Diplomacy Watch: A peace summit without Russia
Diplomacy Watch: What’s the point of Swiss peace summit?
Diplomacy Watch: Europe turns attention to GOP ticket
July 19, 2024
QiOSKAmbassadors from roughly 20 European countries are descending on the Republican National Convention this week, in an effort to win over leaders in the party who are skeptical of NATO and the European Union generally, but also of Washington’s continued commitment to funding Ukraine’s war effort.
“It’s our last-ditch pitch to the MAGA wing of the party,” one unnamed European official told Foreign Policy.
As the FP report notes, it is common for foreign diplomats to appear at both party’s conventions in election years. But, the report says there is “new level of urgency” this year, a sign both of the conventional wisdom that Donald Trump is the favorite to win the election, and of fears in Europe about what a second Trump presidency would mean for the transatlantic relationship.
The selection of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), a prominent Ukraine aid skeptic, as Trump’s running mate earlier this week led to a series of headlines in major media outlets about growing “panic,” “alarm,” and “anxiety” in European capitals.
The two combatants in the war are also apparently reading the tea leaves. Bloomberg reported last week that Kyiv was hoping to organize its next “peace summit” before November’s election, and that, contrary to earlier meetings, Russia may be invited — perhaps conveying a new sense of urgency in preparation for the eventuality of a Trump victory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this week that he was prepared to work with Trump and “not afraid” of Republicans winning the White House.
“We have bipartisan support and we have strong relations with the Republican part of the U.S. political system,” Zelenaky said during a press conference.
Russia, for its part, welcomed the news of a Trump-Vance ticket.
“He’s in favor of peace, in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said of Vance on Wednesday. “And we can only welcome that because that’s what we need — to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons. And then the war will end, and then we can look for solutions.”
Vance has been sharply critical of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy during his short Senate tenure, voting against aid packages and calling for negotiations.
“By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence,” he wrote in an April op-ed in the New York Times. “The White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.”
In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:
— Moscow offered a cautious response to Kyiv's potential invitation to a future peace conference. After initially saying they would reject the offer, comments from the Kremlin spokesman this week suggest that the door is not completely closed.
“The first peace summit was not a peace summit at all. So perhaps it is necessary to first understand what he means,” Dmitry Peskov said during a television interview on Monday, according toThe Moscow Times.
— Trump would push for a rapid end to the war in Ukraine and has “well-founded plans” to accomplish this goal, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Orban, who has also urged a settlement to end the war and has opposed much of the EU’s support for Kyiv, has used the beginning of his six-month rotation as EU president to visit Zelensky, Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Trump to discuss how to end the war.
“Orbán’s description of Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine tallies with a policy paper on the conflict written by two allies for the former president who are expected to take senior national security roles in his administration if he wins November’s US election.” according toThe Financial Times.
That plan, authored by former Trump national security council staffers Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz said that Washington should only continue to send aid to Ukraine on the condition that they participate in negotiations, while also threatening to increase support for Kyiv if Moscow refused to take part in talks.
— Almost 44% of Ukrainians believe that it is time for official negotiations with Russia to begin, according to a new poll from the Ukrainian online newspaper ZN.ua, compared to 35% who were opposed and 21% who remain undecided. This represented a significant uptick from a similar poll last year, in which only 23% indicated that they supported official talks, with 64% opposed.
At the same time, a large majority (83%) of respondents opposed Putin’s stated conditions for a ceasefire, while 61% said they were not prepared to make concessions to Russia in order to obtain a peace deal.
U.S. State Department news:
In a Tuesday press briefing, State Department spokesman Matt Miller was asked about the Trump ticket’s stance on the Ukraine war. Miller said he “shouldn’t respond to” what was happening on the campaign trail.
“I will instead just speak about our record and our record of support for Ukraine. And ultimately I think the question really comes down to not just what we support and what anyone else in public life supports, but what the American people support, and what we have seen is when it comes to Ukraine, the American people strongly support continued assistance to Ukraine,” he said. “They strongly support allowing Ukraine and helping Ukraine to defend itself against Russia’s aggression.”
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What I saw and heard about the Ukraine war in Moscow
July 19, 2024
EuropePerhaps the most striking thing about Moscow today is its calm. This is a city that has been barely touched by war. Indeed, until you turn on the television — where propaganda is omnipresent — you would hardly know that there is a war.
Any economic damage from Western sanctions has been offset by the large number of wealthy Russians who have returned due to sanctions. The Russian government has deliberately limited conscription in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and this, together with a degree of repression, explains why there have been few protests by educated youth. No longer fearing conscription, many of the younger Muscovites who fled Russia at the start of the war have now returned.
As to the shops in central Moscow, I couldn’t say if the Louis Vuitton handbags are the genuine articles or Chinese knock-offs, but there is no lack of them. And far more important, Russia since the war demonstrates something that Germany once understood and the rest of Europe would do well to understand: that in an uncertain world, it is very important indeed to be able to grow all your own food.
In the provinces, it is reportedly very different. There, conscription, and casualties, really have bitten deep. This however has been balanced by the fact that the industrial provinces have experienced a huge economic boom due to military spending, with labor shortages pushing up wages. Stories abound of technical workers well into their seventies being recalled to work, fostering their income and restoring the self-respect they lost with the collapse of the 1990s. As I heard from many Russians, “the war has finally forced us to do many of the things that we should have done in the 1990s.”
In Moscow at least, there is, however, little positive enthusiasm for the war. Both opinion polls, and my own conversations with Russian elites, suggest that a majority of Russians do not want to fight for a complete victory (whatever that means) and would like to see a compromise peace now. Even large majorities however are against surrender, and oppose the return to Ukraine of any land in the five provinces “annexed” by Russia.
In the elites, the desire for a compromise peace is linked to opposition to the idea of trying to storm major Ukrainian cities by force, as was the case with Mariupol — and Kharkov is at least three times the size of Mariupol. “Even if we succeeded, our casualties would be huge, so would the deaths of civilians, and we would inherit great heaps of ruins that we would have to rebuild,” one Russian analyst told me. “I don’t think most Russians want to see that.”
Despite efforts by some figures like former president Dmitri Medvedev, there is very little hatred of the Ukrainian people (as opposed to the Ukrainian government) — in part because so many Russians are themselves Ukrainian by origin. Hence perhaps another reason why Putin has presented this as a war with NATO, not Ukraine. This recalled the attitudes to Russia of people I met in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine last year, a great many of whom are themselves wholly or partly Russian. They hated the Russian government, not the Russian people.
In the foreign and security elites, various ideas for a compromise peace are circulating: a treaty ratified by the United Nations, guaranteeing Ukrainian (and Russian) security without Ukraine joining NATO; the creation of demilitarized zones patrolled by U.N. peacekeepers as opposed to the annexation of more territory; territorial swaps, in which Russia would return land in Kharkov to Ukraine in exchange for land in the Donbas or Zaporozhia. The great majority of Russian analysts with whom I spoke believe however that only the U.S. can initiate peace talks, and that this will not happen until after the U.S. elections, if it happens at all.
The overall mood therefore seems to be one of accepting the inevitability of continued war, rather than positive enthusiasm for the war; and the Putin administration seems content with this. Putin remains very distrustful of the Russian people; hence his refusal so far to mobilize more than a fraction of Russia’s available manpower. This is not a regime that wants mass participation, and hence is also wary about mass enthusiasm. Its maxim seems rather, “Calm is the first duty of every citizen.”
A German version of this article was published in the Berliner Zeitung on June 29, 2024.
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Why Trump picking Vance as VP is about US foreign policy
July 19, 2024
Washington PoliticsGerman Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, known for his sardonic quips, famously remarked that the United States is buffered by weak neighbors to the north and south and by fish to the east and west.
Though Bismarck sought to highlight America’s latent geographic advantages, its remoteness brings another blessing that has become emblematic of post-Cold War U.S. domestic politics: the U.S. has the power and resources to shape the international system, but is simultaneously detached from it in ways that its Old World counterparts cannot afford to be.
There has thus been a striking contrast between America’s historically unprecedented ability to influence the world and the sheer lack of foreign policy substance in its public discourse. That is, until now.
Former President Donald Trump’s decision to name Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate bucked two well-established trends: vice presidential picks being inconsequential, and foreign policy being a non-factor in American domestic politics.
The pick set off a political firestorm unlike any vice presidential announcement in recent memory, with much of it centered on Vance’s foreign policy views. Vance’s detractors have gone over his positions with a fine-tooth comb, grasping for convenient labels. Within less than one day of the announcement, Vance was described as everything from an “arch-isolationist” who spells the end of Reaganism to a “hawk” on virtually every issue except for the Ukraine war.
Yet this piecemeal approach to understanding Vance and his significance on the GOP ticket misses a larger and much more important context. It is true that Vance has made Ukraine something of a signature foreign policy issue, emerging as one of the most forceful Senate critics of a Western Ukraine policy that has not yielded the results anticipated by its architects in the White House. But Vance’s views on the Ukraine conflict, compelling and well-formulated as they are, underlie a deeper set of convictions that reflects the changing face of American politics.
On the level of party dynamics, Vance’s selection marks nothing less than a stunning rebuke of a tired, fading foreign policy consensus that is increasingly divorced from the challenges confronting the U.S. It is as strong a signal as any that Trump, if victorious in November, will likely seek to bring the Ukraine war to a swift conclusion as one of his first policy items. It’s also possible, depending on a wide array of domestic and external factors that are difficult to predict, that with influence from Vance and others, Trump could pursue a broader re-posturing away from reflexive interventionism and needless foreign entanglements.
It is in this light that Vance’s defiant stance on Ukraine poses a means to a much larger grand strategic goal. He believes, as does a large share of the American people and, at least to some degree, the man at the top of the GOP ticket, that the nature of the trans-Atlantic relationship needs to change in order for the U.S. to find a strategically sustainable footing in an era of renewed great power competition.
There is little question that the Ukraine war and the West’s reaction to it has weakened Europe, hobbling its economic dynamism and rendering it increasingly dependent on the United States. To a new generation of realist foreign policy thinkers, this dependence should not be celebrated as a form of “unity” but is, instead, a liability that further exacerbates a longstanding pattern of U.S. overcommitment in Europe.
Vance has championed the view that Europe should stand on its own two feet militarily and do more to provide for its own defense. This argument, which is resonant with a new style of populist politics that has radically transformed the GOP over the past decade, cuts past the usual talking points around the need for greater “burden sharing” to the more fundamental realization that America’s post-Cold War alliance structures need to be updated to better reflect the challenges that the U.S. faces today.
This is not an argument for abandoning Europe or leaving NATO, which is something that no prominent figure in the realism and restraint coalition supports, but to strive for a transatlantic relationship that is characterized by partnership over what has increasingly been a kind of one-sided dependence. None of this is possible while Europe is roiled by the most destructive war on its continent since 1945, which explains the urgency with which Vance and others representing the new populist face of the GOP seek to bring a negotiated end to the Ukraine war as it enters its third year.
On a broader level, Vance’s political ascendance represents a generational passing of the torch to a new wave of politicians who have taken up the difficult task of reimagining America’s place in the world after decades of policy decisions steeped in a hubristic, ill-conceived drive to preserve the waning post-Cold War unipolar moment during which the U.S. was able to act virtually unchallenged on the world stage. These leaders, who defy the established left-right political spectrum, are drawing national attention to the fact that America’s balance sheet of resources and commitments has been unsustainable for years. They perceive the link between overcommitment abroad and decline at home and seek to find ways to end this ruinous cycle.
The debate over means and ends in foreign policy has long been a sideshow in the overarching drama of American politics, relegated to small expert circles in the academic and think tank worlds. But even a great power as strongly advantaged as the U.S. was in the 1990s and early 2000s can only stretch itself so much, and for so long, before retrenchment becomes unavoidable.
The global challenges confronting America have reached a critical mass; a veil of normalcy and “business as usual,” underwritten for decades by America’s massive comparative advantages and the absence of peer competitors, has been abruptly lifted with simultaneous crises in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Trump’s VP decision was presaged by an unprecedented explosion of public interest in foreign policy among concerned voters from all across the country. In a longue durée view of American history, Vance’s selection may very well turn out to be a watershed moment for the democratization of U.S. foreign policy. After decades of benign complacency, American voters have concluded that foreign policy is too important to be left to the technocrats and special interest groups. Whatever comes next, a Rubicon has been crossed in Milwaukee.
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