While America Slept. Robert C. O'Brien
puppet Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the Maidan protests. There was no heat, because most of the gas that powers Ukraine comes from Russia and is too expensive to use this early in the season. Despite the conditions, however, I will not forget the Ukrainian people I met while observing their election.
There was a kindly grandmother running a rural polling station, who was so proud to have a foreign observer, especially an American, visit her village. She told me that the little hamlet, aptly named Velyka Volya (“Great Freedom”), was the place where a group of Ukrainian resistance fighters, in a 1946 version of Masada, committed suicide rather than surrender to the encircling Soviet troops.
An elderly man at a downtown polling station shared his story. As a medical student following the Second World War, he joined the resistance and fought the Soviets until his capture in 1951. He was shipped to a Russian gulag and survived for six years before being released, but authorities prevented him from going home. He never returned to medical school. He was so happy to be serving as a precinct secretary in a democratic election in his native land. He pleaded with me for America to send arms and Kevlar so that Ukraine’s young men would have a fighting chance against Russian regulars.
This article was originally published in the National Interest, October 29, 2014.
A young mother arrived at a suburban precinct. In tow was her three-year-old daughter, dressed in a white snowsuit that matched her own. The little girl clutched and waved Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag and smiled the whole time that her mom underwent the formalities of casting her vote. The election was about the child. Her mom envisioned for her a future of freedom and the rule of law in the sunlit uplands of the West, not of despotism in the wintry East.
Fresh-faced kids manned the precincts. Of the seventeen precinct election committees my team visited, most had a majority of twenty-something members. Some were made up entirely of young people. The Maidan protests that claimed the lives of one hundred of their contemporaries inspired them to get involved and stop the apparatchiks from stealing another election. These young people are taking their country back. Corrupt, one-party rule has no part in their plans.
One of these young post-Maidan activists is Hanna Hopko. She is a thirty-two-year-old mom and committed Christian with a PhD in communications. Hopko has already established herself as a reformer who took on big tobacco in her effort to rid Ukraine’s bars and restaurants of secondhand smoke—no easy feat in a country where cigarettes are still sold everywhere. Hopko was the number-one candidate on the Samopomich Party list. Until Sunday, Samopomich had never contested a parliamentary election. What it lacked in national election experience, it made up for with a pro-European, free-men and free-markets platform. While it appears that President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc will win a narrow victory, the International Republican Institute exit poll shows Samopomich taking an unexpectedly strong third-place position. Dozens of its “outsider” candidates, led by Hopko, will now be demanding reform from inside Ukraine’s Parliament.
Finally, for the first time since the Soviets occupied Ukraine in 1918, there will be no Communist Party representation in Ukraine’s legislative assembly. When the exit polls were released just after 8:00 p.m., showing that the Communists were well below the 5 percent threshold for proportional representation, several Ukrainian voters pumped their fists and smiled. For them, this election was a welcome end to Communist influence over their lives.
Notwithstanding the war and the punishing economic circumstances Russia’s invasion and occupation have inflicted on them, Ukrainians are happy today. They showed the world that they remain unbowed in the face of aggression and are committed to a future in the democratic West.
With the world’s attention focused on Bashar al-Assad’s violent suppression of the Syrian civilian uprising, and with the increasing likelihood of a strike by Israel to thwart Iran’s relentless drive to obtain nuclear weapons, perhaps the most underreported international story is the increasingly heated dispute between Britain and Argentina in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is an unfolding issue that could say much about the way the United States handles its alliances, including those in the Asia-Pacific region.
On April 2, 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher quickly assembled and dispatched a formidable naval task force to retake the islands, which had been in British possession since 1833. On June 14, Argentine forces surrendered to the Royal Marines. The conflict was brief but violent, with both nations losing ships and hundreds of sailors and soldiers. It was, however, a decisive victory for the United Kingdom.
As the thirtieth anniversary of the war approached, Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner vowed that her nation would reclaim Las Islas Malvinas, as the Falklands are called in Argentina. She stated that “[i]n the twenty-first century [Britain] continues to be a crude colonial power in decline.” She branded British Prime Minister David Cameron “arrogant” and said his defense in Parliament of the right of the people of the Falklands to self-determination was an expression of “mediocrity and stupidity.”
This article was originally published in the Diplomat, February 15, 2012.
Argentina’s foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, claims that Cameron’s defense of the Falklands sovereignty “is perhaps the last refuge of a declining power.” Argentine officials have labeled Prince William—aka Flight Lieutenant Wales, who is currently piloting a Royal Air Force rescue helicopter in the Falklands—a “conquistador.”
In a diplomatic offensive, Kirchner persuaded Argentina’s partners in the Mercosur trade bloc—Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—to ban civilian ships flying the Falklands’ flag from entering their ports. Mercosur members had previously banned British warships on Falklands duty from their ports. In December, the thirty-three-country Community of Latin American and Caribbean States unanimously backed Argentina’s “legitimate rights in the sovereignty dispute” over the Falklands and South Georgia.
In response to the United Kingdom’s dispatch of its newest destroyer, HMS Dauntless, to patrol the South Atlantic, Timerman officially complained to the United Nations Security Council that Britain had “militarized” the region. Given the timing of his complaint, just weeks before the anniversary of Argentina’s invasion of the islands, it can be assumed that Timerman lacks a sense of irony. Argentina now claims that the United Kingdom is using the three thousand residents of the Falklands as a mere pretense for its desire to maintain a South Atlantic “empire.” In his UN filing, Timerman noted: “It is the last ocean that is controlled by the United Kingdom—Britannia rules only the South Atlantic.”
While it seems unlikely that Argentina would risk another humiliating defeat by invading the Falklands in the near term, the temptation of appealing to nationalism to mask an economic or political crisis, combined with the desire to control what appear to be significant South Atlantic oil reserves, means that another Argentine military adventure cannot be ruled out. There are four key takeaways from the current situation with implications that stretch much further than the issue at hand:
First, military weakness is provocative. Argentina ramped up its aggressive rhetoric and diplomatic efforts to reclaim the Falklands only after Prime Minister Cameron announced massive cuts to the Royal Navy and British ground forces. The decommissioning last December of the United Kingdom’s sole remaining aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, well before its service life ended, and the sale of Britain’s fifty G-9 Sea Harrier fighter jets to the US Marine Corps, seems to have emboldened the Argentines. In 1982, the Royal Navy had approximately ninety warships from which it could assemble a task force. Today it has thirty. Indeed, most experts believe that while it would be very difficult for the Argentine