FAR from the eponymous ocean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s annual summit saw a shifting of the war fighting furniture. Turkey’s recently elected leader Erdogan, facing a financial crisis of epic proportions and under criticism for his regime’s failure to prepare for the earthquake earlier this year, was made an offer he could not refuse and dropped his objection to Sweden joining Nato.
But the final communique made it clear that Ukraine – over 3,000 kilometres from the Atlantic – is not going to become a member any time soon and certainly not while there is a war with Russia.
The formulation adopted made it abundantly clear that Ukraine is to remain on the sharp end of the power struggle between Russia and the US but without any of the notional protections that membership of the now global war machine offers.
Ukraine was promised yet again an invitation to join “when allies agree and conditions are met.” Both the timing and the conditions remain, of necessity, unspoken.
Zelensky, predictably, threw a tantrum. Ukraine was originally, and provisionally, offered membership in 2008 which precipitated a sharp internal Nato dispute with both France and Germany strongly objecting and Washington, at least rhetorically, in favour.
Fifteen years later the real contours of US foreign policy are more visible. The US is more transparently keen for the war to continue as long as Ukraine is able and equally transparently clear that this will not entail boots on the ground other than the ubiquitous military and intelligence “advisers” that are the inevitable outriders of US foreign policy.
A critical element in the thinking of whoever carries out these tasks for Biden is the salience of the war as an electoral issue that threatens his re-election and that of his entourage. The ever opportunist US Republican party senses the rising domestic mood and plans to build into the pending Defence Bill a proposal to de-fund the US war effort in Ukraine.
If Zelensky gets a moment this weekend he might reflect on his predicament.
He was elected a president of peace with a mandate to find a negotiated way out of the political crisis. As a Russian-speaking Jew in a country where many Ukrainian Jews (and Poles and others) lost their lives at the hands of their fellow citizens acting with the Nazi invaders – and as an entertainer with a humorous take on the national predicament – he was a surprise winner even though he enjoyed the patronage of at least one oligarch.
With bravura he projected himself as the instrument of his fellow citizens’ hopes and a majority projected onto his candidacy their diverse and contradictory expectations.
He came unstuck midway in the vicious civil strife which pitched the post-Maidan coup state against its sizeable and mostly Russian-speaking Donbass. A telling video clip showed him failing to convince front-line combatant militiamen that a ceasefire was needed to allow negotiations with the contested Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts that have since been formally annexed by Russia, while remaining active battlefields.
His secret service is riven by allegations of betrayal and one of his first “negotiating team” was summarily executed by the secret police on suspicious of favouring negotiations. The pitiable Zelensky has zero freedom of manoeuvre.
The conspicuous failure by any of the European leaders present in Vilnius to take any initiative to bring this war to a negotiated end speaks more to their passivity in the face of the US strategy to deepen Nato’s real character as the projection of its power into our continent than to any specifically domestic or pan-European interest.
And who in Britain will speak for peace?
