March 18, 2015
"ICH"
- "CFR"
-
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.
U.S. and European
leaders blundered in attempting to turn
Ukraine into a Western stronghold on
Russia’s border.
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
Imagine the American
outrage if China built an impressive
military alliance and tried to include
Canada and Mexico.
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.”
The United States and
its allies should abandon their plan to
westernize Ukraine and instead aim to
make it a neutral buffer.
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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