The West has only been painting the current crisis in Ukraine and Crimea in black-and-white, with Russia attacking and Ukraine’s coup-imposed regime on the defensive. Western powers are depicted protecting a fledgling democracy with Russia vying to trample it to dust. Just how true is this picture? Malcolm Fraser, who served as Australia’s 22nd prime minister between 1975 and 1983, pointed to grave mistakes that Western powers have made again and again since the fall of the Soviet Union, because what is now happening in Crimea has grown directly from the short-sightedness of Cold-War-minded Western governments.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the general sentiment was one of exaltation as many people hoped that Cold-War ideology could finally be consigned to the past, while former rivals tried to build a better world. But these expectations didn’t last.
In his Guardian article, Mr. Fraser notes there were many ways in which the former Soviet republics could have been guaranteed future security. Instead, the West chose to expand, moving closer and closer to Russia’s western borders, despite talks between the then US Secretary of State James Baker and Russia’s Gorbachev, who insisted that NATO shouldn’t move into what had historically been Russia's domain.
Fraser says NATO’s Drang nach Osten was “provocative” and “unwise,” and a sign that the West intended to exercise power as though the Cold War had never ended. This message was once again emphasized when US President George W. Bush announced the country’s plan for a pan-European anti-missile shield, allegedly aimed at containing Iran, with its elements sited right on the Russian border, in Poland and the Czech Republic. This time the message read: we will do whatever we want and you’d better put up with it.
So, Australia’s ex-premier argues that what happened in Georgia in 2008 and what is now unfolding in Ukraine grows directly from the West’s self-involved politics that completely disregarded Russia’s interests and concerns. The West has been angling to bring these two former Soviet republics into the fold by giving unconditional support to anti-Russian elements that were clearly pro-fascist, pro-Nazi, and anti-Jewish.
As to the current situation in Ukraine, Fraser said the West has again been “flat-footed and unprepared.” He stressed that Putin has been forced to protect both the Russian minority population and Russia’s naval bases in Crimea that are key to its Black Sea access. Of course, these actions are decried by Western media as nothing but a Russian grab for power.
“The steps taken in the early days, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the breach of what Gorbachev… believed to be a firm agreement that NATO would not move east, was bound to create difficulties for the future,” the Australian politician presumes, "and there will be no way out of the current deadlock, he adds, unless the West finally comes to terms with its past and present mistakes.
Those who hoped to see the end of the Cold War have been proven wrong. The West-East standoff is bound to continue unless those in charge of current policy show willingness to work co-operatively to guide the world more safely.
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