According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the
Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian
President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a
long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go
after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In
this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014
merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize
part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its
European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of
the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to
move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same
time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy
movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were
critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly
opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that
they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned
into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s
democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a
“coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared
would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it
abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise.
After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its
core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly.
Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only
because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to
believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first
century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal
principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The
crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore
it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting
to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the
consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to
continue this misbegotten policy.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT
As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders
preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an
arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and
their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that
Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration
evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to
expand.
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and
brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in
2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and
Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing
campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris
Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes
right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst
out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to
derail NATO’s eastward movement -- which, at any rate, did not look so
threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save
for the tiny Baltic countries.
Then NATO began looking further east. At its April
2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and
Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and
Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In
the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the
formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the
aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will
become members of NATO.”
Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a
compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said,
“Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake
which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin
maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct
threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking
with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO,
it would cease to exist.”
Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should
have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent
Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili,
who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the
summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South
Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided -- and out of NATO.
After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists,
Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its
point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal
of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued
marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.
The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008,
it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity
in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not
surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s
interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office,
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a
“sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU
expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.
The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from
Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in
Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding
pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December
2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to
help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S.
government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit
foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in
Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the
biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in
February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped
up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s
democratic institutions.
When Russian leaders look at Western social
engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such
fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The
Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of
the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added:
“Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not
just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
CREATING A CRISIS
The West’s triple package of policies -- NATO
enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion -- added fuel to a fire
waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a
major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a
$15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to
antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months
and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters.
Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February
21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to
stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and
Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was
pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking
members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.
Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not
yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and
Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations,
and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych’s
toppling that it was “a day for the history books.” As a leaked telephone
recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian
politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government,
which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a
role in Yanukovych’s ouster.
For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the
West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take
Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia. The
task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already
stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made
for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its
population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.
Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new
government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow,
making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he
would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep. Toward that
end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian
separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war.
He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if
the government cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price
of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past
exports. Putin is playing hardball.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge
expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany
all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of
enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a
military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into
Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped
install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it
should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers
are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all,
the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military
forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine
the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and
tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have
told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO
expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn
those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war
also made crystal clear.
Officials from the United States and its European
allies contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow
should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to
continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia, the
alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new member
states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia Council in an
effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia, the United States announced
in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in
European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or Polish territory.
But none of these measures worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to
NATO enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians,
not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.
To understand why the West, especially the United
States, failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork
for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when the
Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a
variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no consensus on
what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the United States and their
relatives, for example, strongly supported expansion, because they wanted NATO
to protect such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few realists also favored
the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be contained.
But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief
that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional
economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement
would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The
U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview,
shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I
think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect
their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason
for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”
Most liberals, on the other hand, favored
enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They
believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed
international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the
realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the
“indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was
also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The
aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe.
And so the United States and its allies sought to
promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic
interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions.
Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty
convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given
the EU’s past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to
the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal
order could maintain peace in Europe.
So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the
discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that
even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion
faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma
among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a
speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that
motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an
older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s
response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t
in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading
another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”
In essence, the two sides have been operating with
different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting
according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been
adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the
United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.
BLAME GAME
In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that
NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion
would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue,
most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine
predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in
another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence
supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a
first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging
him on foreign policy.
Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin
regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by
expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having
taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer
Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave
aggressively toward other countries in Russia’s neighborhood. For some in this
camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal
with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and
Ukraine to contain Russia before it dominates its neighbors and threatens
western Europe.
This argument falls apart on close inspection. If
Putin were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions
would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is virtually
no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in
Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion
were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use military force.
Putin’s actions in Crimea took them by complete surprise and appear to have
been a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin
said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his mind.
Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the
capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire
country. Roughly 15 million people -- one-third of Ukraine’s population -- live
between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the Russian border.
An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would
surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore, Russia’s mediocre army, which
shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of
pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly
occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the
resulting sanctions.
But even if Russia did boast a powerful military
machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to
successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S.
experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the
Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually
end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like
swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not
offensive.
A WAY OUT
Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that
Putin’s behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is
unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their
existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression.
Although Kerry has maintained that “all options are on the table,” neither the
United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine.
The West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending
its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States
and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting
mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some
high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened
to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the
Russian economy.
Such measures will have little effect. Harsh
sanctions are likely off the table anyway; western European countries,
especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might
retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if the
United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would
probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that countries will
absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic
interests. There is no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this
rule.
Western leaders have also clung to the provocative
policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice
President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, “This is a
second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange
Revolution.” John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when,
that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at
improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government.
The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern
Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European
Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, “We have a debt, a duty
of solidarity with that country, and we will work to have them as close as
possible to us.” And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed the
economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully rejected seven months earlier.
Also in June, at a meeting of NATO members’ foreign ministers, it was agreed
that the alliance would remain open to new members, although the foreign
ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by name. “No third country has a
veto over NATO enlargement,” announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s
secretary-general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various
measures to improve Ukraine’s military capabilities in such areas as command
and control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally
recoiled at these actions; the West’s response to the crisis will only make a
bad situation worse.
There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however
-- although it would require the West to think about the country in a
fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon their
plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between
NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Western
leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they
cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. This would not mean that a future
Ukrainian government would have to be pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the
contrary, the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the
Russian nor the Western camp.
To achieve this end, the United States and its allies
should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine. The
West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded
jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United
States -- a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in having a
prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank. And the West should
considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to
put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S.
and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights,
especially the language rights of its Russian speakers.
Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at
this late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world. There
would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a misguided
strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries are likely to
respect a state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a policy
that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That option is clearly open to
the United States.
One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right
to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to
prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to
think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes
right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as
self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls
with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a military alliance with
the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United States certainly did not think
so, and the Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West. It is
in Ukraine’s interest to understand these facts of life and tread carefully
when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.
Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and
believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the
fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to
reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to accommodate
Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if
its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is
not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian
people.
Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO
handled relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia
constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time -- and that
the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present policy. But this
viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only get
weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power, moreover, it would still
make no sense to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the
United States and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core
strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its
aid has proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO
member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has expanded
in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its
new security guarantees, but Russia’s recent power play shows that granting
Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and the West on a collision course.
Sticking with the current policy would also
complicate Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States
needs Russia’s assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through
Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize the
situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these
issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who pulled Obama’s
chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under which Syria agreed to
relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that
Obama had threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia’s help
containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow
and Beijing closer together.
The United States and its European allies now face a
choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate
hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process -- a scenario in
which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to
create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and
allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all
sides would win.
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