Threats to run for a third term notwithstanding, Mr. Trump is a lame-duck president, which makes him more prone to take rash actions on the international stage. As his own threats to take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal suggest, he is sympathetic to the idea of big countries taking over smaller ones, and he is behaving far more erratically in the realm of foreign affairs than he did in his first term. That he might become the first American president to confer legitimacy on the annexation of another country’s territory is a real, and terrifying, possibility.
The war in Ukraine is not, as another British prime minister once said about a European territorial dispute that quickly escalated into the most destructive conflict the world has ever seen, just a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Assenting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea would have global consequences.
Other dictatorships, having witnessed the world’s leading democracy endorse such a flagrant violation of the most basic principle governing the relationship among sovereign states, would feel emboldened to do the same. “Giving Russia de jure recognition of occupied territories would send the world the signal: Go ahead, invade a sovereign country, change its borders; it’s all good,” the former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves told me. If the United States were to recognize Crimea as Russian, it would join the august company of Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela.
Those who support bestowing an imprimatur of legality upon Russia’s annexation of Crimea contend that, like the territories Russia controls in its other frozen conflicts, the land Ukraine has lost is never coming back. The same, however, was said about the Baltic States. For most of the Cold War, the prospect of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regaining their independence seemed remote, if not fantastic. In 1975, The Times reported that, while American officials doubted that “formal recognition” of the Soviet occupations would “come soon,” they believed it was “inevitable.”
Yet the United States and its allies persisted in refusing to accept the subjugation of the Baltic States, and when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, they were liberated. Today, they are members of the European Union and NATO with consolidated democracies, market economies and increasingly confident places on the world stage.
