Crisis diplomacy is a complicated business – so complicated that simple solutions are actually out of the question. And yet attempts are regularly made to respond to a complex reality with overly simple recipes. I will limit myself to three examples here.
First: On January 6, 2013, the then German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, demanded that “Assad must go”: “regime change”, i.e. the change of power in Syria, carried out from outside. This appeal, which was popular at the time, went unheeded, and Assad is still in the government palace – partly because no one had a specific suggestion as to who should take Assad’s place.
That’s the problem with such calls: Unfortunately, they don’t make much sense, even with a view to Russia, if there is no clarity about succession planning, as in the case of Syria or Libya.
In the case of Putin, calls for regime change are repeated from the German Bundestag. It is said that Putin has long since belonged in The Hague. Of course there can no longer be a partnership relationship with Putin. The basis of trust has been completely shattered.
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However, anyone who looks around in Moscow for possible successors will be shocked to discover that many of the alternatives to Putin mentioned so far could turn out to be even worse hardliners than Putin himself. Just think of the military leadership or names like Dmitri Medvedev, ex -President and ex-Prime Minister, or Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Security Council in the Kremlin.
Also: If you don’t want to talk to Putin anymore, who should then negotiate with whom about a ceasefire or peace at the given time? Despite the Russian war of aggression, it is right and important that, for example, American-Russian talks on security and arms control policy should definitely be continued. Concerns about stable control over Russian nuclear weapons play a major role in US strategic calculations, just as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed more than 30 years ago.
In the case of Putin, calls for regime change are repeated from the German Bundestag.
(Photo: AP)
As understandable as the demand for regime change in Moscow is, it is therefore not a promising recipe for a Western strategy to end the Russian war of aggression. And if there should ever be regime change, it would obviously not have to be triggered from outside, but from internal developments in Russia.
Secondly: On September 12, 2001, one day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder promised the United States “unlimited solidarity.” It is correct that at the time the German embassy in Washington reported to Berlin that Washington would expect “unrestricted solidarity” from its partners.
Schröder was later criticized for turning these American expectations into a German unconditional promise. Unrestricted solidarity was too much, as became evident in the Iraq conflict of 2002/2003 at the latest.
Incidentally, there is no unlimited solidarity in the NATO alliance either. The American Senate would probably never have approved the NATO treaty if an unconditional obligation to provide assistance had been formulated there. The NATO treaty only obliges the members to take the assistance measures they deem appropriate or necessary.
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If that is true within the alliance, then it must be even more so in relation to third countries. That is why our solidarity with the defending Ukraine, for example, cannot be unlimited. It finds its limit in the security policy interests of Germany, the EU and the NATO alliance, which we define ourselves.
Third: A third critical term that keeps haunting our Ukraine debate is the call for “peace negotiations now”. It is often said where is the diplomacy. The diplomatic toolkit offers a wide range of options for formulating a ceasefire or even a peace agreement in a watertight manner and for subsequently verifying and checking compliance with such agreements. And of course it would be desirable to avoid military conflicts entirely through prevention or to end them diplomatically as soon as possible after they have broken out.
It would not be the right time for Ukraine to start peace talks.
(Photo: dpa)
Unfortunately, it is not the good humanitarian intentions that are decisive here, but above all the available military means and the political will of the conflicting parties. Unfortunately, in practice, the diplomatic hour to end a military conflict only approaches when the parties to the conflict realize that their military resources have been exhausted, i.e. that no further advantages or gains in territory can be gained on the battlefield appear.
It is obvious that, from the Russian point of view, this point in time has not yet been reached. It would therefore also be completely wrong advice to urge Ukraine to negotiate at this point in time. Only Russia would currently be able to benefit from this, and a permanent end to the war would hardly be expected in this way.
Conclusion: The turning point, the epoch break has only just begun. Today, the security of our continent is shaken to its foundations. Without an independent Ukraine, Europe’s security architecture would remain without a keystone. Simple recipes won’t help. We don’t need catchphrases now, we need a lot of staying power.
The author is a former ambassador to Washington and headed the Munich Security Conference. He writes this column every 14 days.
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