“We will never accept Russia’s occupation and attempted
annexation of Crimea,” declaimed Rex Tillerson last week in Vienna.
“Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia
returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine.”
Tillerson’s principled rejection of the seizure of land by
military force — “never accept” — came just one day after President Trump
recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and pledged to move our embassy there.
How did Israel gain title to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and
Golan Heights? Invasion, occupation, colonization, annexation.
Those lands are the spoils of victory from Israel’s 1967 Six-Day
War.
Is Israel being severely sanctioned like Russia? Not quite.
Her yearly U.S. stipend is almost $4 billion, as she builds
settlement after settlement on occupied land despite America’s feeble protests.
What Bibi Netanyahu just demonstrated is that, when dealing with
the Americans and defending what is vital to Israel, perseverance pays off.
Given time, the Americans will accept the new reality.
Like Bibi, Vladimir Putin is a nationalist. For him, the
recapture of Crimea was the achievement of his presidency. For two centuries
that peninsula had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and critical to her
security.
Putin is not going to return Crimea to Kiev, and, eventually, we
will accept this new reality as well.
For while whose flag flies over Crimea has never been crucial to
us, it is to Putin. And like Israelis, Russians are resolute when it comes to
taking and holding what they see as rightly theirs.
Both these conflicts reveal underlying realities that help
explain America’s 21st-century long retreat. We face allies and antagonists who
are more willing than are we to take risks, endure pain, persevere and fight to
prevail.
This month, just days after North Korea tested a new ICBM,
national security adviser H. R. McMaster declared that Trump “is committed to
the total denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
If so, we are committed to a goal we almost surely are not going
to achieve. For, short of a war that could go nuclear, Kim Jong Un is not going
to yield to our demands.
For Kim, nuclear weapons are not an option.
He knows that Saddam Hussein, who had given up his WMD, was
hanged after the Americans attacked. He knows the grisly fate of Moammar
Gadhafi, after he invited the West into Libya to dismantle his nuclear program
and disarm him of any WMD.
Kim knows that if he surrenders his nuclear weapons, he has
nothing to deter the Americans should they choose to use their arsenal on his
armed forces, his regime, and him.
North Korea may enter talks, but Kim will never surrender the
missiles and nukes that guarantee his survival. Look for the Americans to find
a way to accommodate him.
Consider, too, China’s proclaimed ownership of the South China
Sea and her building on reefs and rocks in that sea, of artificial islands that
are becoming air, missile and naval bases.
Hawkish voices are being raised that this is intolerable and
U.S. air and naval power must be used if necessary to force a rollback of
China’s annexation and militarization of the South China Sea.
Why is this not going to happen?
Why is this not going to happen?
While this area is regarded as vital to China, it is not to us.
And while China, a littoral state that controls Hainan Island in that sea, is a
legitimate claimant to many of its islets, we are claimants to none.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan
are the other claimants. But though their interests in the fishing grounds and
seabed resources may be as great as China’s, none has seen fit to challenge
Beijing’s hegemony.
Why should we risk war with China to validate the claims of
Communist Vietnam or Rodrigo Duterte’s ruthless regime in Manila? Why should
their fight become our fight?
China’s interests in the sea are as crucial to her as were U.S.
interests in the Caribbean when, a rising power in 1823, we declared the Monroe
Doctrine. Over time, the world’s powers came to recognize and respect U.S.
special interests in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
Given the steady rise of Chinese military power, the proximity
of the islets to mainland China, the relative weakness and reluctance to
confront of the other claimants, China will likely become the controlling power
in the South China Sea, as we came to be the predominant power in the Western
Hemisphere.
What we are witnessing in Crimea, across the Middle East, in the
South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, are nations more willing than we to
sacrifice and take risks, because their interests there are far greater than
ours.
What America needs is a new national consensus on what is vital
to us and what is not, what we are willing to fight to defend and what we are
not.
For this generation of Americans is not going to risk war,
indefinitely, to sustain some Beltway elite’s idea of a “rules-based new world
order.” After the Cold War, we entered a new world — and we need new red lines
to replace the old.