1.) The author barely mentions Ukraine and its own concerns throughout. We get literally no mention of the 2014 protests in Kiev (and the bloody failed government suppressing of them) that led to a new government in Ukraine in the first place.
Instead, we get vague intimations that U.S. stirred up this whole thing by "seeking regime change in Ukraine".
To put it bluntly, that is made-up nonsense. There are actors in this drama other than the U.S. and Russia, "the Blob" and the KGB, Putin and Biden.
Like Ukraine. It's the seventh-largest country in Europe (44 million people). It has aspirations.. It's not crazy to think that there are people of sound mind outside the infamed "groupthink" in U.S. foreign policy who think that's a causal factor here--and that it should be a consideration.
If Obama, of all people, 8 years ago, was scheming to overthrow Russian influence in Kiev and replace it with some aggressive NATO stooge, he cleverly fooled all of us. He famously won re-election as a dove on Russia and promised to be more "flexible" after the election, mocking Romney for pushing back on it.
A more likely interpretation is that Ukraine turned against their then-current government because its population was sick of being bullied, threatened, jerked around, and ultimately shot by them. (And at least mildly tired of Russia for not just backing it, but dictating its policy.)
You can see this is as "grand game" between great powers (that we're playing stupidly) all you want. At some point, actual human beings enter the frame. That's what Ukraine's doing, and what they've done. It seems obtuse to pretend they don't exist.
2.) The author also fails--once--to mention the actual war (not "warmongering") happening, right now. Russia's response to Ukraine's has already been to illegally annex one of Ukraine's provinces, and to wage an undeclared war in another. For eight years.
Over ten thousand people have died in that war. It's happening right now. People can look it up, like on a map, if they want.
War is not something we're "provoking", or that the "U.S. Blob" is provoking. It's currently underway.
If you're seriously looking at this situation and reacting with "Darn those warmongers in the Pentagon, why are they so aggressive and strategically stupid," we have a fundamental disagreement on cause, effect, and basic reality here.
You might as well blame a abused ex-wife's murder on that handsome guy who smiled at her, rather than the deranged ex-husband. It takes agency away from both perpetrator and victim.
Don't get me wrong, I get it. We are in a fraught situation in the U.S. domestically, and the Biden administration cannot afford further political hits. Foreign policy is a depressing, annoying distraction from the things that really matter, like improving the economy, upzoning, and Build Back Better tax structures.
It's convenient to think of the Ukraine situation as a great-power "Blob-provoked" interference with Very Important Matters. That doesn't make it true.
Biden and his advisors, to their credit, understand that. Center-left pundits are going to have to do the same soon, whether they like it or not.
Your points are valid but they're a bit irrelevant to the author's argument. Like, yes, sure, we should take into account the concerns of Ukraine and Ukrainians, but the fact is that Ukrainian neutrality, either de facto or de jure, is the best way to address its concerns. Ukraine joining NATO is essentially impossible because half of its member states don't even want it to join, and it's abundantly clear that the US would never actually send its own troops to defend Ukraine as required by Article 5 of the Treaty. Therefore, what sense does it make to string Ukraine along? This is the unfortunate reality of international relations, and the US urgently needs to recognize this.
Also, to your second point, yes Russia's aggression is wrong, but it's fair to say that that aggression is partially the fault of the US. If the US had never offered Ukraine a promise to join NATO back in 2008, it is entirely possible that we never would have seen the war in Donbas, as Russia wouldn't have felt the need to invade if they knew Ukraine wouldn't join the Western security architecture.
It's easy, and I think your comment falls prey to this, to focus on specifics about Russia and this or that bone of contention, and miss the larger point, which is that Russia today is not an A-list adversary like it was in the Cold War. Putin's Russia just just doesn't have the juice the Soviet Union had in the 40s, 50s and 60s, when it was the global leader of an international ideological movement that posed a serious threat to the United States. No hip young people today put on berets and feel a comradeship with Russia, no young Bernie Sanders types travel to Putin's Russia to admire it, it's just not an ideological rival anymore. It's just another country, and a corrupt, kleptocracy at that, that we have some differences with, and, also, if we don't get so stuck in Cold War thinking that we can't see them, some significant areas of common or parallel interest. Russia is, after all, historically connected to Europe, and and our and the EU's big picture strategy towards Russia should be aimed at fostering and reinforcing that, not pushing Russia away. I think that's the meta point of this piece and others like it that you're missing.
Believe me--I *very* much acknowledge areas of common and parallel interest we have with Russia. I could name many. (Climate, Covid, anti-terrorism, anti-nuclear-weapons, containing China, etc.)
The problem is not that we, as countries, have nothing in common. Nor is it that we're in a battle between rival ideologies. ('Democracy' and 'dictatorship' don't count as that, in my book.)
The problem is that Russia's leaders over the last decade--not its people, necessarily--see reality through a funhouse lens.
A former province wants to go a different route than they. Putin sees that as a personal insult and a threat.
Former provinces seek closer ties with Europe. The Kremlin sees that as the second coming of Hitler.
Hillary Clinton lectures them about 'democracy'. Putin views that as tantamount to a declaration of intent to violently overthrow him. Etc.
We're not dealing with a true geopolitical 'rival' here, nor with a nation we have nothing in common with. But we are dealing with some psychopathy, at high levels of power.
There's only so much you can do to secure a 'deal' with that. At some point, it ceases to be 'realism' to accommodate it.
IMO, we've reached that point, and far exceeded the point where it makes any level of sense to blame ourselves for the impasse.
It may feel better to secure a quick win by giving Putin most of what he wants. But to my mind, it's not 'realistic', any more than his view of the world is. That's my point.
To the extent this is about Putin personally, I think I agree with you. I learned early on in my time as a litigator the importance of sizing up your opposing counsel, and figuring out whether you're dealing with an adversary who is fundamentally professional and rational, albeit with some deeply divergent interests, or someone who gets off on disagreement and manufactured disputes and is only responsive to a hard knock upside the head. It does seem like Putin may be in that second category, unfortunately.
Life is what happens when you are making other plans. We may not want to make Ukraine a priority, but events can occur outside our control. We didn’t want to get into WW1 or WW2, but we were dragged in anyway. Part of the point of the original comment is that others possess agency, including Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of Europe. Sometimes our priorities can be reset by the actions of others. The largest invasion in Europe since WW2 might do that for us.
There have been a number of mostly Soviet/Warsaw Pact and Russian invasions since WW2. East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya (twice), Georgia, Yugoslav civil wars, Crimea, Donbas, … This is one that has a high chance of pulling us in whether we like it or not. To take one case, suppose the Russian forces aren’t as effective against the Ukrainians as everyone expects, and it drags on and turns very bloody? You think we and the rest of Europe can stay out? At some level, it may no longer be up to us whether Putin invades, and then it may be very difficult for us to stay out of it, no matter what the left-wing realists and right-wing authoritarians think.
To compare this to the Soviets or Nazi/Imperial Germany is the problem. It’s no longer in the US interest because Russia does not have the capacity to dominate Europe. This would be even more clear if the EU stopped free riding off of US defense spending. They have multiples of the population and GDP of Russia. I think they can handle it. This is not true in Asia with the rise of China. Our goal is to make sure no one can dominate their region. Russia is not a threat in this sense.
The better comparison is ww1, with lots of formal and semi-formal alliances, revanchist powers, and authoritarian rulers creating foreign military actions to distract from domestic problems.
Slow to the party on this but I would just point out that it has always seemed to me there is a deal to be done that works for both sides and preserves Ukrainian autonomy (in its domestic affairs at least). Ukraine does not need to be a member of NATO to pursue domestic self-determination.
Matt uses the example of Austria in the article, but an even better example is Finland - a country that was formerly part of Russia and shares a large border with it. Finland strove to pursue a resolutely neutral policy in the Cold War to keep the Soviets happy. It was not painless, but at least it was a realistic third way between war and being a Soviet satellite. Finland was able to function as a democracy throughout the Cold War, even if sometimes they had to live with Soviet pressure. But Ukraine will always need to find a way to live with that (whilst the stakes are totally different, it is analogous to saying that the UK can't just pretend the EU doesn't exist!).
Of course such an agreement relies on trusting Russia as a partner - and they have already breached their existing treaty to guarantee Ukrainian security. But ultimately whether that arrangement works or not will be a question of the West's willingness to back up any treaty agreement with force, which is exactly the position we are in now. So it's worth a shot in my opinion.
I agree with this, but the key point is that Putin has to be willing to make a deal on terms we find reasonable. The diplomacy is progressing, but it may fail, in which case we have war.
To this I would say: Moral values practically matter. At some point, they're not an abstraction; they affect people's lives. That's not as divorced from our "interests" as many would like to pretend.
What more important goals could we practically achieve by trading Ukrainian sovereignty? Cooperation on China? A trade deal to get more rare metal access, perhaps?
Those sound like good, practical, "realist" things--until it becomes clear to the rest of the world that the value of autocracies not unilaterally annexing democracies, or carving them up, is a dead letter, because the powers that be have stopped caring about it.
More to the point, they're not just "our" values.
No country or group of countries are going to plan too far ahead if there's a real prospect of a hungry, vengeful militarist in their near abroad swallowing them up, and the rest of the planet just letting it go. Because it's not "realist" to object too strongly to the whims of dictators with lots of guns and strong feelings.
American interests and goals have been furthered by a global environment where such things don't happen anymore, or are vanishingly rare. American interests will be harmed in the long term by a global environment where these things become routine and commonplace again.
To his credit, that's been Biden's calculus in refusing to negotiate Ukraine's autonomy away with Putin. It has the benefit of being both prudent, and the right thing to do.
Another example I've just remembered - Shinzo Abe spent his entire premiership trying to secure a rapprochment with Russia, promising billions in investment from Japan and a better relationship partly in an effort to drive a wedge between Russia and China. The sticking point was a resolution of the "Northern Territories" issue, four islands just north of Hokkaido.
Putin merrily strung Abe along for years, securing all sorts of promises after multiple personal summits, before ultimately dismissing the idea. Abe was humiliated, and the only thing he'd achieved was a wedge had instead been driven between the US and Japan instead. The Nothern Territories issue is deliberately kept unresolved by Russia precisely in order to give Russia leverage over Japan - that this leverage might be worth a lot less to Russia than the economic benefits of a good relationship with their neighbour is something that Russian elites beyond Putin are satisfied with due to their peculiar and narrow definition of sovereignty and the national interest.
If we're going to try to copy the "Let's be nice to Russia to separate it from China" strategy, then we should at least try and see whether anyone else has successfully managed this with Putin. As of yet, it hasn't worked, and there's no reason to suggest it would with Ukraine.
Germany has been playing much the same game since almost the day Merkel ascended to the chancellorship, with similarly little (nothing) to show for it.
It’s in United Russia’s interests to humiliate and betray “the West” at every turn in ways short of causing war, because it has so little else to offer it’s people.
China is a far more rational actor with much more to lose and much deeper roots at home, at least for now.
This presents the west as the real aggressor which i think is naive bordering on delusional. It also presents a lot of Russian statements at face value.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing military operations in the Donbas are a hostile act, and contravene signed agreements between the US and Russia.
Russia did not invade Ukraine because of Nato expansion, but because of its European association agreement. Russia doesn't fear Nato troops, it fears a successful and prosperous small-l liberal democratic Rus' successor state.
The question is who should deal with that? My answer Germany and the EU. The US has no interest in Crimea. I don’t think we have an interest in NATO which Matt clearly believes but doesn’t come out and say. All the arguments here are Russia is mean and being unfair. True, the response is, it isn’t worth our time and treasure to deal with it. Tell me why it matters?
General European peace matters to the US because every time it falls apart, we have to come in and clean it up. We created NATO to keep the peace and it has largely worked for the past 70 years. The Soviets had to invade East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and lean on Poland to keep their empire and puppet states together. We didn't, and midwife the EU and general European prosperity. Think how much better life is for the average Pole now compared to life in the 30s, 40s, or 70s. If that fails and the Europeans and Russians screw it up, like they have repeatedly done over the past 100+ years, we'll get sucked in again. Best to prevent the war in the first place.
I think you are looking at this with a 1950s mindset. Europe is aging. It’s powers are balanced. It’s importance to us and the world is diminished. I’m saying focus where the threat is.
"Best to prevent the war in the first place." Exactly--so how do we do this? Is agreeing to Ukrainian neutrality, and perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of a Russian sphere of influence over Ukraine, a way to do this? Is threatening economic sanctions on Russia a way to do this (and how credible and damaging would those sanctions actually be?)? Is arming Ukraine now a way to do this, or does it make a Russian invasion and war more likely?
I don’t know and you don’t either, because you don’t know what Putin is going to do. That’s the point, the situation is unstable, and it’s that way because Putin likes it that way.
A lot of arguments like this proceed from a "it's not about morals it's about raw power" critique, but none of us here are world leaders, simply trying to maximize the sheer power of our respective states. Most of us are mere bystanders, or perhaps low level functionaries. And given our likelihood here of living in liberal democracies, with all of our talk of liberal values and human rights, most of us are proceeding from a sincere, albeit sometimes naïve or ignorant, desire to see the moral actions taken. And resultingly, most of us aren't going to look at foreign policy conflicts devoid of morality, as a simple game to maximize (in this case) US power, but guided by this sense of morality, of right and wrong.
It's for this reason I suspect that a lot of people here are say, skeptical of US foreign policy in the Middle East in the last couple of decades in particular, or some of the Cold War overreach that led the US to partner with unsavory actors. You cannot simply tell us to ignore morality and focus only on power, since I don't believe anyone here actually looks at the world in such a cold, sociopathic fashion. We're not diehard nationalists who side with our nations uniformly, regardless of any possible transgressions our nation may have done. And we expect better than that of our leaders, and our countries
You have to include some level of morality in your analysis though. I mean, if we don't use any moralizing- why can't the US invade Canada or Mexico, say, and just seize their natural resources? Why can't we just annex Greenland? Why not start invading random LatAm countries? I was firmly anti-Iraq war decades ago, specifically on moral grounds.
I think my overall point is that the piece from yesterday is too black-and-white, and that we have options to punish Russia for a Ukraine invasion that are short of military force, and that it's actually in our interests to look strong to them (while pushing for more rapprochement in the longer term)
I think Lee has a very different view of what Putin's project is than I do. I think Putin has made it quite clear that he is not interested in a neutral Ukraine. He is interested in a Ukraine that is reintegrated into a Russian empire, at least to the extent that Belarus is now. In the Budapest Memorandum (19940, Russia once before signed onto a joint guarantee of Ukrainian independence, in exchange for Ukraine turning in its Soviet era nukes. Look what came of that.
Yeah this article is almost laughable in that it ignores what Putin is actually doing in the real world. The idea that we can strike some grand bargain with the guy that guarantees Ukrainian independence is folly.
Nominal independence might be OK. Remember, even under the Soviet Union, Ukraine kept a separate seat at the UN. What Putin most wants is a guarantee of a securely illiberal government in Kiev and a right to intervene if necessary to thwart any drift toward liberal democracy. Kazakhstan illustrates a degree of independence that is tolerable.
There's a strain of let's adopt a more realist foreign policy in this article, but it's not actually realist in that it focuses a lot on rhetoric and ends up adopting an all or nothing rhetoric that invokes American soldiers dying in Ukraine. That's not actually on the table in this instance. NATO does not admit countries with territorial disputes, but officially declaring that it would never admit Ukraine just gives Putin a domestic and international propaganda win for... practically nothing because Putin already knows this which is part of why he invaded part of it in the first place. Relatedly, Putin lacks credible commitment mechanisms to credibly promise to not do this all again in a year or two. This is key problem in international relations, you might want to make a deal but you lack a credible commitment mechanism to do so.
What is on the table is selling more arms to Ukraine and greater economic sanctions. If Putin knows there is a significant cost to invading other countries, he won't invade other countries. He correctly perceived that there would not be significant cost for annexing Crimea and so he did it. The higher the perceived cost to further invading Ukraine, the less likely he is to do so. The difficulty is making a credible commitment given that there are negative consequences to actually having to follow through vs. simply deterring with a credible threat you don't end up having to carry out because it's credible that you would.
Selling additional arms to Ukraine is a low cost way to increase the price to Russia of an invasion of the rest of Ukraine. The risk is that Putin decides to invade now before the arms arrive or before Ukraine can learn how to effectively use new weapons systems. Again, this comes back to is there a credible commitment of economic sanctions if he launches an invasion? The author calls into question whether this is in US interests, but cutting off Europe's supply of Russian gas through sanctions is of relatively little consequence to the US so while Europe might not be able to credibly promise this the US could under a more hawkish foreign policy if it were in its interest to do.
There is a realist reason why the US provides wide security guarantees: to prevent nuclear proliferation. This is the deal with the US nuclear umbrella: the US will provide a nuclear security guarantee and in exchange the country will not develop nuclear weapons. The real reason US troops are stationed all over the world is to make these guarantees more credible (because they are not completely credible particularly without dead American soldiers) to avoid nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. Policies of containment run a short term risk on the view that in the long run there will overall be less risk to the US of nuclear war if Russia is contained within its own borders vs. if other countries feel they must develop the bomb to provide credible deterrence. Wherever you come down on the best strategy for the US, this is what's at stake for the US, not Ukraine's sovereignty.
Selling arms to the Ukraine is fine, but the Ukraine cannot afford to buy enough arms to resist a determined invasion . Russia’s GDP is over 9 times Ukraine’s and it’s population is over three times as large.
But is that actually worth the price to Russia? Do they really have the will to maintain a bloody occupation? And for what? What Putin wants is to boost his domestic popularity so that he can maintain power in Russia. That might be served by another quick invasion of some borderland if there are limited economic sanctions in response, but it is not served by a prolonged war of occupation or if there are severe economic sanctions in response. The point here is just a comparative static: a better armed Ukraine is more costly to invade and occupy which makes the benefit to a full scale invasion lower.
This argument doesn't stack up. There are several things wrong here - it's a mistake to draw conclusions about how to handle foreign policy in Europe directly from domestic party politics; Western policy is clearly capable of trade-offs in the region; and it sees the solution as simple because it sees the problem through a binary Russia/US lens rather than the correct interplay of olibgations, relationships, and behaviour between Russia, Ukraine, the EU, Turkey, and the US.
First, to the extent whatever Tucker Carlson or Brookings have to say about this issue is relevant, it is not that there are truthtellers on Ukraine in each US political party, but rather as an indication that there is no 'Blob' position on Ukraine. For instance, Brookings, the premier liberal establishment thinktank, has nevered miss an opportunity to call for rapprochment with Russia, and has argued for throwing Ukraine under the bus since Maidan.
Tucker and Brookings are strange bedfellows, because there is not a consensus in US/Western politics on Ukraine policy, despite the clarity of international law and the post-invasion consensus in Ukraine on a pro-Western position. If there is a foreign policy blob in this area, it is among the "Russia experts" (and pro-Russian politicians in Austria, Germany, Italy, France etc) who believe that Russia's behaviour can be controlled by the West if only we do whatever Russia says it wants from us. Even if you want a better relationship with Russia, this is naive and will fail as previous "resets" have, because the competitive relationship emerges from deep beliefs about sovereignty and interests among Russian elites that they are prepared to pay a high price to pursue.
Second, the West has within the past year shown at least twice that it does think about the area in terms of trade-offs. Nary a peep was heard about either the protests in Kazakhstan earlier this month (!) or Armenia's crushing defeat in the Second Karabakh War last year despite the 2018 revolution that had brought a pro-Western president to power in Yerevan. Aside from perfunctory meetings with Tsikhanouskaya, Belarus' fake election has dropped off the agenda now that Lukashenko has reasserted control.
The reason why the West has stuck up for Ukraine is that the trade-offs are worth it. Ukraine is big, democratic, pro-Western, has a capable military and a clear medium-term path to closer integration with the European legal order and economy. Allowing Russia to use the threat of another invasion to spike Ukraine's economic and political reforms because they are too successful would bake-in instability to the Russia-West relationship, as Russia would not be able to resist using similar threats to our allies in what Russia has decided is its "sphere of influence". To the extent Russia has become more aggressive over the past year, it's due to Ukraine's growing confidence combined with flagging signals coming from certain Western capitals, especially Washington.
And this comes to the third point - there is no way a US-Russia deal will actually solve the issue, because Ukrainian society and politics is at this point committed to Ukrainian national sovereignty. Blob thinking in this area has always tended to agree with the Russian posititon that Ukraine is not a "proper country", and its true purpose is in a junior role to Russia. But it is not possible to just turn Ukraine on-and-off again and reset it to this imagined role. Not only is Ukrainian society in a totally different place to where it was a decade ago, but Russia today has nothing to offer potential members of its "sphere" beyond cheap energy (sometimes) and implicit threats. A 'deal' would not be stable.
The West abandoning Ukraine would not change this, and would only induce a more unpredictable and dangerous relationship between Russia and Ukraine that partner countries could not avoid getting tangled up in. The challenge for US policy, and the way to serve its interests, is organising a strong and consistent line on Ukraine across Nato, especially the European Union and Turkey, that ensures Russia understands there are no divisions in the West that can be exploited.
The details of such a line don't really matter at this stage and can be worked out, but reasserting the solidarity of the alliance (which includes getting us Europeans to cough up more for our own defence and pissing off German politicians, many of whom believe that sanctions on Russia would be worse for the European economy than a literal invasion!!) and the commitment to respecting Ukraine's own path are the key building blocks. Doing this and avoiding a conflict then frees up energy, attention, and resources for the US to concentrate on Northeast Asia.
Similar to another commenter… Crimea? Hello? Author attempts to write a few thousand words on current USA-Ukraine-Russia-NATO situation but spends none of those words building critical context about a CURRENT and violent low intensity war? How does this happen? An argument could possibly be made that, “the article is focused on US policy” but even then, how is a Russian invasion to achieve strategic regional goals and threaten Ukrainian sovereignty not relevant to the article?
That Crimea is not mentioned once in this article is incredibly telling. Obama's policy of rapprochement made some sense when Russia was not a blatantly obvious irredentist power. (The Georgian conflict at least had some pretense of being about self determination of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.) That changed in 2014. The proscription against the right of territorial conquest is one of the most important norms created in the post war era and we have fought before to maintain that principle, the Gulf War being the most salient example.
Yes, the capture of Crimea or other Ukrainian territory itself might not be a direct threat to US interests. The weakening of international norms against territorial conquest, however, is a direct threat. Allowing Russia to invade a sovereign nation unchallenged has a very real chance of slowly unwinding the post-war international order. We've only seen Russia grow more emboldened when NATO rolled over after they invaded Crimea. It's not long before some tin pot dictator elsewhere in the world begins to think to themselves, why not try and establish my own empire? A world of unstable international borders is a world with higher military spending, less trade, and frankly more dead people. That's definitely not in our national interest.
I'm not even suggesting we go to war with Russia over this, but we should be willing to make it hurt.
The logical conclusion of your reasoning is that we are everywhere and always involved in wars. Instead we should say, this is what we care about and are willing to defend because it is in our interest. Moral foreign policy gets people killed because we’ll only go so far for things that seem wrong to us but don’t really matter. Ukraine is a good example. Personally I think this rhetoric on Ukraine is immoral. We encourage Ukraine to defy Russia but in the end if Russia pushes the issue we won’t fight because we don’t care enough. That just gets people killed.
Again, this assumes we are the decision makers. Despite what many believe, the US did not create the Maidan or the Syrian revolution. Sometimes people get killed and the US isn't even involved. But if enough people get killed, we are dragged in even if it is inconvenient to everyone.
I don’t disagree that these things happened despite us (but then again maybe invading Iraq contributed a lot to the Arab Spring?). We just made them a lot worse by getting involved. We give false hope to people and get them killed.
The logical consequence of your reasoning is that we shouldn't care about Russia invading France, Germany or the UK, or China invading Japan or South Korea, all of whom we have actual defense treaties signed with.
I basically agree with your overall take and am not a Russia hawk, but I think you need to be a bit more concerned about heavily armed authoritarian states that keep annexing new territory from democracies every few years. The general world track record is that if they don't encounter pushback at some point, they keep invading more & more & more. Regardless of the wisdom of past NATO expansion, we're now obligated to fight for Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia- what are we going to do, back out of those commitments now? If we don't show at least some pushback, we encourage Russia to target them next
I essentially agree with this. My point is that Russia can’t invade Germany and France. They are too weak. So why worry too much about them. China is different. I wouldn’t care about Japan either if it weren’t for China.
"We should acknowledge Ukraine’s position as a buffer, and try to reach a joint guarantee of Ukraine’s independence and nonalignment"
Wasn't a "joint guarantee of Ukraine's independence" already made in Budapest in 1994? Also, even if we wanted to offer such a guarantee, why would Russia accept it? I would imagine that Putin would prefer a Russia-aligned Ukraine to a nonaligned one. Given that he has recently acquired a Russia-aligned Belarus, I don't see why he would think that stopping at nonalignment in Ukraine's case is the most he could do. Simply turning off Radio Free Europe, as the article suggests, is probably not enough to get him to change his mind.
Good lord this article is stupid. Putin's Ukraine policy is driven by his domestic politics; there is literally no concession the US and NATO could make that would lead to less Russian belligerence. He needs the rivalry to maintain standing, and he'll invent it regardless of our policy choices. There will be no benefit to any compromise.
I agree with much of this piece, and I think we need to reserve special scorn for George W. Bush (easily the single worst President of the last 100 years) for offering NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Just another absolutely godawful foreign policy decision by that madman! Still, I think the author is arguing against a bit of a strawman here- most of America is pretty clear that we're not going to go to war over Ukraine.
It's perfectly reasonable to discuss consequences for Russia if they do go ahead with a (further) invasion, including devastating their economy, bolstering more US troops and missiles close to Russia, and adding Finland and Sweden to NATO. While at the same time, quietly negotiating to keep Ukraine as a buffer state between NATO and Russia. I think what a lot of the 'why should we do anything for Ukraine' people in the comments here don't understand is that doing *nothing* not only makes us look weak, but *actually encourages further aggression*. Having some consequences is actually better for US security than doing literally nothing!
After this conflict is over though, I do agree with the broader idea that we should be try to be friendlier with Russia (even if a few eastern Bloc countries get screwed), while focusing more on China. Leonid Bershidsky had a really good piece in Bloomberg about how Europe could be offering more of a commercial relationship to Russia's elites post-Putin, if they agree to freer elections https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-06/the-west-needs-to-dream-bigger-than-vladimir-putin
Our interests in Ukraine is to preserve the possibility of a liberal democratic order, not NATO membership. On the other hand, it's not clear that Putin in interested so much in preventing NATO membership as to insure that there IS no liberal democratic order in Ukraine, so this will be tricky. The Russian intervention in Kazakhstan is disturbing from this POV.
Thanks so much for this article, and thank you to Matt for letting Lee write this. This is a sorely needed reality check for liberal internationalists and the liberal media, who have been releasing absolutely maddening op-eds on Russia these past few weeks. Scholars have been predicting that Nato's open door policy would be a disaster for literal decades, and now here we are, still with no one listening. Biden must work towards a de facto, if not de jure, Ukrainian neutrality agreement with Russia to ensure Europe doesn't combust into warfare. The US and its allies know that they are not willing to send their troops to defend Ukraine (as required by Article 5 of NATO's founding charter), so why even give Ukraine the option to join at all?
You know, we signed an agreement with Russia in 1994 to guarantee Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity in exchange for it giving up its nuclear weapons. Russia broke that deal. Result, general instability, warfare, and every threatened state now knows to never give up its nuclear weapons. Also, the lesson is that Russian guarantees and agreements are not to be trusted.
I’m not familiar with the details of that agreement, but a Russian might argue that the US violated promises made not to expand Nato into former Soviet territory, thereby changing the paradigm and taking advantage of Russian weakness in the 90s and 2000s to break its own deal. Now that Russia is in a position of strength, Putin believes he must “re-negotiate” European security.
The issue is that 'promises made not to expand NATO into former Soviet territory' is just a story, and is certainly not in writing. For instance, Gorbachev specifically denied that the US had made any such promise. Whereas, Russia did make a promise not to invade Ukraine- in writing, in a treaty.
Countries don't do business based on unwritten promises made off the record, they put things in a treaty. So the NATO expansion story is just a he-said, she-said thing
We never signed anything with Russia saying we wouldn’t expand NATO. The Russians can argue whatever they want, but what they are really relying on is the Melian dialogue.
To clarify, the Melian dialogue turned out badly for the Athenians. It will turn out badly for the Russians too, but that is their operating principle.
Whether rapprochement is possible or not, the writer makes the strong point that it is dangerous to push Russia into a corner.
When amendment of the NATO Treaty was before the U.S. Senate to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO, I guided a tour of about two dozen American editorial writers to explore the issue. We visited Paris, NATO headquarters in Brussels, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest.
In all these places we talked with government officials and foreign policy scholars. Opinions varied on whether NATO continued to have a viable mission and whether it was a good idea to admit these three new members. But it is my recollection that we heard over and over again that care needed to be taken that NATO did not crowd Russia severely by pushing NATO expansion right up to the Russian borders.
This was not a question of "liking" Russia or whether NATO had the "right" to expand. It was just a commonsense expression of how the new relationship of Russia and NATO should best be managed with an eye to avoiding conflict.
The argument is correct, but ungenerous (that the majority of Democrats suffered anti-Russia derangement due to intervention is a slur). The analogy to Austria is good; Finlandization might be even better. That occurred under Stalin, negotiated by Zhdanov. Just to emphasize that accepting spheres of influence doesn't mean thinking highly of the regime in power in Russia. Putin showed in 2016 and in many other cases that he can hurt us. Our domestic divisions leave us in a very weak position to project power. When you're faced with power, you have to make concessions. Ukraine not being in NATO is a minor one and I would be overjoyed if that were an adequate concession to satisfy Putin. Probably not, but one should at least try and see. I don't see any reason not to try and make it formal. The mechanism would be an agreement in which Ukraine formally declares its neutrality and NATO/the US formally recognizes it (as well as Russia). This would of course have a whiff of Munich about it but not all appeasement is bad and Putin is not even remotely in the power position of Hitler in 1938.
The author makes statements about Democratic "derangement" and "Election interference became a scapegoat, with Democrat elites blaming Putin for Hillary Clinton’s defeat" without offering any evidence. I think that most Democratic elites (not "Democrat" elites) are aware of the fact that there is no single reason for Clinton's defeat, and that if any one of several issues had gone differently, she would have won. But they are rightfully upset about the fact that one of those issues was Putin's interference in our election. I've seen nothing to indicate that Democrats have overreacted about it.
Exactly. I continue to believe Anthony Weiner played a much bigger role than Russia did in Clinton's defeat. That doesn't mean I'm not still pissed GRU hackers were combing through DNC (and let's not forget they got into the RNC too) email servers and then leaked the data publicly.
There's at least two problems with this article.
1.) The author barely mentions Ukraine and its own concerns throughout. We get literally no mention of the 2014 protests in Kiev (and the bloody failed government suppressing of them) that led to a new government in Ukraine in the first place.
Instead, we get vague intimations that U.S. stirred up this whole thing by "seeking regime change in Ukraine".
To put it bluntly, that is made-up nonsense. There are actors in this drama other than the U.S. and Russia, "the Blob" and the KGB, Putin and Biden.
Like Ukraine. It's the seventh-largest country in Europe (44 million people). It has aspirations.. It's not crazy to think that there are people of sound mind outside the infamed "groupthink" in U.S. foreign policy who think that's a causal factor here--and that it should be a consideration.
If Obama, of all people, 8 years ago, was scheming to overthrow Russian influence in Kiev and replace it with some aggressive NATO stooge, he cleverly fooled all of us. He famously won re-election as a dove on Russia and promised to be more "flexible" after the election, mocking Romney for pushing back on it.
A more likely interpretation is that Ukraine turned against their then-current government because its population was sick of being bullied, threatened, jerked around, and ultimately shot by them. (And at least mildly tired of Russia for not just backing it, but dictating its policy.)
You can see this is as "grand game" between great powers (that we're playing stupidly) all you want. At some point, actual human beings enter the frame. That's what Ukraine's doing, and what they've done. It seems obtuse to pretend they don't exist.
2.) The author also fails--once--to mention the actual war (not "warmongering") happening, right now. Russia's response to Ukraine's has already been to illegally annex one of Ukraine's provinces, and to wage an undeclared war in another. For eight years.
Over ten thousand people have died in that war. It's happening right now. People can look it up, like on a map, if they want.
War is not something we're "provoking", or that the "U.S. Blob" is provoking. It's currently underway.
If you're seriously looking at this situation and reacting with "Darn those warmongers in the Pentagon, why are they so aggressive and strategically stupid," we have a fundamental disagreement on cause, effect, and basic reality here.
You might as well blame a abused ex-wife's murder on that handsome guy who smiled at her, rather than the deranged ex-husband. It takes agency away from both perpetrator and victim.
Don't get me wrong, I get it. We are in a fraught situation in the U.S. domestically, and the Biden administration cannot afford further political hits. Foreign policy is a depressing, annoying distraction from the things that really matter, like improving the economy, upzoning, and Build Back Better tax structures.
It's convenient to think of the Ukraine situation as a great-power "Blob-provoked" interference with Very Important Matters. That doesn't make it true.
Biden and his advisors, to their credit, understand that. Center-left pundits are going to have to do the same soon, whether they like it or not.
Your points are valid but they're a bit irrelevant to the author's argument. Like, yes, sure, we should take into account the concerns of Ukraine and Ukrainians, but the fact is that Ukrainian neutrality, either de facto or de jure, is the best way to address its concerns. Ukraine joining NATO is essentially impossible because half of its member states don't even want it to join, and it's abundantly clear that the US would never actually send its own troops to defend Ukraine as required by Article 5 of the Treaty. Therefore, what sense does it make to string Ukraine along? This is the unfortunate reality of international relations, and the US urgently needs to recognize this.
Also, to your second point, yes Russia's aggression is wrong, but it's fair to say that that aggression is partially the fault of the US. If the US had never offered Ukraine a promise to join NATO back in 2008, it is entirely possible that we never would have seen the war in Donbas, as Russia wouldn't have felt the need to invade if they knew Ukraine wouldn't join the Western security architecture.
It's easy, and I think your comment falls prey to this, to focus on specifics about Russia and this or that bone of contention, and miss the larger point, which is that Russia today is not an A-list adversary like it was in the Cold War. Putin's Russia just just doesn't have the juice the Soviet Union had in the 40s, 50s and 60s, when it was the global leader of an international ideological movement that posed a serious threat to the United States. No hip young people today put on berets and feel a comradeship with Russia, no young Bernie Sanders types travel to Putin's Russia to admire it, it's just not an ideological rival anymore. It's just another country, and a corrupt, kleptocracy at that, that we have some differences with, and, also, if we don't get so stuck in Cold War thinking that we can't see them, some significant areas of common or parallel interest. Russia is, after all, historically connected to Europe, and and our and the EU's big picture strategy towards Russia should be aimed at fostering and reinforcing that, not pushing Russia away. I think that's the meta point of this piece and others like it that you're missing.
Believe me--I *very* much acknowledge areas of common and parallel interest we have with Russia. I could name many. (Climate, Covid, anti-terrorism, anti-nuclear-weapons, containing China, etc.)
The problem is not that we, as countries, have nothing in common. Nor is it that we're in a battle between rival ideologies. ('Democracy' and 'dictatorship' don't count as that, in my book.)
The problem is that Russia's leaders over the last decade--not its people, necessarily--see reality through a funhouse lens.
A former province wants to go a different route than they. Putin sees that as a personal insult and a threat.
Former provinces seek closer ties with Europe. The Kremlin sees that as the second coming of Hitler.
Hillary Clinton lectures them about 'democracy'. Putin views that as tantamount to a declaration of intent to violently overthrow him. Etc.
We're not dealing with a true geopolitical 'rival' here, nor with a nation we have nothing in common with. But we are dealing with some psychopathy, at high levels of power.
There's only so much you can do to secure a 'deal' with that. At some point, it ceases to be 'realism' to accommodate it.
IMO, we've reached that point, and far exceeded the point where it makes any level of sense to blame ourselves for the impasse.
It may feel better to secure a quick win by giving Putin most of what he wants. But to my mind, it's not 'realistic', any more than his view of the world is. That's my point.
To the extent this is about Putin personally, I think I agree with you. I learned early on in my time as a litigator the importance of sizing up your opposing counsel, and figuring out whether you're dealing with an adversary who is fundamentally professional and rational, albeit with some deeply divergent interests, or someone who gets off on disagreement and manufactured disputes and is only responsive to a hard knock upside the head. It does seem like Putin may be in that second category, unfortunately.
Life is what happens when you are making other plans. We may not want to make Ukraine a priority, but events can occur outside our control. We didn’t want to get into WW1 or WW2, but we were dragged in anyway. Part of the point of the original comment is that others possess agency, including Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of Europe. Sometimes our priorities can be reset by the actions of others. The largest invasion in Europe since WW2 might do that for us.
There have been a number of mostly Soviet/Warsaw Pact and Russian invasions since WW2. East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya (twice), Georgia, Yugoslav civil wars, Crimea, Donbas, … This is one that has a high chance of pulling us in whether we like it or not. To take one case, suppose the Russian forces aren’t as effective against the Ukrainians as everyone expects, and it drags on and turns very bloody? You think we and the rest of Europe can stay out? At some level, it may no longer be up to us whether Putin invades, and then it may be very difficult for us to stay out of it, no matter what the left-wing realists and right-wing authoritarians think.
To compare this to the Soviets or Nazi/Imperial Germany is the problem. It’s no longer in the US interest because Russia does not have the capacity to dominate Europe. This would be even more clear if the EU stopped free riding off of US defense spending. They have multiples of the population and GDP of Russia. I think they can handle it. This is not true in Asia with the rise of China. Our goal is to make sure no one can dominate their region. Russia is not a threat in this sense.
The better comparison is ww1, with lots of formal and semi-formal alliances, revanchist powers, and authoritarian rulers creating foreign military actions to distract from domestic problems.
We didn't stay out of Syria or Libya or the Yugoslav civil wars. You want to stay out of it, which I understand.
Slow to the party on this but I would just point out that it has always seemed to me there is a deal to be done that works for both sides and preserves Ukrainian autonomy (in its domestic affairs at least). Ukraine does not need to be a member of NATO to pursue domestic self-determination.
Matt uses the example of Austria in the article, but an even better example is Finland - a country that was formerly part of Russia and shares a large border with it. Finland strove to pursue a resolutely neutral policy in the Cold War to keep the Soviets happy. It was not painless, but at least it was a realistic third way between war and being a Soviet satellite. Finland was able to function as a democracy throughout the Cold War, even if sometimes they had to live with Soviet pressure. But Ukraine will always need to find a way to live with that (whilst the stakes are totally different, it is analogous to saying that the UK can't just pretend the EU doesn't exist!).
Of course such an agreement relies on trusting Russia as a partner - and they have already breached their existing treaty to guarantee Ukrainian security. But ultimately whether that arrangement works or not will be a question of the West's willingness to back up any treaty agreement with force, which is exactly the position we are in now. So it's worth a shot in my opinion.
I agree with this, but the key point is that Putin has to be willing to make a deal on terms we find reasonable. The diplomacy is progressing, but it may fail, in which case we have war.
To this I would say: Moral values practically matter. At some point, they're not an abstraction; they affect people's lives. That's not as divorced from our "interests" as many would like to pretend.
What more important goals could we practically achieve by trading Ukrainian sovereignty? Cooperation on China? A trade deal to get more rare metal access, perhaps?
Those sound like good, practical, "realist" things--until it becomes clear to the rest of the world that the value of autocracies not unilaterally annexing democracies, or carving them up, is a dead letter, because the powers that be have stopped caring about it.
More to the point, they're not just "our" values.
No country or group of countries are going to plan too far ahead if there's a real prospect of a hungry, vengeful militarist in their near abroad swallowing them up, and the rest of the planet just letting it go. Because it's not "realist" to object too strongly to the whims of dictators with lots of guns and strong feelings.
American interests and goals have been furthered by a global environment where such things don't happen anymore, or are vanishingly rare. American interests will be harmed in the long term by a global environment where these things become routine and commonplace again.
To his credit, that's been Biden's calculus in refusing to negotiate Ukraine's autonomy away with Putin. It has the benefit of being both prudent, and the right thing to do.
Another example I've just remembered - Shinzo Abe spent his entire premiership trying to secure a rapprochment with Russia, promising billions in investment from Japan and a better relationship partly in an effort to drive a wedge between Russia and China. The sticking point was a resolution of the "Northern Territories" issue, four islands just north of Hokkaido.
Putin merrily strung Abe along for years, securing all sorts of promises after multiple personal summits, before ultimately dismissing the idea. Abe was humiliated, and the only thing he'd achieved was a wedge had instead been driven between the US and Japan instead. The Nothern Territories issue is deliberately kept unresolved by Russia precisely in order to give Russia leverage over Japan - that this leverage might be worth a lot less to Russia than the economic benefits of a good relationship with their neighbour is something that Russian elites beyond Putin are satisfied with due to their peculiar and narrow definition of sovereignty and the national interest.
If we're going to try to copy the "Let's be nice to Russia to separate it from China" strategy, then we should at least try and see whether anyone else has successfully managed this with Putin. As of yet, it hasn't worked, and there's no reason to suggest it would with Ukraine.
Germany has been playing much the same game since almost the day Merkel ascended to the chancellorship, with similarly little (nothing) to show for it.
It’s in United Russia’s interests to humiliate and betray “the West” at every turn in ways short of causing war, because it has so little else to offer it’s people.
China is a far more rational actor with much more to lose and much deeper roots at home, at least for now.
This presents the west as the real aggressor which i think is naive bordering on delusional. It also presents a lot of Russian statements at face value.
NATO's eastward expansion to Russia's doorstep is a hostile act.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing military operations in the Donbas are a hostile act, and contravene signed agreements between the US and Russia.
I agree, but it was preceded by the NATO expansion/
Russia did not invade Ukraine because of Nato expansion, but because of its European association agreement. Russia doesn't fear Nato troops, it fears a successful and prosperous small-l liberal democratic Rus' successor state.
What makes you think the US has total control over tensions and tit for tat actions with Russia? They have their own agency.
The question is who should deal with that? My answer Germany and the EU. The US has no interest in Crimea. I don’t think we have an interest in NATO which Matt clearly believes but doesn’t come out and say. All the arguments here are Russia is mean and being unfair. True, the response is, it isn’t worth our time and treasure to deal with it. Tell me why it matters?
General European peace matters to the US because every time it falls apart, we have to come in and clean it up. We created NATO to keep the peace and it has largely worked for the past 70 years. The Soviets had to invade East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and lean on Poland to keep their empire and puppet states together. We didn't, and midwife the EU and general European prosperity. Think how much better life is for the average Pole now compared to life in the 30s, 40s, or 70s. If that fails and the Europeans and Russians screw it up, like they have repeatedly done over the past 100+ years, we'll get sucked in again. Best to prevent the war in the first place.
I think you are looking at this with a 1950s mindset. Europe is aging. It’s powers are balanced. It’s importance to us and the world is diminished. I’m saying focus where the threat is.
"Best to prevent the war in the first place." Exactly--so how do we do this? Is agreeing to Ukrainian neutrality, and perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of a Russian sphere of influence over Ukraine, a way to do this? Is threatening economic sanctions on Russia a way to do this (and how credible and damaging would those sanctions actually be?)? Is arming Ukraine now a way to do this, or does it make a Russian invasion and war more likely?
I don’t know and you don’t either, because you don’t know what Putin is going to do. That’s the point, the situation is unstable, and it’s that way because Putin likes it that way.
A lot of arguments like this proceed from a "it's not about morals it's about raw power" critique, but none of us here are world leaders, simply trying to maximize the sheer power of our respective states. Most of us are mere bystanders, or perhaps low level functionaries. And given our likelihood here of living in liberal democracies, with all of our talk of liberal values and human rights, most of us are proceeding from a sincere, albeit sometimes naïve or ignorant, desire to see the moral actions taken. And resultingly, most of us aren't going to look at foreign policy conflicts devoid of morality, as a simple game to maximize (in this case) US power, but guided by this sense of morality, of right and wrong.
It's for this reason I suspect that a lot of people here are say, skeptical of US foreign policy in the Middle East in the last couple of decades in particular, or some of the Cold War overreach that led the US to partner with unsavory actors. You cannot simply tell us to ignore morality and focus only on power, since I don't believe anyone here actually looks at the world in such a cold, sociopathic fashion. We're not diehard nationalists who side with our nations uniformly, regardless of any possible transgressions our nation may have done. And we expect better than that of our leaders, and our countries
You have to include some level of morality in your analysis though. I mean, if we don't use any moralizing- why can't the US invade Canada or Mexico, say, and just seize their natural resources? Why can't we just annex Greenland? Why not start invading random LatAm countries? I was firmly anti-Iraq war decades ago, specifically on moral grounds.
I think my overall point is that the piece from yesterday is too black-and-white, and that we have options to punish Russia for a Ukraine invasion that are short of military force, and that it's actually in our interests to look strong to them (while pushing for more rapprochement in the longer term)
I think Lee has a very different view of what Putin's project is than I do. I think Putin has made it quite clear that he is not interested in a neutral Ukraine. He is interested in a Ukraine that is reintegrated into a Russian empire, at least to the extent that Belarus is now. In the Budapest Memorandum (19940, Russia once before signed onto a joint guarantee of Ukrainian independence, in exchange for Ukraine turning in its Soviet era nukes. Look what came of that.
Yeah this article is almost laughable in that it ignores what Putin is actually doing in the real world. The idea that we can strike some grand bargain with the guy that guarantees Ukrainian independence is folly.
Nominal independence might be OK. Remember, even under the Soviet Union, Ukraine kept a separate seat at the UN. What Putin most wants is a guarantee of a securely illiberal government in Kiev and a right to intervene if necessary to thwart any drift toward liberal democracy. Kazakhstan illustrates a degree of independence that is tolerable.
There's a strain of let's adopt a more realist foreign policy in this article, but it's not actually realist in that it focuses a lot on rhetoric and ends up adopting an all or nothing rhetoric that invokes American soldiers dying in Ukraine. That's not actually on the table in this instance. NATO does not admit countries with territorial disputes, but officially declaring that it would never admit Ukraine just gives Putin a domestic and international propaganda win for... practically nothing because Putin already knows this which is part of why he invaded part of it in the first place. Relatedly, Putin lacks credible commitment mechanisms to credibly promise to not do this all again in a year or two. This is key problem in international relations, you might want to make a deal but you lack a credible commitment mechanism to do so.
What is on the table is selling more arms to Ukraine and greater economic sanctions. If Putin knows there is a significant cost to invading other countries, he won't invade other countries. He correctly perceived that there would not be significant cost for annexing Crimea and so he did it. The higher the perceived cost to further invading Ukraine, the less likely he is to do so. The difficulty is making a credible commitment given that there are negative consequences to actually having to follow through vs. simply deterring with a credible threat you don't end up having to carry out because it's credible that you would.
Selling additional arms to Ukraine is a low cost way to increase the price to Russia of an invasion of the rest of Ukraine. The risk is that Putin decides to invade now before the arms arrive or before Ukraine can learn how to effectively use new weapons systems. Again, this comes back to is there a credible commitment of economic sanctions if he launches an invasion? The author calls into question whether this is in US interests, but cutting off Europe's supply of Russian gas through sanctions is of relatively little consequence to the US so while Europe might not be able to credibly promise this the US could under a more hawkish foreign policy if it were in its interest to do.
There is a realist reason why the US provides wide security guarantees: to prevent nuclear proliferation. This is the deal with the US nuclear umbrella: the US will provide a nuclear security guarantee and in exchange the country will not develop nuclear weapons. The real reason US troops are stationed all over the world is to make these guarantees more credible (because they are not completely credible particularly without dead American soldiers) to avoid nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. Policies of containment run a short term risk on the view that in the long run there will overall be less risk to the US of nuclear war if Russia is contained within its own borders vs. if other countries feel they must develop the bomb to provide credible deterrence. Wherever you come down on the best strategy for the US, this is what's at stake for the US, not Ukraine's sovereignty.
Selling arms to the Ukraine is fine, but the Ukraine cannot afford to buy enough arms to resist a determined invasion . Russia’s GDP is over 9 times Ukraine’s and it’s population is over three times as large.
But is that actually worth the price to Russia? Do they really have the will to maintain a bloody occupation? And for what? What Putin wants is to boost his domestic popularity so that he can maintain power in Russia. That might be served by another quick invasion of some borderland if there are limited economic sanctions in response, but it is not served by a prolonged war of occupation or if there are severe economic sanctions in response. The point here is just a comparative static: a better armed Ukraine is more costly to invade and occupy which makes the benefit to a full scale invasion lower.
Fair enough. I’m not against selling Ukraine arms on a cash basis. I just don’t want to put any tripwires in place that could suck the US in deeper.
This argument doesn't stack up. There are several things wrong here - it's a mistake to draw conclusions about how to handle foreign policy in Europe directly from domestic party politics; Western policy is clearly capable of trade-offs in the region; and it sees the solution as simple because it sees the problem through a binary Russia/US lens rather than the correct interplay of olibgations, relationships, and behaviour between Russia, Ukraine, the EU, Turkey, and the US.
First, to the extent whatever Tucker Carlson or Brookings have to say about this issue is relevant, it is not that there are truthtellers on Ukraine in each US political party, but rather as an indication that there is no 'Blob' position on Ukraine. For instance, Brookings, the premier liberal establishment thinktank, has nevered miss an opportunity to call for rapprochment with Russia, and has argued for throwing Ukraine under the bus since Maidan.
Tucker and Brookings are strange bedfellows, because there is not a consensus in US/Western politics on Ukraine policy, despite the clarity of international law and the post-invasion consensus in Ukraine on a pro-Western position. If there is a foreign policy blob in this area, it is among the "Russia experts" (and pro-Russian politicians in Austria, Germany, Italy, France etc) who believe that Russia's behaviour can be controlled by the West if only we do whatever Russia says it wants from us. Even if you want a better relationship with Russia, this is naive and will fail as previous "resets" have, because the competitive relationship emerges from deep beliefs about sovereignty and interests among Russian elites that they are prepared to pay a high price to pursue.
Second, the West has within the past year shown at least twice that it does think about the area in terms of trade-offs. Nary a peep was heard about either the protests in Kazakhstan earlier this month (!) or Armenia's crushing defeat in the Second Karabakh War last year despite the 2018 revolution that had brought a pro-Western president to power in Yerevan. Aside from perfunctory meetings with Tsikhanouskaya, Belarus' fake election has dropped off the agenda now that Lukashenko has reasserted control.
The reason why the West has stuck up for Ukraine is that the trade-offs are worth it. Ukraine is big, democratic, pro-Western, has a capable military and a clear medium-term path to closer integration with the European legal order and economy. Allowing Russia to use the threat of another invasion to spike Ukraine's economic and political reforms because they are too successful would bake-in instability to the Russia-West relationship, as Russia would not be able to resist using similar threats to our allies in what Russia has decided is its "sphere of influence". To the extent Russia has become more aggressive over the past year, it's due to Ukraine's growing confidence combined with flagging signals coming from certain Western capitals, especially Washington.
And this comes to the third point - there is no way a US-Russia deal will actually solve the issue, because Ukrainian society and politics is at this point committed to Ukrainian national sovereignty. Blob thinking in this area has always tended to agree with the Russian posititon that Ukraine is not a "proper country", and its true purpose is in a junior role to Russia. But it is not possible to just turn Ukraine on-and-off again and reset it to this imagined role. Not only is Ukrainian society in a totally different place to where it was a decade ago, but Russia today has nothing to offer potential members of its "sphere" beyond cheap energy (sometimes) and implicit threats. A 'deal' would not be stable.
The West abandoning Ukraine would not change this, and would only induce a more unpredictable and dangerous relationship between Russia and Ukraine that partner countries could not avoid getting tangled up in. The challenge for US policy, and the way to serve its interests, is organising a strong and consistent line on Ukraine across Nato, especially the European Union and Turkey, that ensures Russia understands there are no divisions in the West that can be exploited.
The details of such a line don't really matter at this stage and can be worked out, but reasserting the solidarity of the alliance (which includes getting us Europeans to cough up more for our own defence and pissing off German politicians, many of whom believe that sanctions on Russia would be worse for the European economy than a literal invasion!!) and the commitment to respecting Ukraine's own path are the key building blocks. Doing this and avoiding a conflict then frees up energy, attention, and resources for the US to concentrate on Northeast Asia.
Similar to another commenter… Crimea? Hello? Author attempts to write a few thousand words on current USA-Ukraine-Russia-NATO situation but spends none of those words building critical context about a CURRENT and violent low intensity war? How does this happen? An argument could possibly be made that, “the article is focused on US policy” but even then, how is a Russian invasion to achieve strategic regional goals and threaten Ukrainian sovereignty not relevant to the article?
That Crimea is not mentioned once in this article is incredibly telling. Obama's policy of rapprochement made some sense when Russia was not a blatantly obvious irredentist power. (The Georgian conflict at least had some pretense of being about self determination of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.) That changed in 2014. The proscription against the right of territorial conquest is one of the most important norms created in the post war era and we have fought before to maintain that principle, the Gulf War being the most salient example.
I think the point is that Crimea doesn’t matter to the US strategically. It’s sad but not really of concern to the US.
Yes, the capture of Crimea or other Ukrainian territory itself might not be a direct threat to US interests. The weakening of international norms against territorial conquest, however, is a direct threat. Allowing Russia to invade a sovereign nation unchallenged has a very real chance of slowly unwinding the post-war international order. We've only seen Russia grow more emboldened when NATO rolled over after they invaded Crimea. It's not long before some tin pot dictator elsewhere in the world begins to think to themselves, why not try and establish my own empire? A world of unstable international borders is a world with higher military spending, less trade, and frankly more dead people. That's definitely not in our national interest.
I'm not even suggesting we go to war with Russia over this, but we should be willing to make it hurt.
The logical conclusion of your reasoning is that we are everywhere and always involved in wars. Instead we should say, this is what we care about and are willing to defend because it is in our interest. Moral foreign policy gets people killed because we’ll only go so far for things that seem wrong to us but don’t really matter. Ukraine is a good example. Personally I think this rhetoric on Ukraine is immoral. We encourage Ukraine to defy Russia but in the end if Russia pushes the issue we won’t fight because we don’t care enough. That just gets people killed.
Again, this assumes we are the decision makers. Despite what many believe, the US did not create the Maidan or the Syrian revolution. Sometimes people get killed and the US isn't even involved. But if enough people get killed, we are dragged in even if it is inconvenient to everyone.
I don’t disagree that these things happened despite us (but then again maybe invading Iraq contributed a lot to the Arab Spring?). We just made them a lot worse by getting involved. We give false hope to people and get them killed.
The logical consequence of your reasoning is that we shouldn't care about Russia invading France, Germany or the UK, or China invading Japan or South Korea, all of whom we have actual defense treaties signed with.
I basically agree with your overall take and am not a Russia hawk, but I think you need to be a bit more concerned about heavily armed authoritarian states that keep annexing new territory from democracies every few years. The general world track record is that if they don't encounter pushback at some point, they keep invading more & more & more. Regardless of the wisdom of past NATO expansion, we're now obligated to fight for Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia- what are we going to do, back out of those commitments now? If we don't show at least some pushback, we encourage Russia to target them next
I essentially agree with this. My point is that Russia can’t invade Germany and France. They are too weak. So why worry too much about them. China is different. I wouldn’t care about Japan either if it weren’t for China.
"We should acknowledge Ukraine’s position as a buffer, and try to reach a joint guarantee of Ukraine’s independence and nonalignment"
Wasn't a "joint guarantee of Ukraine's independence" already made in Budapest in 1994? Also, even if we wanted to offer such a guarantee, why would Russia accept it? I would imagine that Putin would prefer a Russia-aligned Ukraine to a nonaligned one. Given that he has recently acquired a Russia-aligned Belarus, I don't see why he would think that stopping at nonalignment in Ukraine's case is the most he could do. Simply turning off Radio Free Europe, as the article suggests, is probably not enough to get him to change his mind.
Yeah this article seems wildly disconnected from what's actually happening/happened in the world.
Good lord this article is stupid. Putin's Ukraine policy is driven by his domestic politics; there is literally no concession the US and NATO could make that would lead to less Russian belligerence. He needs the rivalry to maintain standing, and he'll invent it regardless of our policy choices. There will be no benefit to any compromise.
I agree with much of this piece, and I think we need to reserve special scorn for George W. Bush (easily the single worst President of the last 100 years) for offering NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Just another absolutely godawful foreign policy decision by that madman! Still, I think the author is arguing against a bit of a strawman here- most of America is pretty clear that we're not going to go to war over Ukraine.
It's perfectly reasonable to discuss consequences for Russia if they do go ahead with a (further) invasion, including devastating their economy, bolstering more US troops and missiles close to Russia, and adding Finland and Sweden to NATO. While at the same time, quietly negotiating to keep Ukraine as a buffer state between NATO and Russia. I think what a lot of the 'why should we do anything for Ukraine' people in the comments here don't understand is that doing *nothing* not only makes us look weak, but *actually encourages further aggression*. Having some consequences is actually better for US security than doing literally nothing!
After this conflict is over though, I do agree with the broader idea that we should be try to be friendlier with Russia (even if a few eastern Bloc countries get screwed), while focusing more on China. Leonid Bershidsky had a really good piece in Bloomberg about how Europe could be offering more of a commercial relationship to Russia's elites post-Putin, if they agree to freer elections https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-06/the-west-needs-to-dream-bigger-than-vladimir-putin
Our interests in Ukraine is to preserve the possibility of a liberal democratic order, not NATO membership. On the other hand, it's not clear that Putin in interested so much in preventing NATO membership as to insure that there IS no liberal democratic order in Ukraine, so this will be tricky. The Russian intervention in Kazakhstan is disturbing from this POV.
Thanks so much for this article, and thank you to Matt for letting Lee write this. This is a sorely needed reality check for liberal internationalists and the liberal media, who have been releasing absolutely maddening op-eds on Russia these past few weeks. Scholars have been predicting that Nato's open door policy would be a disaster for literal decades, and now here we are, still with no one listening. Biden must work towards a de facto, if not de jure, Ukrainian neutrality agreement with Russia to ensure Europe doesn't combust into warfare. The US and its allies know that they are not willing to send their troops to defend Ukraine (as required by Article 5 of NATO's founding charter), so why even give Ukraine the option to join at all?
You know, we signed an agreement with Russia in 1994 to guarantee Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity in exchange for it giving up its nuclear weapons. Russia broke that deal. Result, general instability, warfare, and every threatened state now knows to never give up its nuclear weapons. Also, the lesson is that Russian guarantees and agreements are not to be trusted.
I’m not familiar with the details of that agreement, but a Russian might argue that the US violated promises made not to expand Nato into former Soviet territory, thereby changing the paradigm and taking advantage of Russian weakness in the 90s and 2000s to break its own deal. Now that Russia is in a position of strength, Putin believes he must “re-negotiate” European security.
The issue is that 'promises made not to expand NATO into former Soviet territory' is just a story, and is certainly not in writing. For instance, Gorbachev specifically denied that the US had made any such promise. Whereas, Russia did make a promise not to invade Ukraine- in writing, in a treaty.
Countries don't do business based on unwritten promises made off the record, they put things in a treaty. So the NATO expansion story is just a he-said, she-said thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
We never signed anything with Russia saying we wouldn’t expand NATO. The Russians can argue whatever they want, but what they are really relying on is the Melian dialogue.
To clarify, the Melian dialogue turned out badly for the Athenians. It will turn out badly for the Russians too, but that is their operating principle.
Whether rapprochement is possible or not, the writer makes the strong point that it is dangerous to push Russia into a corner.
When amendment of the NATO Treaty was before the U.S. Senate to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO, I guided a tour of about two dozen American editorial writers to explore the issue. We visited Paris, NATO headquarters in Brussels, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest.
In all these places we talked with government officials and foreign policy scholars. Opinions varied on whether NATO continued to have a viable mission and whether it was a good idea to admit these three new members. But it is my recollection that we heard over and over again that care needed to be taken that NATO did not crowd Russia severely by pushing NATO expansion right up to the Russian borders.
This was not a question of "liking" Russia or whether NATO had the "right" to expand. It was just a commonsense expression of how the new relationship of Russia and NATO should best be managed with an eye to avoiding conflict.
The argument is correct, but ungenerous (that the majority of Democrats suffered anti-Russia derangement due to intervention is a slur). The analogy to Austria is good; Finlandization might be even better. That occurred under Stalin, negotiated by Zhdanov. Just to emphasize that accepting spheres of influence doesn't mean thinking highly of the regime in power in Russia. Putin showed in 2016 and in many other cases that he can hurt us. Our domestic divisions leave us in a very weak position to project power. When you're faced with power, you have to make concessions. Ukraine not being in NATO is a minor one and I would be overjoyed if that were an adequate concession to satisfy Putin. Probably not, but one should at least try and see. I don't see any reason not to try and make it formal. The mechanism would be an agreement in which Ukraine formally declares its neutrality and NATO/the US formally recognizes it (as well as Russia). This would of course have a whiff of Munich about it but not all appeasement is bad and Putin is not even remotely in the power position of Hitler in 1938.
The author makes statements about Democratic "derangement" and "Election interference became a scapegoat, with Democrat elites blaming Putin for Hillary Clinton’s defeat" without offering any evidence. I think that most Democratic elites (not "Democrat" elites) are aware of the fact that there is no single reason for Clinton's defeat, and that if any one of several issues had gone differently, she would have won. But they are rightfully upset about the fact that one of those issues was Putin's interference in our election. I've seen nothing to indicate that Democrats have overreacted about it.
Exactly. I continue to believe Anthony Weiner played a much bigger role than Russia did in Clinton's defeat. That doesn't mean I'm not still pissed GRU hackers were combing through DNC (and let's not forget they got into the RNC too) email servers and then leaked the data publicly.