Ukraine crisis - Neutrality may become a real issue

Just over 50 years ago, as the confrontation between the US and Russia over Soviet plans to base nuclear missiles in Cuba moved ever closer to the kind of catastrophe that threatens world stability and peace, or whatever the current version of that is, US President John F Kennedy ordered that all senior American military commanders read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and seminal history of the first months of the First World War.

Kennedy wanted his commanders to understand the almost irreversible threat posed by the forceful process of escalation in conflict. He wanted them to understand that confrontation builds a momentum of its own and that it can almost assume a persona, that it can become the enemy of rational thought or the kind of intervention and pause that avert war.

We are not yet at that point over the Ukraine but perceptive book dealers may have already reordered copies of one of Tuchman’s great, ever more relevant histories. It would be reassuring, too, to imagine that at least some of the main players in the growing conflict have learnt the lessons from a century ago and so effectively recorded by Tuchman.

Yesterday’s attempted assassination of Gennady Kernes, the pro-Russian mayor of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, and the takeover of administrative building in Kostyantynivka by gunmen wearing uniforms without identifiable insignia — they raised the flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic — all point in the wrong direction.

So too do US and European plans to impose fresh sanctions on Russian individuals and companies. The widely held belief in the West, that Moscow supports, at least tacitly, separatist gunmen who have occupied official buildings across eastern Ukraine helps generate the momentum Kennedy so feared half a century ago.

That separatists continue to hold seven Western military observers hostage adds to it. That Moscow seems at least indifferent to sanctions overshadows nearly all other factors though, in time, their ability to control — or not — various factions in Ukraine may prove the decisive issue of the conflict.

This all raises a series of questions for Ireland, ones we would do well to consider. The most immediate is energy security and what it might mean to be very much the last stop on the European network of oil and gas supply lines should Russia block gas and oil supplies to continental Europe.

Another question is how any EU involvement might impact on our much-celebrated if questionable neutrality. During the last world war — The Emergency — we were a hurler on the ditch, aloof and neutral albeit on the part of the Allies. It is probably foolish to imagine that option still exists. Like our economic independence, it now seems a quaint memento from an earlier time. We are too deeply involved in, and dependent on, the European project to expect to look on should ‘The Emergency II’ unfold around us.

This is at the moment, thankfully, a theoretical question, but as European elections approach, it seems entirely appropriate to ask all of those who would represent us in the ever more powerful European parliament what their clear position on the issue is.

Asking that obvious and pressing question is the very least Tuchman — and Kennedy — would expect of us.