Whether it’s gun control, transit or the minutiae of presidential politics, so much news courses through our social media feeds and across our TV screens that it’s hard to catch it all. And that’s before you get to what’s happening overseas, where multiple conflicts are raging on multiple continents.
Next week, the third annual St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs, which is free and open to the public, takes place at USF St. Pete. Tackling everything from international criminal tribunals to sea-level rise, the three-day conference, chaired by retired Ambassador Douglas McElhaney, a St. Pete resident, aims to take a deeper look at issues that often get short shrift in the 140-character media landscape.
Many of the seminar topics are framed as questions, and intriguing questions they are. For instance, “If You Had Five Minutes with the NEXT President, What Would You Recommend?” (2 p.m. Friday, with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as one of the panelists), and “Can We Keep Our Rights and Protect Our Country Too?” (9 a.m. Friday, with Ted Kennedy biographer Burton Hersh on the panel).
Ahead of the conference, which runs from Feb. 26 to Feb. 28, CL asked two of the panelists to give us a bird’s-eye view on the increasingly fraught arenas of Ukraine and Syria.
Ralph Clem on Ukraine: “It’s a war. It’s not an insurrection.”
How can one best describe the current situation in Ukraine? “This is a war in Europe that nobody thought would happen after WWII, kind of the war to end all wars. Nobody thought it was going to happen, and here it is. It’s a war. It’s not an insurrection, it’s not a — all these words people use without calling it what it is. It’s a war. There are 5,000 dead and a million refugees. That’s a war.”
What is its significance? “This is the first time since the end of the Second World War in Europe where a country has seized territory from another country and incorporated it. The last time that happened was 1945 when the border transfers after the Second World War were completed. So this is really a remarkable event. It is destabilizing in the extreme. It was widely viewed that those kinds of things would not ever happen again in Europe… This has thrown that right out the window.”
How did it get to this point? “It actually started seriously back in November of 2013 when the protests against the previous government in Ukraine began. Where there were thousands and thousands of people in the streets and widespread violence between protesters and police in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev… When the previous government was thrown out after that popular rebellion began in November of 2013, a new, more pro-European government came in. And that became a serious threat to the Russians, or the Russians perceived it as a threat and from that point on they began to act very aggressively. They seized Crimea.”
What do you think is the issue most at heart in this conflict? “To the west, you have the European Union and NATO. To the east you’ve got Russia and its allies. And right in the middle of that you have Ukraine. Ukraine is literally caught in the middle, between those two, the western and eastern camps. The word Ukraine actually means frontier or borderlands, and that’s exactly what it is… The key question for Ukraine is do they want to become more European, or do they want to be more closely allied with Russia? Russia would prefer and in fact, seems to insist on Ukraine kind of being in their orbit, and Ukrainians themselves generally are divided on which way they want to go.”
France and Germany managed to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia. What does that entail and how likely is it to hold up? “The process… is very complex. It involves the withdrawal of heavy weaponry, it involves the removal of any foreign fighters, which mainly means the Russians. And then, very importantly, down the road, it involves giving those eastern regions of the country some relatively greater autonomy than they currently have, but still within the territorial structure of Ukraine. And I would assess the chances of all of that happening at under 10 percent.”
Why’s that? “There was an agreement signed last September [the Minsk agreement] that failed to achieve anything. This is a successor to that, and you could reasonably ask the question, if that didn’t work, why would this work?”
Before the ceasefire, the US was talking about sending “lethal aid” to Ukraine. How likely was that to have really happened? “This talk about providing more lethal types of aid might have been a kind of good cop/bad cop strategy where the Germans and the French are saying we need to talk, we need diplomacy, we need to really work this out through negotiations, and with the Americans saying, we’re thinking now about providing lethal, defensive military aid… The other side of that is maybe Russians decided to come to that agreement because of the sanctions and their economic problems are really beginning to hurt them. They would like those to be lifted.”
What happens if the ceasefire fails? “If this process goes off the rails, I don’t think that there will ever be a return to status quo. I think these areas would be absorbed by Russia, and I think that the only thing that would change that would be an end to the Putin presidency.”
Russia after the Ukraine and Crimea Grabs: What’s for Dessert? Thurs., Feb. 26, 9 a.m., USF Student Center. Speakers: Ralph Clem, Damon Wilson, Clarence Juhl, Robert Shaefer, Ilgiz Yanbukhtin.
Joshua Landis on Syria: “…total meltdown…”
Syria has been fighting a civil war for nearly four years now, and ISIS/ISIL is in control in some areas. How bad is it? “Syria is a total meltdown — 3.8 million refugees have registered with the UN High Commission for Refugees. Over 4 million people are outside of the country as refugees. Another 6-8 million have been misplaced inside Syria. That means one out of every two Syrians has been forced to leave their home. The UN estimates that 90 percent of Syrians now live below the poverty line. In between civil war and devastating economic sanctions placed on Syria, the economy is crashed.”
Death toll estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 in Syria. Who’s doing most of the killing? “Both sides are exhibiting extraordinary brutality. The government is more brutal because it can. It’s got an air force and it’s got more artillery. But the other side is trying to catch up in executing their prisoners and everything else. Both sides are just being barbaric.”
At the moment, many Americans don’t see ISIS or the conflict in Syria as having a direct impact on their lives. Why is it important to pay attention? “Because there’s massive confusion over what we should be doing, why we’re bombing and what our goals are. Can we destroy ISIS? What’s it going to take to undo this threat of jihadism that has people very worried? Is the Middle East going to be an incubator for terrorism for decades to come?”
What kind of role does the US have in the conflict? “America is in a very terrible position when it comes to Syria. We’ve started, since the summer, bombing ISIS, which was originally al Qaeda in Iraq, that we fought against for many years… We refuse to work with the government of Bashar al-Assad, which is quite barbaric, and we’ve been unable to work with the rebels, who’ve been very divided and now are radicalized.”
Ideally, what would we be doing? “The textbook way to destroy an insurgency like ISIS is to create a better government than the insurgency can offer. And in order to create a better government in Syria we need partners who we can trust and rely on, which we don’t have, who are capable of ruling a big country, 25 million people… So it’s unclear what we can do besides pursue a narrow policy, counterterrorism, which is trying to kill as many ISIS guys as we can and keep them from organizing against Americans and Europeans.”
Is it likely the US military will get involved much beyond that in the future? “We’re not going to do it. It’s very clear. It’s possible that the Republicans would ramp up if they win the elections, but I don’t even think the Republicans would do it. They talk big, but they’re not going to do it. Americans don’t want to do it.”
What is at the root of the violence? “This is a problem that we have at home: the problem of a yawning income gap, of spreading disparity in the world, we know about it in America because of growing inequality here… and globalization is leading to a real differentiation in wealth, skills, education. We feel it in America.”
Why can’t we just walk away? “We’re all in the same boat. And globalization means globalization of fear and radicalism, too. And we’re seeing that in the growing anxiety about terrorism. So we… can’t just turn our backs on countries like Syria or on a region like the Middle East. Because they’re with us. They’re next door to us… The world has to come together and help each other. That is ultimately the only solution.”
Oh, What a Lovely War: Syria Edition, Thurs., Feb. 26, 2:30 p.m., USF Student Center. Speakers: Joshua Landis, Norine McDonald, Larry Butler, Robert Shaefer.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2015.