The 80s called. . .

Found this classic quote from Salon by googling “the 80s called” + cold war:

In an exchange about al-Qaida during the debate, Obama attacked Romney for calling Russia  “without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe” earlier this year.“ 

“Gov. Romney, I’m glad you recognize al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what is the biggest geopolitical group facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida,” Obama said. “You said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policy of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s.”

Yeah, and in the process, I discovered that every blogger out there is using this reference in talking about the current crisis in Ukraine.  (Current Drudge top headline, a Washington Post article, here.)

And, of course, it’s entertaining to indulge in this schadenfreude of mocking Obama for being so foolish as to imagine that a “reset button” was going to lead to World Peace, just as much as the Left liked to mock Bush’s statement that he “looked into Putin’s eyes.”

(Funny thing is, in talking about this with my husband yesterday, I found myself referring to the “Soviet Union” rather than Russia.)

And yet — now, of course, we’ve got the situation in which Russia has already militarily intervened, and will probably succeed in taking Crimea and either annexing it or declaring it to be independent.  And the West will probably spout out words of outrage but do nothing more than when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 — because there aren’t really any good alternatives.  As this article on pjmedia.com points out, this is not a simple matter of replacing a dictator with a democrat and everything’s good.  Ukraine has a very troubled economy and no tradition of true democratic governance, but plenty of corruption to go around.  They’re shockingly poor for a European country, with kleptocrats helping themselves to any wealth the country does produce.  (Besides, knowing how willingly the Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans in the Holocaust makes them less sympathetic than your generic oppressed people, though the Holomodor counterbalances this.)

And here’s another fun piece, a set of maps that’s been floating around facebook.  Crimea isn’t really “naturally” a part of Ukraine.  Besides which, Crimea was historically the Tartar’s homeland, until Stalin uprooted them all and relocated ethnic Russians there.

So imagine that Russia hadn’t invaded Crimea to create new facts on the ground, but that, instead, the Russian majority in the province had agitated for autonomy from an increasingly-Ukrainian Ukraine.   What then?  What would the justification have been for denying their aspirations?

Really, so far as I know, there are no established principles of when a secessionist movement is declared legitimate, and when not so.  Clearly, you’ve got situations like the pending independence vote in Scotland, in which the U.K. has said it’ll abide by the result, whatever it is.  But we’ve got Kosovo, and South Sudan, and East Timor, which were hardly voluntary and peaceful.  The Wikipedia history of East Timor says in the introductory paragraph that Indonesia ceded control in 1999, and only afterwards tells us that this was after a long war for independence subsequent to Indonesia’s occupying the country in 1975, following Portugese abandonment of its former colony.  (I couldn’t really tell whether Indonesia had a historical claim or invaded purely out of conquest.)

But even with respect to Scotland, the EU has already said that Scotland wouldn’t be welcome, lest their secession encourage others.  And then there are situations like Somaliland in Somalia, a secessionist movement which isn’t being recognized.

For that matter, consider the American Civil War.  What justification, really, was there in forcing the Southern states to remain in the Union?  Why not let them go their own way?  It’s almost inconceivable — and I’ll bet your gut reaction, dear reader, is likely, “but if they had succeeded, then slavery never would have ended!” — but the rationale at the time was not, “they must stay in the Union so that, when the time is right, we can end slavery.”  And now, the revisionist claim is generally that the Civil War was not about slavery at all, but solely about preserving the Union — which I generally disagree with precisely because there had to have been a reason for the preservation of the Union to have been worth so many lives.

So, anyway, is the reason why some secessionist movements are acceptable to the International Community and some not, is a determination that a given secessionist group consists of Good People, and another one doesn’t, with bonus points if you’ve been oppressed in the past?

Does it matter whether the secessionist province is wholly united in its desire for independence, or somewhat less so?  What if Crimea were not 50% Russian (25% Ukrainian, the rest Tartar and “other”), but 75% or 90%?  Majority rules or supermajority?  And what of an ethnic minority split between multiple countries — the Kurds, for instance?   Could we permit or should we demand redrawing the map to more clearly place ethnic groups in neat national boundaries?  In that sense, the comparisons to the Anschluss are mistaken — we’re really speaking more of the Sudetenland, Hitler’s demand that the German part of Czechoslovakia be united to Germany.  And let’s not forget the ethnic cleansing post-war:  the mass numbers of ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslovia in the name of ensuring they wouldn’t make trouble; and Stalin expelling Poles from the portion of prewar Poland that the USSR held onto, which now became part of Ukraine — plus other instances in which ethnic groups were moved into an area to create “facts on the ground” such as China moving Han Chinese into Tibet and other ethnic minority areas.

So I’m not offering any pat answers.  There aren’t any, and I’m hugely skeptical of a politician that asserts there are.