The EU has hit out after it was effectively excluded from security talks between Russia and the US. The fate of the world may have once been decided in Western European capitals, but now it seems to be out of their hands.
However, it seems increasingly clear that the bloc only has itself to blame for the fact its members no longer have a seat at the top table, leaving them the subject of discussions, rather than the driver of them.
In advance of the talks last week, Washington rhetorically agreed that European security cannot be decided over the heads of the EU and Ukraine, before then simply going ahead with the bilateral US-Russia format. Simply put, Washington cannot do diplomacy with Eurocrats in the room.
The first reason is that the credibility of US security guarantees is juxtaposed with compromise. In 1962, President Kennedy and the Soviet Union reached an agreement to resolve the Cuban missile crisis, which stipulated that the US would remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviet Union removing its missiles from Cuba. Instead of celebrating the diplomatic efforts that prevented nuclear war, the US conditioned the agreement on it being kept a secret. Kennedy lied to the US public and its foreign allies. For two decades, the US public believed that the crisis had been solved by confronting Moscow in an uncompromising stance, which made the Soviets back down and grant victory to the US.
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