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WHY THE UKRAINE CRISIS IS THE WEST'S FAULT
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
By John J. Mearsheimer
>From our September/October 2014 Issue
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 emigres 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, Jose 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.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
By John J. Mearsheimer
>From our September/October 2014 Issue
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 emigres 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, Jose 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.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault