1994 Budapest Memorandum

[ionelv]

There are a lot of people that say that US and UK reneged on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and did not defend Ukraine after 2014. Let me point out why that memorandum was never worth more than the paper it was printed on (despite the flashy signatures):
1. The US President can sign treaties (or any type of foreign-related acts) but they are worthless unless the US Senate countersigns them (which of course never happened and AFAIK was not even brought up for debate/vote). It might also matter to some that in Dec 1994 when Clinton signed that memorandum, the Nov 1994 US Senate elections have already flipped the chamber to the GOP, party which was already on a crusade to block everything Clinton tried to do, going as far as to impeach him. Yes, the Dems could have invoked a Senate lame duck session before the Jan 1995 actual seat changes and tried to ram through a ratification of the memorandum, but that would have been highly unlikely to succeed given the filibuster rule and even less likely on such a non-issue from the POV of American politics. So, the US/Clinton assurance was effectively DOA.
2. I suspect that the UK prime minister has a similar arrangement given that the UK Parliament votes on everything consequential, especially something as important as starting a war with Russia.
3. The Ukrainian counter signatories of that memorandum were either stupid, duplicitous or both. To not know the above and dick around with Russia on Crimea/Sevastopol and their transit gas pipelines and contracts, is and has proved nearly suicidal.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Maybe it is because I was a baby at the time, but I thought there was some genuine optimism about nuclear disarm am in the 90s. Was that not the case?

[ionelv]

I believe there was first SALT (which failed by mid 80s) and then START in the early 90s (between USSR and USA). As to convincing former USSR republics to give up their arsenal in the mid 90s (Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus), that was both Russia and USA's doing who feared nuclear proliferation and convinced those 3 new countries to peacefully give their nukes to Russia (which was the only one that had the launch codes anyway). To argue that Ukraine could have fared better post-2014 if they kept the nukes is a fool's errand and barely a deterrent in a conventional war. https://opencanada.org/the-myth-of-ukraines-nuclear-deterrent/