The event was remarkable for the rare quality of the three presenters, guests from the USA bringing a ‘dissident’ perspective on the unfolding clash with Russia: its causes and how it might lead to thermonuclear war if world leaders do not come to their senses. And it was remarkable for the quality of the 25 VIP panelists from among European parliamentarians, diplomats and think tank officers whose comments and questions set out in the second of the two-part video series demonstrated the breadth of the concerns over possible scenarios for the clash of wills over Ukraine.

The key speakers were John Mearsheimer, Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is America’s leading exponent of the Realpolitik school in International Relations studies. He established his reputation for dealing with taboo subjects in 2007 when he co-authored a scholarly work on the Israeli Lobby and U.S. policies towards the Middle East. In September 2014 his article on “Why the West is to Blame” for the current Ukraine crisis was published in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine, touching off a fierce debate in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Professor emeritus of Princeton and New York Universities Stephen Cohen is one of America’s leading historians of modern Russia. He is the author of the classic biography of Nikolai Bukharin and has published widely read works on the returnees from Stalin’s Gulag, as well as critical historiographical books on the blind spots of American studies of Russia. In the past year, his activities as public intellectual writing and speaking out about the Ukraine crisis, attempting to understand what drives the Kremlin, have made him a key target for supporters of the Washington narrative who have portrayed him as an ‘apologist for Putin’ in attacks of a McCarthy-ite nature.

For more than 20 years, Katrina Vanden Heuvel has been editor-publisher of the New York-based magazine of commentary The Nation, which is this year celebrating its 150th anniversary. In the 1950s, The Nation was already an outspoken critic of U.S. military adventures abroad in the then gathering storm over Viet Nam. The magazine also fought against McCarthyism in U.S. society. Under Vanden Heuvel’s stewardship it is today fighting the same fight. Vanden Heuvel is a close watcher of the Progressive Left political movement in the USA and her speech focuses on how it has lost its way, becoming intermeshed with Liberal Interventionism.

The VIP panelists in the Round Table discussion who appear in the video Part Two include 5 Members of the European Parliament representing groups of parties from the Left, Center and Right. The Brussels diplomatic corps sent two ambassadors and several high officers from the missions of the Philippines, Russia, Israel and others, who also took the floor. A senior member from the Strategy Group within the EU External Action Service took the microphone, as did the director of a Russia-related think tank based in Brussels. And from among the several senior professors in attendance, Richard Sakwa of the University of Kent also spoke out.

The 2 March Round Table was organized by the American Committee for East West Accord Ltd, a non-profit educational corporation founded in late February in the State of New York with European Coordinator in Brussels.  Its next planned event, on “Germany’s Ostpolitik:   who supports it, where it is headed and what impact it is having on the European Union?” will be held in both Berlin and Brussels in mid-May in partnership with political groupings from across the spectrum in Germany.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2015

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide.

All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

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By Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

I cannot say what gnashing of teeth may have been occasioned in the halls of Foggy Bottom by the appearance in the current issue ofForeign Affairs magazine of an article by John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. However, I bear witness to the rubbing of hands in glee within the small American community of Russia-friendly online media resources. Portals which normally feature short and punchy op-ed pieces have republished Mearsheimer in full on their ‘front pages’, notwithstanding the thousands of words  the author used to set out his thesis on the blindness of the West which provoked our present confrontation with Russia.

It is customary for virtually all readers of political science tracts, whether lay or professional readers, to look first and often only at where the author’s feet are pointed. In this case, it is not merely Mearsheimer’s shoes, but his whole body which is pointed in a direction 180 degrees at variance with US foreign policy on Russia and Ukraine. 

The appearance of Mearsheimer’s article in Foreign Affairs was quite remarkable and damaging to the prevailing wisdom in academe, as in the mass media, that anyone trying to understand the Kremlin’s point of view must be a ‘dupe of Putin’ if not on the payroll of the FSB altogether. No such charge can possibly be made against Mearsheimer, who has no particular interest in US-Russian relations. Moreover, in the article Mearsheimer makes it clear that he is not a believer in Russia’s future. He came to his conclusions about the present crisis for one reason only: he is an exponent of the Realist School in International Relations, an heir to the traditions of Hans Morgenthau, and the policy line from Washington which got us into the imbroglio with Russia comes from the opposite camp, the Wilsonian Idealist, aka the Liberal camp, which he would oppose wherever it is applied.

 In what follows I propose to move up from the bottom line to consider the content of Mearsheimer’s reasoning  so as to better evaluate its limitations as well as where it marks a serious break in the ranks of the American elites. 

But before doing that, I will put his FA article into the context of what appears to be a sharply delineated evolution in the thinking of the magazine’s editorial board on the Ukraine-Russia crisis from February to present. I do this in the belief that FA, as by far the largest circulation professional journal in its field, is a good marker for Establishment thinking.

Let us recall that the very first response to the overthrow of the Yanukovich government and onset of the direct crisis with Russia this past February was shocking flippancy by none other than the magazine’s editor Gideon Rose, in an appearance on the political satire television show The Colbert Report; a link to the show was featured in the magazine’s on line edition on 28 February. Tongue in cheek, Rose told the television audience  that the task ahead was to get the Russians to accept their gold medal count at the recently ended Sochi Olympics as full consolation while the USA bagged Ukraine and raised its country count (http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2014/03/01/foreign-affairs-magazine-as-a-cartoon-strip-the-28-february-1125531.html ). 

As the months rolled on and the confrontation with Russia appeared to assume menacing proportions, the editorial team at Foreign Affairs adopted a more thoughtful tone, stepping back from the nitty gritty of the civil war in Southeast Ukraine and stroking their collective beards in erudite discussion of the philosophical implications of the conflict on the End of History narrative and possible reemergence of geopolitics as a factor to be reckoned with in International Relations theory. As I commented at the time, this was a counting of angels on a pinhead by two members of the journal’s inner circle who are rather closely positioned in the spectrum of Idealism. On the phony debate between G. John Ikenbery and Walter Russell Mead, I wrote at the time (http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2014/05/16/foreign-affairs-magazine-may-june-2014-issue-the-false-deba-1130360.html). Needless to say, the essays in question offered no practical advice on how to deal with the crisis that had now landed on the front page of everyone’s daily newspaper.

It has taken till now, when we have reached what pundits are uniformly agreeing is a New Cold War, for Foreign Affairs magazine to make its precious real estate available to other schools of thought, publishing Mearsheimer’s essay. The good professor has used the opportunity well. He not only goes after the philosophical underpinnings of a policy that has led to a cul-de-sac but gives us a new reading of the factual narrative (i.e., new for mainstream media) of who did what to whom  from the early ‘90s to get us where we are today with Russia. Indeed Mearsheimer gives his readers a narrative that is very close to the one Vladimir Putin first set out in his February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference and has been repeating with ever greater explicitness since.

The essay by Mearsheimer is the main international relations story of the September-October issue, which otherwise is dedicated, very unusually for FA, to domestic US issues. Indeed, the leitmotiv of the issue might be summed up as ‘doctor, heal thyself’ since the issue explored is the decay of US institutions, the critical dysfunctions of American democratic institutions.  Of course, the two themes are not explicitly linked by the editors, who are calling for America to cure its ills so as to better go out and conquer new worlds. And, perversely, the featured author for the major content of the issue is Francis Fukuyama, who those of us with a memory that goes back further than a year or two, the usual journalistic limits, will recall was the author of the seminal work End of History. Fukuyama was the brilliant popularizer of Neoconservative ideology that otherwise is the butt of Mearsheimer’s essay.  And so this issue is rich in ironic flourishes.

Mearsheimer’s argument is essentially mind over matter. Being a man of the cloth, rather than a foreign policy practitioner in Washington, he would have us believe that our politicians are guided by idealistic principles which, in the event, blind them to the nature of the challenge before them. Deeming national interests a relic of the last century, our leaders cannot fathom Putin, cannot fathom the enigma that is Russia, and lead us into confrontations which could have been avoided if they appreciated the logic of Realpolitik the way tenured faculty of the University of Chicago tend to do. A couple of short quotes set out his point with great clarity:

“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.”  Or

“In essence, the two sides have been operating with different play-books. 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.”

All of this sounds rather disingenuous given Mearsheimer’s mention of the smoking guns on the US side along the way to the crisis:  the 5 billion dollars disbursed on democracy promotion in Ukraine by unsavory CIA-controlled organizations including the National Endowment for Democracy and, I might add, Freedom House;  our donut on the Maidan dispenser Victoria Nuland,  who also plotted with Geoffrey Pyatt for replacement of a sitting President in Kiev, as Mearsheimer reminds us.  The cheerleaders of the coup share not merely Neoconservative principles but are actively implementing the Neoconservative program of cutting Russia down to size, if not chopping it up altogether.  I fail to see how Mearsheimer can mention Nuland and omit the fact that her spouse is the leading foreign policy thinker of the Neocons and co-chair of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a plotter of dirty tricks to the detriment of Russia.

And Mearsheimer gives us not just pin pricks, He lists the substantial actions by the US side that set the stage for the present confrontation and have added fuel to the fire as it developed. These include the whole issue of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders in Ukraine and Georgia, American designs on the Sevastopol port, American deployment of a missile shield in Eastern Europe.  What we have here are actions bristling with hard power. There are the dotted lines which Mearsheimer declines to connect.

His reticence is all the more perplexing given that John Mearsheimer made his name precisely as an iconoclast who broke taboos and told us clearly what many saw but refused to say aloud. I am alluding to his work The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, written jointly with Stephan Walt.  To anyone with eyes to see, it is clear that a still more powerful anti-Russian lobby is behind U.S. foreign policy towards Russia these past 20 years. And unlike the privately funded Israel lobby, this one feeds off of the U.S. treasury.

When asked about this important lacuna in his essay, Professor Mearsheimer pleaded lack of space to go into these matters. Let us hope that he finds the time to write a book on the subject, and to do so quickly enough to influence the next presidential electoral cycle.

As I mentioned above, in his essay Mearsheimer deals not only with political philosophy but also gives us a road map to exit the present confrontation.  Curiously, his recommendation is precisely what Henry Kissinger was urging at the start of the year. And it is one that even Russian detractor Zbigniew Brzezinski had favored back then:  to give Ukraine the status of a neutral buffer state enjoying good commercial and political relations with both the European Community and Russia, with the NATO card taken off the table once and for all.

.Mearsheimer advocates a neutral Ukraine in the belief that the alternative outcomes will be much worse for the West, knowing that no one is going to go to war to keep Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence.  And he reserves the hope that by accommodating Russia’s security interests the way will remain open for cooperation on the several global hotspots including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and….controlling the rise of China.

In sum, the publication of John Mearsheimer’s article by FAmagazine marks a turning point in coverage of the crisis by the intellectual leaders of the American foreign policy establishment. It comes in sync with the just launched initiative of the Carnegie Corporation in New York to present a platform for academic dialogue on the nature of the Putin regime, on possibilities for reducing tensions.

But all of this is very little and very late. Most commentators agree that we have entered a New Cold War. What no one wants to remember is that the original Cold War was accompanied by a permanent existential fear of nuclear Armageddon. However, the risks are there. The United States and Russia still jointly account for 90% of all nuclear warheads in the world. The possibility of miscalculation between sides that are now very wary of one another after months, indeed years of rancorous name calling is as high as at any time in the 40 years that followed the onset of the first Cold War.  It is time to recognize that sad fact and redraw our foreign policy priorities accordingly.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2014
      
G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide.

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The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin

By John J. Mearsheimer

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.

© John J. Mearsheimer
Article is published with permission from John J. Mearsheimer

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