The Western punditariat’s commentary on Russia is spectacularly ill-informed. This should be expected from mainstream journalists whose employment relies on the very ignorance they so readily espouse, but there is no excuse for those who promote themselves as “experts” and use this alleged expertise to help craft Western policy towards Russia.
A case in point is Michael McFaul, the Stanford Professor whose claim to fame is serving as Obama’s ambassador to Moscow. In a recent post on his Twitter account, McFaul linked to a Foreign Affairs article he penned in December of last year, outlining how he believed the incoming Trump administration could end the war in Ukraine. As is no surprise, the ambassador and NATO enthusiast recommended the suicidal strategy of admitting Ukraine into the alliance. Yet this is far from the most egregious misstep McFaul made in this piece, as he committed several factual errors that are inexcusable for someone of his experience and purported expertise.
It has become an article of faith in the West that Ukraine made a catastrophic folly in the mid-1990s by surrendering its nuclear weapons stockpile in exchange for security guarantees in the form of the Budapest Memorandum. McFaul repeats this conventional wisdom, stating that “the United States offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for Kyiv’s handing over its nuclear arsenal to Moscow.”
There is, however, just one problem with this piece of commentary: it isn’t true. Kiev couldn’t hand over its nuclear arsenal to Moscow because it didn’t have a nuclear arsenal to begin with. Ukraine’s much-vaunted nuclear deterrent was, in actual fact, Soviet nuclear weapons that happened to be stationed on Ukrainian soil. Even post-independence, Moscow retained full control of these systems. Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, then, was as much Ukrainian as American nuclear systems stationed throughout Europe are European. All debates about whether Kiev could have deterred the Russian invasion had it not signed the Budapest Memorandum are, therefore, redundant. As someone who’s bragged about making close to a million dollars a year for his supposed insights on Russia, McFaul should know better than to entertain these debates.
In fairness to McFaul, he did at least get one thing right when he said Washington offered Ukraine security assurances. Often used synonymously with guarantees, the word assurances was very carefully and deliberately selected language by Washington to ensure they would not be legally-bound to come to Ukraine’s defense, as the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer has explained:
“American officials decided the assurances would have to be packaged in a document that was not legally-binding. Neither the Bush nor Clinton administrations wanted a legal treaty that would have to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. State Department lawyers thus took careful interest in the actual language, in order to keep the commitments of a political nature. U.S. officials also continually used the term “assurances” instead of “guarantees,” as the latter implied a deeper, even legally-binding commitment of the kind that the United States extended to its NATO allies”
So, when former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark said on a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored that the U.S. is essentially “giving up” on the Budapest Memorandum by failing to come to Ukraine’s aid, he is demonstrating quite a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the agreement. Clark additionally fails to mention that Washington had made their desire to “give up” on the Budapest Memorandum very clear long before the 2022 invasion. A key component of the memorandum is for the signatories of Russia, the U.S., and U.K. to refrain from exercising “economic coercion” against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (the latter two also had Soviet nuclear weapons that they agreed to transfer, and signed their own separate versions of the memorandum to do so).
As early as 2006, the United States and its British partners acted in complete defiance of this commitment, sanctioning the government of Belarus. Washington placed further sanctions on Minsk in 2013, justifying this on the grounds that their pledges in the Budapest Memorandum were “not legally binding.” Feeling liberated from any legal constraints, Washington also imposed sanctions against the government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, which complemented their blatant interference in the country’s internal affairs during the Maidan revolution. Such a move was a clear violation of the Budapest pledge to respect Ukraine’s “independence and sovereignty.”
Clark may profit from studying this and much else of the post-Soviet record. In addition to peddling mainstream dogma about the Budapest Memorandum, the general also repeated the Western media favourite that Putin wants to reconstitute the borders of the Soviet Union. As he put it, “From the time Vladimir Putin became prime minister and later president, he wanted to restore the Soviet Union’s space and territory.”
Hellbound and Down 