The Best Article I’ve Read on Ukraine Recently
[Editor’s Note: This long-form article — by Michael A. Reynolds, asssociate professor of Near Eastern studies and co-director of the Program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy at Princeton University — is well worth your time, especailly if you are still under the false impression that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Don]
EXCERPTS:
How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine
By Michael A. Reynolds
[…]
The push to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance to Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the second term of Bill Clinton’s presidency sparked fierce debate among foreign policy experts. The most notable and prescient critic was George Kennan, who warned in a 1997 New York Times article that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” He further predicted that expansion would trigger a backlash from Moscow, and when it did, proponents would obtusely dismiss it by saying, “that is how the Russians are.” Kennan, a former ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union and the architect of the policy of containment that won the Cold War, was widely regarded as one of America’s greatest diplomats and authorities on Russia. As even proponents of expansion grudgingly concede, Kennan’s unequivocal condemnation of NATO expansion should carry some weight.
Kennan was no voice in the wilderness. In fact, he was expressing the expert consensus. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s point man on expanding NATO, lamented that virtually everyone he knew with expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe opposed it. Standing with Kennan against NATO expansion was a coalition of America’s best foreign policy minds and most experienced hands. Their numbers included noted anti-Soviet hardliners from the Republican Party such as Fred Ikle and Paul Nitze as well as foreign policy luminaries among the Democrats such as Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Bradley. Reagan’s adviser on Eastern European and Soviet affairs, Harvard historian Richard Pipes—known for his deep pessimism about Russia’s political culture—not only inveighed against NATO expansion as unnecessary and unwise, but even regarded the alliance as an anachronism that should be dissolved. Moreover, in 1997, the debate over NATO expansion concerned Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, with perhaps Romania and Slovenia to follow. Neither Ukrainian nor Georgian membership was on the table. Nonetheless, the weight of expert opinion even then deemed NATO expansion a folly.
[…]
Almost as if it feared anyone might wonder whether it bore any responsibility for the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted on affixing the qualifier “unprovoked” to references to Russia’s invasion. Yet even Robert Gates—a self-described hardliner on Russia with a record to prove it—had called Washington’s effort to bring Ukraine into NATO as “an especially monumental provocation.”
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America’s current predicament, where it finds itself one step away from becoming a direct combatant against a rival nuclear power in war that involves neither territory nor principles that are vital, is puzzling. The experience of the Cold War offers instructive precedents on how to manage the crisis with Russia. There is also a rich literature on the myriad structural shortcomings, weaknesses, and irresolvable dilemmas of Putin’s authoritarian Russia, some of which are even more acute than those that brought down the Soviet Union. Confronting Russia on territory fairly described as sacred to it in terms of both religious (Kievan Rus) and secular (Tsarist and World War II) history was, paradoxically, perhaps the best way to give Putin’s regime a new lease on life.
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has persuaded itself that expanding US power in Eurasia is akin to an act of altruism. It has clung to this belief even as it violated the democratic principles and values it was professing to promote by engineering Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership despite the Ukrainian public’s opposition; by pretending Georgia had not initiated war in 2008; and by abetting the mass upheaval that led to violence and culminated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s appallingly corrupt but democratically elected government in 2014.
Convincing themselves that any who objected were anti-democratic and therefore illegitimate and driven solely by base motives, Washington policymakers … pursued policies and used a language of will and power that cast the world as an arena of competition—some countries as prizes to be won, others as pivots to control, and still others as regimes to be countered. This strategic and moral confusion in foreign policy bred a combination of overconfidence and breathtaking ineptness that has secured not primacy but disaster for America and its allies and partners.
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