Crimea: Verification of history and strategy for world diplomacy

17/03/14

Can history, with its teachings, influence strategy and international relations? This question seems to echo in the last few hours in the chancelleries of half the world following the events in Crimea.

The Russian and non-Russian people, occupying the small peninsula on the Black Sea, expressed themselves with a very broad plebiscite about their future in the Russian Federation, a vote that we would call Bulgarian and that perhaps today we can rename it with a neologism in which the word Crimea appears.

Expected recent events, because the question referred to in the beginning is able to generate so much upset?

According to what was declared by the old Gorbachev, it seems that he had foreseen everything already in the 1991, when the leaders of the three largest states of the USSR, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, through their leaders, decided the partition of the Soviet empire, without holding account of the question Sinferopoli, unfortunate that none of the three leaders of the time is in condition or willing to respond, it must then be added the plausible resentment that still today moves the statements of the last head of the CPSU; as for the West, in the early '90, driven by the enthusiasm of having won, he made no predictions and today he does not plan credible answers showing a lack of inclination to understand and learn.

If, however, one tries to change perspective, one could check how President Putin, accused of having lost contact with reality by Frau Merkel, actually seems to have done all of the homework well, demonstrating that he had learned so many lessons. It has kept faith with the old tsarist adage that the boundaries must be kept as far as possible from the nerve centers of state power, incardinated with bilateral economic agreements, difficult to resolve, countries like Italy, Spain and France, without taking into account the obvious dependencies in terms of raw materials that the whole of Europe buys from the Russian giant, as for the military component the lessons learned are even more substantial and make Moscow a real strategic giant.

As a result of the experiences of the Cold War, the tactics of silos, as the point of origin of the nuclear launch systems, gave way to that of submarines, revitalizing the fleet and the consequent shipbuilding, the 5-day carpet bombing on Georgia in 2008, was replaced by a popular referendum and the invasion by regular units in the territories of Ossetia and Abkhazia was replaced by the intervention of paramilitary units, also legitimized by the fact of being in Crimea, as a result of agreements with Ukraine, in times not suspicious, in defense of the Black Sea fleet. 

In order not to obstruct the reasoning in terms of Western shortcomings and the Russian strategy and in order to frame it in the broader "comprehensive approach", much vaunted in Washington and Brussels, but never actually implemented, it must be said that the Russians with the claims in Ukraine have did the Chinese a big favor, temporarily diverting American attention from the Pacific, which for the US should have been the scenario of the future; this trend reversal seems to have irritated many strategy experts in the USA, having been proven wrong in the short and medium term forecasts drawn up at universities and academies, and preventive wars and "democracy exports" have certainly not benefited credibility and Uncle Sam's reliability.

The diplomatic / strategic back-and-forth will still continue, perhaps for several months, but it is plausible to assume that the third world war will not break out and neither will the second cold war, Putin simply made pan for focaccia to the "friends" of NATO demonstrating that he did not forgotten the Chechen sacrifice, which the Americans also benefited from, to have in mind the Kosovar 2008 setback and to be fully aware of the choices made by some diplomatic circles ready to blow on the embers of Asian and Arab-Israeli conflicts for the sole purpose to clumsily apply the divide and rule of imperial memory.

History never repeats itself, but learning from the experiences of the past is more ready to confront the challenges of the future, this seems that the Russians, in spite of what was declared by distinguished analysts, have understood it, the West, by contrast, what do you plan to do?

Andrea Pastore

(photo: Ministry of Defense archive of the Russian Federation)