Partitioning a country into its parts because ethnic and social differences make it difficult for them to work together is a distasteful but not a bad resolution to the problem and so not a failure but a creative way to solve international relations. The partition of Poland in the late 18th century put up a bd precedent because Poland got nothing from it while Prussia, Russia and Austria gobbled up its pieces, the nation not restored for another hundred years when, by that time, Poland as a civilization had industrialized and developed a domestic, Polish, literary culture, whose roots went back to the time of the scientific revolution. Think instead of more successful partitions. Slovakia and thee Czech Republic separated more or less amicably in the nineties and the largest and historically most significant partition was between India and pakistan, however many people died during the separation, Both are better off following their independent entities, Pakistan as authoritarian and turned west so as to dominate Afghanistan, while India has flourished asa democratically oriented and industrious society with Hindu domination. You cannot say it would have been better off if Hindus and Muslims had tried to go it together rather than each alone in the years since independence in 1947.
In fact, the two great events that shaped the United States can best be understood as a successful and an unsuccessful partition. Unlike the French and English revolutions, where the opposing sides were not centered in regions, the American revolution was an attempt to partition its American colonies from the homeland because they were far away even though the two were similar in politics and culture. It did not have to be if British politicians were more accommodating to Ben Franklin, the de facto Secretary of State of the colonies. The other and unsuccessful partition was the attempt by the Southern states to separate from the Union. The Southern states were a contiguous area shared by geography, economic and social institutions although putatively also shared with the North in Republican principles. The failure to partition allowed the North to allow the South for a century more in its rural idiocy until the North intervened so as to make it again a single country though Southern politics persist in its long lasting tendency to subvert voting rights and allow police violence. Still a bit partitioned.
Consider now the current situation with Ukraine. After the western takeover of Ukraine in 2014, Obama said to Putin that there would need to set up a peace conference to regularize new borders. But Putin has been unwilling to do so because the West will pull a fast one or because Putin prefers to act unilaterally so as to establish that he is just acquiring what he always had, not on the sufferance of the West, and with some good reason, in that Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years, back to the twelfth century when Russians and Kievians founded it. So, when three days ago, Putin took over the two eastern regions of Ukraine as part of Russia, I thought this a masterstroke in that it meant he was avoiding sending two armies south to encircle Kiev and decapitate the Ukraine government and so set up a full scale war which Putin might quickly win and then sit tight to wait for everyone to calm down. But, instead, Putin was biting only what he could chew: only the part of Ukraine that is heavily backed by Russian speaking and Russian favorable residents, (Jen Psaki said yesterday that an invasion aimed at Kiev from the north has not been ruled out.)
Regarding that invasion from the south as a war rather than recognizing it as a de facto partition was a mistake on Biden’s part, excused only in that he had so clothed himself in the flag of sovereignty and was considering only events of a decade old. But, as usual, Biden has been cagey. He said yesterday the level of sanctions against Putin would depend on what Putin did, and how much further his troops went west. Alittle, fewer sanctions and more a lot of sanctions, knowing that the sanctions would not create severe pain to the Russian regime unless they were well extended. So, in effect, Biden is offering a peace treaty that will not be called that: an agreement on how far into Ukraine the Russians will go so as to partition the east from the rest of a more fully westernized area of Ukraine.
Nothing much happened today. The United States Defense Department insists that Putin is preparing for war but Putin has not invaded the two regions in eastern Ukraine it has declared as independent and so triggered Biden to say tha the invasion had begun and required American and European sanctions. The journalistic commentaries of all these events have been very poor, reduced to saying Putin must be a madman, the only exception Thomas Friedman who noted that here are false moves by the West, particularly the movement of NATO to Russia’s border in 1997, which I thought was wisee even if belligerent because it meant the eastern part of Europe would be second class citizens, subject to Russian influence, rather than part of the European enterprise. I still don;t know why everyone can’t calm down and then draw boundaries and mutual guarantees. That is what peacemaking is about.