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 is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor
of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
