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April 25, 2022
By
Trey Popp | The Pennsylvania Gazette
Perry World House's Alexander Vershbow, Mitchell Orenstein, and Robert Vitalis are featured in a new article in The Pennsylvania Gazette, looking at the war in Ukraine from a range of perspectives.
On December 21, 1991, 10 years before becoming the US ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow watched the world order swing on a hinge. The setting was the inaugural meeting of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a NATO forum established to facilitate direct consultations with the alliance’s erstwhile Warsaw Pact adversaries. He reminisced about that day’s drama at a Perry World House colloquium in late January of 2022.
“At the end of that first meeting,” Vershbow recalled, “the Soviet ambassador announced that he had to take his name off the communique, because his country had just ceased to exist. And then, 10 minutes later, a telegram came from Yeltsin saying: I’m now the president of Russia, and I want to be a member of NATO.”
[...]
Annexing Crimea was politically popular in Russia, said Mitchell Orenstein. So was the Donbas incursion, if somewhat less so. Putin “thought he could use those two territories as hooks into Ukraine that he could use to manipulate the country into a more pro-Russian orientation … But the opposite occurred.”
The Donbas territories did not prosper under the Russia-backed regimes that took power there. “They were an epic disaster,” Orenstein said. “They were war-torn, blown up, destroyed. Their economy sucks. They have no services. Many of the people had to leave. So if you’re a Russian speaker [in Ukraine], and the question is Should we have Russians come and save us?, it was ludicrous.”
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“Energy independence has ostensibly been a goal articulated by every president since Richard Nixon,” observed political science professor Robert Vitalis, whose 2020 book Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security that Haunt US Energy Policy casts a skeptical eye on the idea.
“I concluded a long time ago, along with many economists, that the notion of energy independence is a fiction,” he said. “It appeals to nationalism and is supported by two kinds of interests: domestic producers of oil and gas, and conservationists, for lack of a better term. But it’s not really possible. In the 21st century, the US—as we can see right now—is not walled off from shocks to a global market. And oil is a global market.”
