Where do the West’s interests really lie?

Of all the challenges the West faces in 2022, does war over Ukraine need to be one of them? Evidently missing from consideration is the fact that the majority of the population in eastern Ukraine and, overwhelmingly, in Crimea is Russian. And they speak Russian, a language as different from Ukrainian as Catalan is from Spanish. Ukraine wants to retain its industrial base in the eastern provinces. But is retention necessary? There’s a case for the people of eastern Ukraine and, especially Crimea, to decide whether they want to remain part of Ukraine, to join Russia or to have their own independent country. Why haven’t the Russians called for a plebiscite? Conflicting sometimes with a commitment to the integrity of established borders, self-determination has been for a hundred years a guiding principle of international relations (except for Kurds and Armenians). There was a modicum of justification for Hitler’s similar interest in the Germans of Sudetenland and Danzig, if not of course for invasion and annexation of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

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