What McCain's interest in Crimea suggests about his worldview.
With Senator John McCain’s increasing propensity to drop new
policy proposals into debates with little explanation, it is worth asking what
he meant when he urged viewers to “watch
Ukraine.” As it turns out, Ukraine
is once again in the middle of a nasty
domestic political crisis, this time pitting two former allies from the Orange
Revolution--Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and President Viktor Yushchenko--against
one another, with the most likely outcome being yet another early parliamentary
election. But as much as I personally would applaud either of the U.S.
presidential candidates for encouraging Americans to pay more attention to
domestic politics in Ukraine (or any post-communist country for that matter), I
don’t think this is exactly what Senator McCain had in mind.
Instead, Senator McCain was likely advancing a line of
reasoning that has become popular in
the press following this summer’s Russian-Georgian conflict. Simply put,
there is a growing tendency to invoke the Munich
analogy from World War II in reference to Russia’s
invasion of Georgia.
The argument here is that, like Germany
in the 1930s, Russia
is in the beginning stages of attempting to expand (or in this case
reestablish) its empire by invading, dismembering, and eventually annexing
territory from their neighbors. If the invasion of Georgia was a first step in this
regard, then it is logical to ask what the next step will be.
This is where Ukraine,
and in particular the Ukrainian province
of Crimea (which McCain name-dropped during the
debate), enters the picture. Crimea has
three characteristics that make it a particularly attractive option as a next
step for Russian aggression. First, the Russian Black Sea Fleet is still
located in the Crimean city of Sevastopol,
based on a lease that currently runs through 2017. Second, ethnic Russians make
up a majority of the population of Crimea. Finally,
and somewhat ominously, there are rumors that Russians have been increasing the
rate at which they have been giving
Russian passports to ethnic Russians in Crimea, a tactic that was employed
previously in the Georgian case. Thus, one posited scenario is for an “atrocity”
against ethnic Russians in Crimea to be manufactured,
requiring Russian armed intervention in response.