“Keep the pressure on it, especially the economic pressure.” US writer and former Pentagon adviser Robert Kaplan is clear about how Europe should orientate towards Russia: “Keep working on sanctions, even though they are complex, difficult to implement and you need different layers of bureaucrats in all individual countries to to enter them. Sanctions are not a means that you use so that you don’t have to worry about them anymore. It is a process that deserves continuous attention from all European leaders.’
Kaplan (New York, 1952) has traveled the globe in his more than 45-year career, writing more than twenty books, mostly geopolitical analyzes of areas on the brink of rupture. For example, the book is famous Balkan ghosts from 1993, in which he predicted that the former Yugoslavia would face a time of civil wars.
His latest book was published this week, The Adriatic Sea, about the past, present and future of Southeastern Europe. But because the world is suddenly gripped by ‘the greatest geopolitical event in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall’ (‘suddenly we have entered a war in which cities are bombed from the air by an adversary with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States? States within thirty minutes’) it is mainly his book from 2016, Dark Europewhich is current.
Ukrainian revolution in 2014
In that book, in which Kaplan travels through Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Hungary and takes stock of the state of European security policy, he warns that since the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 a new phase in the confrontation between Russia and the West has arrived.
His advice at the time: Europe should help Ukraine with reforms and the development of institutions. He argued, among other things, that the Dutch should vote ‘yes’ during the referendum on the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU (which did not happen) and that Germany should purchase less natural gas from Russia (which also did not happen).
He also outlined that Russia is weakening the European Union and NATO through an extensive network of gas pipelines, intelligence services, organized crime and disinformation. ‘That sometimes happens subtly’, he said about it in an interview in Fidelity, ‘sometimes hidden, sometimes brutal and fast as with the Crimea. Anything that will weaken the legitimacy of pan-European institutions is a priority for the Russians.’
“While the fighting is taking place in Ukraine, the underlying strategic war revolves around the fate of the Western alliance and mainland Europe,” he added in a recent article. The National Interest ready.
Has Europe done enough in the past eight years to thwart Russian ambitions?
‘No, Europe has done too little. But note: Europe was not alone. Putin is now often compared to Hitler. They call him a fascist and say, why didn’t our leaders and intellectuals see this coming? I get that question, but I still think there is an important difference between the two. Hitler was always who he was. He wrote Mein Kampf in the early 1920s, well before he came to power; so it was always clear what he believed in and what he wanted to do. It was difficult to misinterpret Hitler.
“In Putin’s case, it’s different because his personality seems to have evolved. He is really a different person now than he was twenty years ago. In the early days he was still a kind of reformer, but now he is mainly a champion of a kind of mystical Russian nationalism. That is why you cannot say that politicians who did not see this coming have failed. Just like you can’t blame the people who until a few weeks ago lived under the assumption that he would never invade Ukraine.’
Over the past four weeks, the western countries have drawn a common red line. Did that unanimity surprise you?
‘Since the invasion, we have all been very impressed with the unity within NATO. For a long time things went exactly the other way within the alliance. That is precisely why I think Putin’s invasion was a geopolitical and strategic mistake. His ultimate goal has always been to sow division in the West. That went very well for a long time, but the moment he invaded Ukraine, he suddenly became a military threat, with the result that all NATO countries remember why the institute was founded in 1949: to defend the world against Russia.’
However, there are major differences between then and now. Then there were hardly any financial relations between Russia and European countries.
‘That’s right, which is why it’s all the more impressive that even Germany is thinking about new suppliers of natural gas. We must of course see what happens to those intentions. If there is a ceasefire and this becomes a frozen war like in Moldova or Chechnya, and the weeks and months pass slowly, only then will we see whether the European countries are prepared to maintain their sanctions, or whether they start exceptions for certain sectors.
‘This is more often the case with sanctions: they are often imposed with great enthusiasm, but gradually they tend to dissolve slowly. From a European point of view it is great to receive gas from the United States, but in view of the distance that is less convenient in the long term, because it is more expensive.’
What do you think?
“We are now in the middle of a huge war, which makes it very difficult to predict what will happen in the future. But don’t forget that just after the September 11 attacks, the United States was terribly united; everything seemed clear, the country came together. But just nine months later, the whole country was arguing over whether or not we should start a war in Iraq. What I mean by that is: these kinds of sentiments can change. A crisis like this can take turns making it difficult to predict the course.’
Can the European Union and NATO do more? Ukrainian President Zelensky has repeatedly said he would like to join both alliances.
‘Look at Finland. During the Cold War, it was a free, democratic country, yet it was unable to join NATO and, in fact, take any unequivocally anti-Soviet stance because of its position. For Ukraine, such a future would also be the maximum: a free country with elections, but not a full member of NATO or the EU, because it simply has to do with a certain geopolitical reality.
“There is really only one way for Ukraine to become a true full-fledged member of the West, which is if Russia falls apart from within. Remember that in the 1990s NATO could only intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, because Russia was historically weak at the time. If that doesn’t happen again, so if Russia doesn’t fall apart, Ukraine will have to accept such Finlandization.’
Book Kaplan prevented Clinton from intervening
Robert Kaplan is an American journalist and author who mainly publishes on geopolitics and security. He has written for all the major US newspapers, has served on multiple think tanks, including the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Eurasia Group, and served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board for a time. He achieved worldwide fame after his book Balkan ghosts President Clinton from intervening in the war in the former Yugoslavia. He later wrote books about Iraq, Afghanistan and the South China Sea. His latest book is called The Adriatic Seaabout a piece of Europe that Kaplan says is at the center of many of the greatest challenges of our time, such as the rise of populism, the refugee crisis and the battle for fossil fuels.