It somehow became conventional wisdom in Washington political circles that pushing NATO membership for Ukraine would be a good idea. There are, however, all kinds of problems with this idea including the fact that Ukrainian people don’t seem to want to be NATO members:

Yanukovich’s bid to end the pursuit of military alliances such as NATO may represent an abrupt departure from his predecessor Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-Western policies, but Gallup surveys suggest it may be more in line with what Ukrainians may have wanted for some time. Even if the law is passed, NATO will not completely be out of the picture in Ukraine. With this U-turn from pro-NATO policies, however, it is possible that more Ukrainians’ opinions about NATO will shift to the “threat” category.

It seems to me that before the US enters into an unconditional security partnership with a new country we should be looking, at a minimum, for a fairly firm cross-party consensus in favor of such an alliance. What they had in Ukraine was the reverse—it’s a subject of partisan controversy in which the pro-NATO side of the controversy was on the wrong side of public opinion.

I basically liked this New Atlanticist piece on Ukraine’s new president, but the inclusion of the phrase “[g]iven the country’s strategic significance” is one of my pet peeves. There seems to be a rule in American journalism that wherever it is you happen to be talking about has enormous strategic significance. I was joking earlier with a friend that maybe Namibia or Mozambique lacks strategic significance, but in fact back in the Cold War days the whole southern cone of Africa was somehow central to the battle against Communism.

I wouldn’t want to slight anyone and say that Chile or Chad or wherever doesn’t matter. Every country and every region is a beautiful unique snowflake, crucially important to the people who live there and to the specialists who work on it. But the idea of a given country being strategically significant only makes sense as a relative idea. Ukraine obviously lacks the significance of, say, Germany to say nothing of nuclear armed European powers like Russia, France, and the UK. And “fourth most important country in Europe” sounds like an overestimation to me. The fact of the matter is that Ukraine has been politically dominated by Moscow for the vast majority of the three hundred years since the Battle of Poltava and control of Ukraine has never made Russia mistress of the word.

At any rate, as a supplement to the next QDR I would appreciate it if the Pentagon would compile a “list of countries by strategic significance” for use by journalists and policy analysts. Or maybe instead of a rank-ordering, it would make more sense to divide the nations of the world up into a few broad categories. The point is that we can’t just wander around in confusion.

Joshua Tucker at the Monkey Cage offers a link to a new Pew Global Attitudes Project titled “The Pulse of Europe 2009: 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall”.

This seems like the most noteworthy table:

We can see that in eight of the nine post-communist countries, a majority of the population continues to approve of the change to democracy; in four of these countries at least 70% of respondents approved. Ukraine is the clear outlier here, with support having dropped by 42% to only 30%. Particularly interesting in these findings is the fact that a greater proportion of Russians than Ukrainians continue to approve of the change to a multiparty system, despite the fact that the latter actually has functioning multiparty politics while one would be hard pressed to claim anything of the sort exists in the former.

Basically Ukrainians hate freedom. Or more seriously, a big part of the problem is that a hefty chunk of multi-party politics in Ukraine consists of just reiterating an entrenched regional/linguistic divide between the more western-oriented and more eastern-oriented halves of the country.

Someone asked me earlier today what I thought of the ongoing political unrest in Moldova. I didn’t have anything especially to say, but I was able to make the observation that there’s always the outside chance that Romania will try to intervene in the situation. Moldovans are Romanian-speaking and their territory was part of the Romanian state in the past. The protests are being characterized as “anti-Communist” in nature, but also reflect disagreement about whether Moldova should be oriented toward Bucharest or to Moscow. You can see this reflected in the fact that the party line is that this agitation is all being masterminded by Romania:

“We know that certain forces from Romania masterminded these riots,” Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Mr. Voronin as saying. “Romanian flags which were planted on state buildings in Chisinau prove this.”

You could imagine Romania and Russia both intervening in this situation as part of a regional tug-o-war. And Romania’s in NATO, so next thing you know maybe it’ll be nuclear war. But obviously that’s unlikely.

Still, the larger issue is that political instability in former Soviet Republics embeds a lot of potentially problematic international conflicts. And the recession is fostering a lot of political instability. Not only in Moldova but also (via Ezra Klein) in Ukraine where, again, domestic political conflicts are tied in with geopolitical struggles between Russia and the West. And there’s also, it seems, trouble in Thailand.

This sort of thing is probably the most fundamental danger in the economic crisis. Given enough time and calm, the policies the major countries have put in place should lead to a recovery sooner or later. But if “sooner or later” takes too long, the calm starts to go away and there are big risks of downward spiraling.