Special to WorldTribune.com

Gregory R. Copley, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs

The change in the political balance in the Black Sea region which took place on March 18, 2014, with the re-accession of Crimea into Russia, was not profound in terms of any of the normal arbiters of strategic power. Nonetheless, it changed the equation not only in the Black Sea but regionally and globally.

The small events, predictable in their inevitability and outcome (and yet so poorly understood by the players in Western Europe and the U.S. who ensured that they would happen), not only dramatically undermined the credibility of U.S. strategic prestige, they transformed a range of other political events.

Future historians will ponder whether the pivoting of the global strategic architecture resulting from the overreaction on the transfer of Crimea from Ukraine back to Russia was worth the price which will be paid, ultimately, by the West.

Many actors in the game have no thought of the future, however; theirs is a short-term grasping at opportunity. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a key component of this. It was an alliance which had lost its purpose. Now, it saw again a chance to portray a major threat to justify its existence.

The most shortsighted of players, perhaps, are the usurpers in Kiev, who have for the past decade sought to undo the reality that in any democratic Ukrainian elections there was the strong probability that the Eastern, Orthodox Christian population would dominate the Western Ukrainians, who are predominantly Catholic and European oriented. Some of the Western Ukrainians, like former Prime Minister and Presidential hopeful Yulia Tymoshenko understand that for Ukraine to remain stable the Government in Kiev must balance its relations between Moscow and the West. But all of the “color revolutionaries” of Kiev and Lviv see the West — NATO — as their savior and protection. For the moment, this is unrealistic. Similarly, the Baltic states, particularly Lithuania, seem to hope that they can use their NATO membership to “wag the dog” to ward off perceived (but unlikely at this stage) Russian predations toward the Baltic Sea.

Within the NATO framework, the Turkish Government — which remains dependent on Russia for much of its trade and for control (as a transit territory) for much Caspian region oil and gas to Europe — is moving to once again prove that it is indispensable to NATO, the European Union (EU) and the United States. And this despite the fact that it has acted strongly against EU and U.S. interests, even as a member of NATO, for decades. One aspect of this is the almost frantic case which Turkey, and Turkey’s advocates in and formerly of the U.S. State Department, have been making that it was imperative for gas in Israel’s and Cyprus’s fields in the Eastern Mediterranean to be piped to Turkey for on-shipment to the EU. This ignores the better case for the piping of these supplies to Greece and then on to other European markets.

Western moves, particularly those by the U.S. State Dept. and some others in the private and public sectors in the West, made the present watershed inevitable. Certainly, Western Ukrainian politicians, since 1990, have agitated for closer ties with the EU, NATO, and the West generally. But U.S. and EU entities fueled that approach, and absolutely encouraged the Western Ukrainians to refuse to accept the democratic standards which the West itself had claimed to espouse. Thus the stage was set for revolution in Ukraine, for the Western Ukrainians to achieve what was not possible through the ballot box. What, then, should Russia’s reaction have been?

If Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin underestimated one thing about the Russian move to reclaim Crimea, it was the extent to which it played into the hands of opportunists in Ankara, Brussels, and Washington. If nothing else, the affair will put on hold any real progress in attempts to remove Turkish troops from their four-decade occupation of northern Cyprus. It will certainly cause Turkey to also try to dominate Cyprus and its ability to finance and develop gas exploitation from its offshore fields.

It will also, with NATO support, re-empower Turkey in its de facto resumption of near-hegemonic domination of the Balkan states. Turkish Prime Minister Reçep Tayyip Erdogan claimed victory for his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s March 30, 2014, municipal elections, but that could not disguise the reality of the near-meltdown of his Government and party, and his dire need to regain the initiative. Despite his now near-pathological anger at the West, and particularly his erstwhile partner, U.S. President Barack Obama, and his admiration for President Putin, Mr Erdogan cannot avoid playing his only strategic hand: proving his indispensability to NATO and the West. At the same time, he cannot afford to alienate Moscow or further antagonize the Iranian leadership, which hold the potential to destabilize Turkey and its many ethnic and religious communities (which ensure that ethnic Turks are a minority in Turkey).

What this all moves the pendulum towards is a situation in which NATO will once again become empowered, although with the U.S. being able to exert less leverage over Europe than in the past, and Russia being forced to resort to either an empowerment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a security organization or the creation of a new security mechanism around the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

An SCO empowerment would give Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) dominance over the Eurasian heartland with all the implications that implies.

The EU states would be compelled to return to higher defense spending.

All of this came into clarity when Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, Crimean Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov of Crimea, and the mayor of Sevastopol on March 18, 2014, jointly signed an agreement for Crimea and Sevastopol to join the Russian Federation. The secession removed 26,100 sq.km. (10,038 sq. miles) from Ukraine’s territory, and also took some 1,973,185 (2007 est.) people from Ukraine’s population.

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