Kazakhstan and Ukraine and NATO policy toward Russia

Kazakhstan has faced serious protests in recent days, which prompted the authoritarian Kazakh government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested the intervention of Russian troops to help suppress the anti-government demonstrations, which Vladimir Putin's government provided. Russia does have a mutual-defense treat with Kazakhstan. But this was not a foreign attack that Kazakhstan faced, but protests against the existing government.

Deutsche Welle news reports on the situation in NATO calls for calm in Kazakhstan 01/07/2022:

It's important to remember that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan held 1,400 nuclear warheads, which it voluntarily gave up, a very important contribution to nuclear nonproliferation. Ukraine also gave up its nuclear weapons. The Russian military actions in Ukraine in 2014 and its annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, along with US-NATO interventions in Iraq and Libya after those countries had given up their "weapons of mass destruction" development programs, sent a very strong message: if you give up your nuclear weapons, that's not guarantee that the US or Russia won't invade you. That makes a very damaging impact on nuclear nonproliferation efforts. The leaderships in Iran and North Korea certainly paid attention to those messages.

The recent Russian intervention in Kazakhstan isn't directly comparable to its actions in Ukraine in 2014, in that the Kazakh government requested it. We don't know to what extent Putin's government may have actually encouraged such a request. But there seems to be no obvious reason to think Tokayev's government was unhappy about the Russian support.

The standoff between Russia on the one side with its troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and on the other with Ukraine and NATO (of which Ukraine is not a member) continues. Hawkish American commentators are promoting the supposed Russian menace to Europe, such as Daniel Fried, who writes in Just Security (As Putin Aims to Re-Divide Europe, Lessons from the Past Can Guide a Response 01/07/2022):

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin demands that the West help restore its empire in Europe, the imposition of which by Joseph Stalin was the original cause of the Cold War. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed a lot about Kremlin views of the countries between Germany and Russia when he said in December that the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact left them not free or sovereign but “ownerless.”

There's always nostalgic value in hearing the golden oldies. But Fried gets there by writing as though the Russians' current negotiating positions, which they know very well that the US and NATO won't accept without changes (duh! that's what they call it "negotiation") as though it were something like a military ultimatum.

Fried even declares, "the Kremlin regards the 40 million Ukrainians and 100 million Europeans from Estonia to Bulgaria as mere property of one or another great power; Moscow lost them as the USSR collapsed and now demands them back." (my emphasis)

I'm tempted to say I'd like some of whatever he's smoking. Russia wants to take over Bulgaria?

Now, it's a reality that great powers are known to throw their weight around in their geographic neighbors, sometimes in more blundering ways than others. Ask Venezuela or any other country in Latin American about that. But Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet government was willing to cut its Warsaw Pact allies loose not least because they were a significant economic burden for the economically troubled USSR.

While Russia clearly sees an interest in keeping Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO, the recent unrest in Kazakhstan is another reminder that Russia realizes that it has plenty of challenges already. Sure, any Russian government would in theory be happy if NATO in its current form didn't exist. But Russia's armed forces are roughly the size of Germany's and France's combined. That it has the capability or the immediate intent to overrun eastern and central Europe really sounds like nostalgic Cold War fantasy.

Fried uses the intervention in Kazakhstan as evidence. "The Russian-led military incursion in Kazakhstan shows that Moscow is willing to use its military in a big, overt way inside its neighbors."

Since the context of Fried's comments is providing an outline of what the US negotiating position should be, and his comments on that seem like a pretty straightforward pragmatic negotiating strategy, I suppose a little hyperbole is to be expected. But hyperbole turning into actual policy - or as justification for policy based on less exalted aims - has happened a lot in US foreign policy.

At least he didn't bring up the Munich analogy!