EU leaders led the world in condemning the president of Belarus for ordering a truly extraordinary caper on Sunday. In a piece on May 24 titled, “A State-Sponsored Skyjacking Can’t Go Unanswered,” the editorial board of The New York Times began its condemnation as follows:
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Aleksandr Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, has gone too far. Hijacking a commercial airliner to kidnap an opposition journalist is simply too dangerous a violation of international norms for the United States, the European Union and other responsible states to let pass without serious consequences.
A throwback to the regional bosses of the Soviet era, Mr. Lukashenko has become steadily more repressive and autocratic over his 27 years in power. With neighboring President Vladimir Putin of Russia as kindred spirit and protector, Mr. Lukashenko has consistently shrugged off criticism and sanctions from the West.
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Sure enough, with concerted alacrity hardly ever seen, EU leaders showed they had no intention of letting this pass without consequences.
The European Union agreed Monday to impose sanctions on Belarus, including banning its airlines from using the airspace and airports of the 27-nation bloc, amid fury over the forced diversion of a passenger jet to arrest an opposition journalist.
Reacting to what EU leaders called a brazen ‘hijacking’ of the Ryanair jetliner flying from Greece to Lithuania on Sunday, they also demanded the immediate release of the journalist, Raman Pratasevich, a key foe of authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
(The Washington Post, May 24, 2021)
Meanwhile, this international incident has seen US President Joe Biden emulating his former boss by leading from behind. He made quite a show of joining the EU chorus in condemning this “outrageous incident … in the strongest possible terms.” He also endorsed those EU sanctions and telegraphed his intent to have the US pile on. But here’s the rub:
EU leaders have been sanctioning Belarus for almost as long as they’ve been sanctioning Russia – all to no avail. In fact, as the Times piece duly indicates, these sanctions will hardly constitute “serious consequences” for Lukashenko. And, ominously, Putin has shown time and again, that the more Western leaders sanction Russia, the more outrageous his actions become.
This is why Lukashenko has no reason to take Biden or EU leaders seriously. More to the point, the US has had just cause to vent even greater outrage and levy far more onerous sanctions for far worse transgressions against Russia. This, most notably for interfering in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, ordering political hits on dissidents abroad, and hacking hundreds of US government and corporate entities for billions in ransomware (aka the SolarWinds caper).
Yet, despite all those brazen assaults on American democracy and corporate interests, Biden is practically salivating at the prospect of a summit with Russia’s dystopian leader.
President Joe Biden will hold a summit with Vladimir Putin next month in Geneva [on June 16], a face-to-face meeting between the two leaders that comes amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia in the first months of the Biden administration.
Biden first proposed a summit in a call with Putin in April as his administration prepared to levy sanctions against Russian officials for the second time during the first three months of his presidency.
(ABC News, May 25, 2021)
I argued in my podcast episode, “Biden’s Foreign Policy ‘A-Team’ Is Failing Him,” May 15, 2021, that the only way Western countries can regain the moral high ground in their dealings with China is to prevail upon the IOC to relocate the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and let the chips fall where they may.
In a similar vein, the only way the United States can regain any moral high ground in its dealings with Russia is for Biden to make a show of canceling this summit. Not least because, while others rushed to condemn Lukashenko, Putin rushed not only to congratulate him for this derring-do, but also to invite him for a state visit this weekend to offer, in person, any help he might need to weather any sanctions those outraged world leaders impose.
No doubt they’ll be chuckling away, while doing shots of Stolichnaya. This, especially as they contrast all the brazen acts of lawlessness Lukashenko has committed to stay in power with the way pro-democracy protests forced wannabe strongman Viktor Yanukovych to hightail it and run from neighboring Ukraine.
I commented on the restive events that ended in Yanukovych seeking refuge in Russia in “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution Turns Red,” February 25, 2014. Nobody has seen or heard from him since.
Of course, nobody should be surprised that Putin applauded this brazen act of lawlessness like the proud mafia boss I often cast him as in commentaries. I refer you most notably to “In Putin’s Russia Even Athletics Is a Criminal (Doping) Enterprise,” November 9, 2015. Even worse, though, Putin has effectively dared Biden to cancel. Only that explains him threatening just last week to “knock out the teeth” of the US or any nation that even attempts to claim any part of the Arctic he has already claimed for Mother Russia.
Frankly, you’d be forgiven the impression that early-stage dementia has Biden thinking Putin is the leader of the old Soviet Union. To be sure, Putin fantasizes, openly and notoriously, about being the czar of a reconstructed union of all socialist republics that once composed that Soviet bloc. And I’ve been mocking him for years for doing so in commentaries like “The Putinization of Russia Extends to Georgia,” November 2, 2005.
The reality, of course, is closer to what the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona used to say to get under his thin skin, namely that
Putin is the leader of the largest gas station in the world just masquerading as a country.
No doubt he has always been a thug. But Putin has reduced Russia to little more than a doping kleptocracy that specializes in cyber crimes and political assassinations.
This is why any leader who commands any respect on the world stage holds him in utter contempt. But, since he can’t brag about doping his athletes, fleecing his people, hacking foreign entities, or ordering political hits, he’s resorting to schoolyard taunts to get their attention. And, alas, he has succeeded in getting the attention, on a grand scale, of no less a person than the leader of the free world.
But I’ve been arguing for years that US presidents should coordinate with Western allies to impose crippling sanctions not on states but directly on rogue leaders and their oligarch cronies. Further, that they should limit all contact with these rogues to formal channels through diplomatic underlings.
I refer you in this regard to commentaries like “Why Do World Leaders Even Give North Korea’s Leader the Time of Day,” October 4, 2006, “Pussy Riot: Russia’s ‘Vlad the Poisoner’ Strikes … Again,” September 19, 2018, and “Germany Confirms What Everyone Knew: Putin Poisoned Navalny!” September 3, 2020.
In other words, as I explained in the May 15 podcast episode I referenced earlier, Western leaders should not be giving autocrats like Putin and Kim Jong-un the time of day. But I delineated in this same episode the economically MAD (as in the acronym for Mutual Assured Destruction) reasons why Xi Jinping might appear the exception to this rule but is, in fact, not.
Finally, I’d be remiss not to note how much former President Trump’s public dalliances with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has cheapened once-coveted summits with US presidents. Because only that explains the public show Kim made of rejecting Biden’s inexplicable overtures for a summit with him.
The point is that there’s no wonder autocrats, even tiny Samoa’s, feel emboldened. And you ain’t seen nothing yet: wait till China’s Xi starts flexing his authoritarian muscles.
Related commentaries:
podcast Biden’s A-Team… Ukraine’s Orange Revolution… Putinization of Georgia…
Doping enterprise… time of day… Vlad the poisoner… Navalny…