Ohio Wesleyan Professor Shares Russia-Ukraine Insights with National Media
Updated: February 11, 2015Hear Sean Kay’s “All Sides with Ann Fisher” interview.
Military Escalation ‘Not Worth the Potential Dangers’ at This Time, Sean Kay, Ph.D., Says
Location of Ukraine (green) with disputed territory (light green). (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Sean Kay, Ph.D.
DELAWARE, Ohio – Ohio Wesleyan University professor Sean Kay is being quoted in media outlets ranging from CNN and the Washington Post, to The Daily Beast and Bloomberg News this week for his insights regarding a much-discussed increase in military aid to Ukraine.
Kay, a global security expert, calls any escalation “a risky gamble at this time, not worth the potential dangers.” He will continue to discuss the issue Feb. 10 on the NPR-affiliated talk show, “All Sides with Ann Fisher.” Kay, Ph.D., is expected to be on-air from 10:20 a.m. to 11 a.m. “All Sides” is broadcast on 89.7 FM and archived online afterward for on-demand listening.
His thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine situation were first published Feb. 3 in “War on the Rocks,” an online news source that defines itself a “platform for analysis, commentary, debate and multimedia content on foreign policy and national security issues through a realist lens.”
In that commentary, “The Escalation Advocates are Wrong on Ukraine,” Kay writes: “The United States and Europe hold overwhelming political, economic, and military advantages over Russia. Russia, in fact, grows weaker by the day – as made evident by the recent S&P downgrade of Russian credit to ‘junk’ level. Russia is fundamentally weak in terms of its unsustainable long-term force projection and the erosion of its economy.”
He concludes by stating: “Advocates of escalation in Ukraine are sustaining a respectable and logical extension of a worldview that governed the last two decades of American policy towards Europe, which culminated in the false promises of NATO’s 2008 declaration that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join NATO. That worldview, however, ran into the ditch in eastern Ukraine last March.
“Military escalation at this time would entangle America in a conflict adjacent to a declining, paranoid, and nuclear-armed Russia. What Russia has done in eastern Ukraine is unacceptable and the Russian people will eventually look back and wonder what their ‘leadership’ was thinking. Now, however, is not the time to risk making a bad situation even worse by launching America onto a slippery slope of dangerous military escalation.”
He later told CNN’s Stephen Collinson: “The moment Putin thinks this weaponry is coming in, he could dramatically escalate things in a very dangerous way to take advantage of the current window.”
Kay, a politics and government professor at Ohio Wesleyan, is the author of several books including “America’s Search for Security: The Triumph of Idealism and the Return of Realism” and “Global Security in the Twenty-First Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace.”
He also serves as director of the Arneson Institute for Practical Politics and Public Affairs and as chair of the International Studies Program. He is a Mershon Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University and a fellow in foreign policy and national security at the Eisenhower Institute in Washington, D.C.
Founded in 1842, Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the nation’s premier liberal arts universities. Located in Delaware, Ohio, the private university offers 86 undergraduate majors and competes in 23 NCAA Division III varsity sports. Ohio Wesleyan combines a challenging, internationally focused curriculum with off-campus learning and leadership opportunities to connect classroom theory with real-world experience. OWU’s 1,750 students represent 46 U.S. states and territories and 43 countries. Ohio Wesleyan is featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” listed on the latest President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction, and included in the U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review “best colleges” lists. Learn more at www.owu.edu.