there and that a less provocative US approach to the political turmoil in Ukraine might well have produced a more pleasant result from the Western perspective than what happened.

This is the way grownups and serious politicians should be talking about this thing.

Little Tommy Friedman, on the other hand, in Walt's words, "thinks Obama can't decide if he's Pollyanna, John Wayne, or Henry Kissinger (as if these are the only options)." (The referenced piece of Friedman's continuing self-embarrassment is The Three Faces of President Obama New York Times 03/15/2014)

But politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said shortly before he signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact that, among other things, divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.

So I was intrigued to see this polemic by Fabian Reinbold against the German Left Party's position on the crisis, Linkspartei in der Krim-Krise: Die Putin-Versteher Spiegel Online 17.03.2014, which blast the Left Party for taking what sounds to me a position a lot like Walt's.

A bit of background. The Left Party evolved over time since the fall of the German Democratic Republic (Communist East Germany). It started off as the "postcommunist" successor party to the old East German Communist Party. It merged with a left group from western Germany to form the current Left Party.

The state of the euro crisis has put the Left Party in what is potentially a qualitatively new situation in German politics. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is a junior partner in Angela Merkel's Grand Coalition (GroKo). And with minor and mostly cosmetic differences, the SPD is totally on board with Angie's brutal austerity policies that are laying waste to the economies of the southern eurozone countries.

In last year's German Parliamentary election, it was only the Left Party among the real contenders for Bundestag seats that both offered a Keynesian critique of Merkel's economic policies and also had opposed them in the Budestag. The Green Party also offered such a critique but had voted for Merkel's austerity policies in the Bundestag. If the Greens and the Left Party form a working alliance, they have the chance to jointly benefit politically over the next few years. With the center-left (the social-democratic parties) in countries like Italy and Spain having badly discredited themselves by embracing ruinous neoliberal economic "reforms," it's entirely feasible that a Green-Left alliance could occupy much of the political space the SPD currently does, similarly to how the Five Start Movement surged in Italy in last year's elections.

Reinbold's polemic tries to portray the Left Party as pro-Putin. There's a couple of key points on this. One of which has to do with his insult phrase "Putin-Versteher," literally "understanders of Putin." For anyone of a mental age older than Tommy Friedman, i.e., older than elementary-school age, knows that understanding something or someone is not the same as sympathizing with or supporting them. So when someone tries to make it a stigma to understand a potential adversary nation, that's a very good sign they're up to know good. In the real world, understanding adversary countries may be even more important than understanding friendly ones. Especially when one of those potential adversaries is a nuclear power, which Russia still is.

Second, the fact that the Left Party has some historical roots in a party that possessed a reverence for the Soviet Union is a whole different thing than admiring Vladimir Putin's political model in the Russia of 2014. I mean, if you reason like a FOX News pundit or David Gregory, you might think, "Well, uh, the Soviet Union was headed by Russia, or maybe they were the same thing, and they were Communists and that's left and now Putin heads Russia so he must be a Communist, too, like Obama or something."

But in the post-elementary-school population, that would be a pretty sad assumption for people to make. Because if there are people who consider themselves "left" who also admire Putin's kleptocratic-oligarichal half-baked version of democracy or consider it a goal to strive for, I'm not aware of it. And I think that it's fair to say that in the German Left Party, neither those who judge Putin's Crimea maneuver more harshly nor those who are more focused on the EU's and the United States' mistakes in the crisis consider Putin a "left" model or an ally to be defended.

It's like the old "red-baiting," except it's more like Russia-baiting.

I doubt the Left Party will be inclined to bow and scrape and try to show their foreign policy belligerency by denounced and double-denouncing Russia and Putin. I doubt that approach works much better in German politics than in the US. (See Digby, Objectively Pro-Putin Hullabaloo 03/18/2014)

The larger question is how the Greens will play this. If they let stuff like this drive a wedge between themselves and the Left Party that prevents making a combined political effort as the opposition in the Bundestag, that would likely prove to be a self-defeating course.

There are some dubious signs so far on the Greens' response, such as the Greens' Bundestag caucus head Katrin Göring-Eckardt portraying Left Party leader Sahra Wagenknecht as a Russian today. (Göring-Eckardt Twitter post 14.04.2014; Michael König, Grüner Streit um Anti-Wagenknecht-Kampagne Süddeutsche Zeitung 17.03.2014)

And some hopeful ones, like this petition signed by Robert Zion and other Greens declaring, "Wir Grünen stehen auf der Seite des Friedens und der Freiheit. Unsere Seite ist nicht die des Nationalismus, weder die Seite Putins, noch die der Gruppe der Rechten in der Ukraine." ("We Greens stand on the side of peace and freedom. Our side is not that of nationalism, nor that of Putin, nor that of the rightists in Ukraine.")

Albrecht von Lucke writes in Die gespaltene Opposition Gegenblende 11.03.2014:

Dort, wo Linke und Grüne in der Opposition tatsächlich zur Zusammenarbeit verdammt sind, etwa zwecks Einberufung eines Untersuchungsausschusses, werden sie notgedrungen kooperieren. Ansonsten aber herrscht ein gewaltiges Distanzierungsbedürfnis – auch und vor allem von Seiten der Grünen.

[There where the Left Party and the Greens in the opposition {to the GroKo} are actually condemned to work together, for instance in the need to call for a investigative committee, they will be compelled to cooperate. But otherwise a powerful need for distance reigns - particularly and especially from the side of the Greens.]

There have been differences of emphasis in the public positions of various Left Party leaders on the Ukraine/Crimea crisis, which seem to turn less on differences in actual policy outlook than on the degree to which they are willing to target the SPD and the Greens in their criticism. Wagenknecht has been more inclined to do so, Party Chairs Katja Kipping und Bernd Riexinger less so. (Markus Decker, Kipping und Riexinger kontra Wagenknecht Mitteldeutsche Zeitung 13.03.2014)

It's worth noting that one of the more notable figures expressing criticism of the EU's policies toward Russia in the Ukraine/Crimea crisis is former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who surprising more-or-less explicitly admitted to having committed war crimes himself to defend or at least explain Russia's actions. (Gerhard Schröder, Russia and the Crimea 03/09/2014) And Schröder even has Russian financial connections that make his comments more dubious than anything Fabian Reinbold quotes from Left Party figures.

The SPD had the theoretical opportunity after last year's election to attempt to form a center-left coalition government with the Greens and the Left Party, because together they had a majority of seats in the Bundestag. The SPD national leadership wasn't in the least interested. But to reassure the Party base that wasn't entirely happy about their entering a Grand Coalition headed by Merkel, the SPD leaders promised that next time, four years from now, they would consider a coalition with the Left Party. (You didn't have to read hard between the lines to get the suggestion that it meant in four years, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes later).

SPD Vice Chancellor and loyal Angie-bot Sigmar "Sigi Pop" Gabriel; Reinbold reports that Steinmeier is grumping publicly that the Left Party is parroting "dummer Propagandalügen des russischen Staatsfernsehens" ("dumb propaganda of the Russian state television"). Sigi Pop can't distance himself from the Left Party fast enough. No surprise at all there.

Tags: crimea, german green party, german left party, grand coalition, spd, ukraine