George Friedman
It has been about three months since U.S. President Donald Trump began the negotiation process with Russian President Vladimir Putin for peace in Ukraine. Many discussions have ensued, but no real progress has been made. Trump is constantly optimistic, Putin is constantly saying he wants peace (despite the fact that the situation makes a rapid settlement impossible), and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is helplessly caught in between.
I do not normally personalize geopolitics, but these talks are not about geopolitics, the reality of which is clear: Russia has failed to defeat Ukraine. The phase of the peace process we are in, such as it is, is what I call engineering. It is the process by which leaders of countries try to construct an edifice that is necessarily based in reality but is compatible with each side’s political needs – in terms of international relations and internal politics alike. The process of engineering is essential and extraordinarily difficult. The most difficult parts of this particular feat of engineering are Putin’s political needs.
I compare this phase of engineering to the negotiations that ended the Vietnam War. The U.S. went to war to block North Vietnam, a communist state, from conquering South Vietnam and extending Chinese and Russian power in Southeast Asia. The assumption was that U.S. military power would readily defeat the Viet Cong, and that doing so was a geopolitical necessity. The U.S. failed because it underestimated the power of the Viet Cong, supported as it was by the Soviet Union, and because it couldn’t craft an appropriate military strategy to defeat the enemy before it. The Viet Cong was fighting for fundamental national imperatives – including reunifying Vietnam under Hanoi’s control – while the U.S. was fighting for a marginal geopolitical imperative. In short, the U.S. lost the war by not winning it, and its defeat had domestic political consequences all around the world, particularly in the U.S. The negotiations to end the war took place from 1969 to 1973. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon were negotiating an end to the conflict, of course, but they also had the political imperative to show the world U.S. power had not been diminished.
No comments:
Post a Comment