From Crimea to Geneva: Pinpointing Obama's weak spot

Haaretz

Over and over again U.S. President Barack Obama has been attacked for his weak stand against Russia, Iran or Bashar al-Assad. But the crisis in Crimea shows a different kind of weakness. There is no doubt which is the strong side in the conflict between the government in Kiev and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but it seems like Obama is also a little intimidated by Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his men.

Putin didn’t have a master plan to annex Crimea from November, and probably not even when he sent the soldiers without insignia to decorate the streets of Sevastopol and Simferopol. He didn’t send his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for such long talks with his colleagues John Kerry and Lady Catherine Ashton only to waste time. His hours of talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Obama weren’t spent solely on repeating Russia’s ancient claims to Crimea.

As The Guardian’s Shaun Walker describes, in all those talks, Putin did offer a compromise - a compromise Ukrainian government might have not liked, but not an unreasonable one. The conditions included ensuring that Ukraine’s interim government involved a coalition of all political forces, including Yanukovych’s Party of Regions (but not Viktor Yanukovych himself, which even Putin gave up on), disbanding all armed revolutionary factions and making Russian an official state language.

But this offer wasn’t even discussed publicly. Instead of pressuring Kiev to compromise and averting the escalation of the crisis, the West rejected the Russia’s suggestion on grounds that it is interference in Ukraine's internal matters. This justification didn’t take into account that Kiev is in control of an interim and even revolutionary government, not one elected in free and fair elections, and that there is room for reshuffling the ministries so that all sections of Ukrainian society will be recognized.

Why was the Russian compromise truly rejected? The Ukrainian sovereignty was an excuse. Obama isn’t personally afraid of the Ukrainian Prime Minister, or from repercussions for the US. But after years of criticism about his weakness in front of other world or regional powers, he has developed a vulnerability to the demands of adversaries of those powers.

This is not the first time Obama has succumbed to pressure of the weaker party in a way that hinders a possible solution. Before the Geneva conference on the war in Syria, the Americans gave in to the Syrian opposition's threats and stopped Iran’s participation in the negotiations. Washington acknowledged the mistake by organizing a parallel event with an Iranian delegation, but the result was a peace conference without one of the main forces involved in the war, and probably the only force that might be able to pressure Assad to compromise.

One might argue that the Syrian peace conference was doomed from the beginning, and the Iranian absence didn’t change much. But now, when American officials are starting to recognize publicly that Crimea is lost to Ukraine, and before we see another round of accusations about Obama’s weakness in the face of Putin, it is important to remember the principal weakness that led to this result.