Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault

ForeignAffairs.com - published by the Council on Foreign Relations
John J. Mearsheimer September/October 2014

A man takes a picture as he stands on a Soviet-style star re-touched with blue paint so that it resembles the Ukrainian flag, Moscow, August 20, 2014. (Maxim Shemetov / Courtesy Reuters)

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close...>

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Cyprus: Harvesting the Hemp- "first industrial hemp harvest on the island since the 1930s"

Evie Andreou cyprus-mail.com August 31, 2014

Hemp pickers in Akaki harvesting the crop. Photo: Facebook

IT WAS simple curiosity that got me out of bed at 5.30am on a very hot August Sunday morning to go and check out the hype surrounding the first industrial hemp harvest on the island since the 1930s.

The organisers had invited the public to help harvest the crop and arranged a convoy of cars from Nicosia to Akaki. Hemp is a variety of the cannabis plant, containing negligible amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the stuff that gets you high. Without it, the plant, which used to be widely grown around the world, including Cyprus, has a host of other uses from bricks, to textiles to paper and even as food.

We had been told to bring pruning shears, long pants, closed shoes and water. The meeting point was Makarios Stadium at 7am. I was early and half thought I’d be stood up but by 6.50am people began to arrive.


Clement Ryan at work on the hemp harvest Photo: Facebook

“Are you here for the harvest?” was the question everyone was asking.
Soon, Maria (she wanted to keep her surname private), arrived and introduced herself as the woman behind the hemp field and everyone – around 30 people in all – headed off...MORE
http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/08/31/harvesting-the-hemp/