Before the United States can develop a plan in Crimea, the U.S. must clarify its goal. Is it to end violence? Is it to assure the reunification of Ukraine and the now quasi-independent Crimean peninsula? Is it to embarrass Vladimir Putin?
Now that recent developments have suggested that Ukraine is all but surrendering Crimea after it announced Wednesday its plans to move military personnel back to mainland Ukraine, the onus of potential military involvement may have shifted. If the aforementioned goals are indeed to be our goals in Crimea, maybe military might, or the threat of it, as many have suggested, is a good idea. Military action, even if limited, certainly increases the chances of those outcomes, and some within the Department of State and House Committee on Foreign Affairs consider those goals to be paramount. Teddy Roosevelt’s “speak softly and carry a big stick” policy has become a commonplace suggestion.
Far be it from me to speak for Roosevelt, but his fondness for the adage “speak softly and carry a big stick” did not come to bear because it sounds nice. For Roosevelt, the saying was not the simple cure-all for foreign policy conundrums that it’s often used as today, but rather a strategy that implied some concrete and tangible foreign policy actions.
But the year is 2014, the president of the U.S. is Barack Obama and the United States’ increasing military reticence after more than a decade of war and hesitance to intervene in humanitarian crises like Syria means that strong-arming seems unlikely and perhaps irresponsible. Furthermore, the United States’ stake in the Crimean crisis is hardly territorial, but rather a convenient stage for ad hoc, rhetorical geopolitical battles with a formidable world “foe,” whatever that may entail.
The United States’ direct interest in the Crimean crisis pertains more to how it violates international law than to what is actually happening there. So, to say that the U.S. ought to oppose the Russian invasion of Crimea is really to say that the U.S. ought to generally oppose illegal violations of state sovereignty. To say that the U.S. ought to end Ukrainian violence to protect protesters and non-Russian ethnic groups in Crimea is really to say that the U.S. ought to stand for human rights, non-discrimination and peaceful protest.
To be curt, the fact that these violations are precipitating from a world power and an internationally recognized leader in Putin doesn’t hurt when the U.S. decides to decry this particular violation of sovereignty, as opposed to the multitude of violations that have occurred in the last decade.
The United States’ goals are realistically general and rhetorical. Thus, a self-interested but shrewd U.S. foreign policy, if it comes to fruition, will likewise be general and rhetorical. It means denouncing Russia and Putin publicly, revoking Russian visas, threatening to exclude Russia from the G8, using Russia’s seat on the Security Council as bargaining leverage and encouraging Crimean secession to follow the legal process of gaining permission from all of Ukraine.
That does not mean using military force to any capacity, working to end violence, directly enforcing dual autonomy or even standing all that firm. Like Ukraine itself, allowing what is happening on the ground to continue may be our most realistic strategy.
One thing is for certain: We shouldn’t be, and for the most part aren’t, speaking softly and carrying a big stick.
We should be, and for the most part are, throwing the stick aside and shouting from the mountaintops.