Time for Washington To ‘Seek a Grand Bargain with Moscow over Crimea’

Nov. 26, 2019 (EIRNS)—U.S. Naval War College Associate Professor Lyle Goldstein proposed just such a strategy in an enjoyably polemical article posted by The National Interest on Nov. 24. “American diplomats should perhaps turn their attention away from reciting tiresome talking points and stirring up old Cold War tensions to actually negotiating a grand bargain to set European security on a much more positive course,” he proposes. That will require accepting Crimea as part of Russia, and commitments to help Ukraine economically with more than adorning its former Chernobyl nuclear plant with solar panels and wind farms.

It’s time the “venerable” American foreign policy elite gives up its “Russia in decline” claim. That elite “will not be pleased to learn that the Russian Transport Ministry announced on Nov. 1 that trains would begin running between Crimea and the Russian mainland before the end of 2019.... These trains will, of course, cross the famed Crimean Bridge that was first opened with great fanfare in 2018 to vehicular traffic.” Freight traffic over that bridge is to follow sometime in 2020; “as of late October, according to one Russian report, heavy technical trains consisting of a locomotive with 23 cars full of crushed stones was operating on the bridge for tests. The overall weight of the test train amounted to 2,400 tons.”

Goldstein puts forward ten reasons to get to work on negotiating this “grand bargain.” Some are more workable than others, but his proposal to start such discussions is the key.