In organizing and spearheading the international response to the Russian assault on Ukraine, the United States has played the role typically assigned to it in the folklore of American foreign policy: leader of the free world in standing for peace, freedom, and democracy and against the predations of despots and aggressors. If you discern a note of sarcasm in that observation, you would be right, since I largely reject that folklore, but honestly, I have no serious complaints about the Biden administration’s actions since the Russians invaded (as opposed to its behavior just prior to the invasion).  I think the president has struck a decent balance between prudent restraint and necessary resistance to aggression. And yet…

I can’t help reflecting on the role of US foreign policy in helping bring on the crisis that it now must deal with.  I agree with the analysis of John Mearsheimer, among others, (even if Mearsheimer overstates) that NATO expansion, along with a variety of other American and Western offenses to Russian national pride and security interests, has been a major cause of the revanchism that has culminated in the assault on Ukraine. This shouldn’t be controversial.  In a previous post, I cited the early warnings of George Kennan and Thomas Friedman, but I could have added a long list of smart men and women who over the past 25 years have advised in whole or in part against the expansion of the alliance.  The list would include William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense; Brent Scowcraft, GHW Bush’s National Security adviser; French President Jacques Chirac; Henry Kissinger and Angela Merkel.  Way back in 1995, Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin lamented to Clinton,

I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed [with NATO expansion]. How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia.  Many Russians have a sense of fear. What do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner? [T]hey ask. I ask it too: Why do you want to do this? We need a new structure for Pan-European security, not old ones!”

Around that same time, eighteen former US officials, mainly retired Foreign Service officers, signed an open letter warning that NATO enlargement might convince Russians “that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them, rather than integrating them into a new European system of collective security.”

“A new European system of collective security” would have been a natural response to the end of the Cold War.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO’s raison d’etre disappeared.  But NATO not only survived its obsolescence; it expanded.  How did that happen?  The broad explanation is that NATO was (and is) the main vehicle for the exercise of American influence in Europe.  America won the Cold War.  US policymakers were happy to build on that triumph.  They certainly were not interested in withdrawing from Europe, so the preservation of NATO was a natural objective; the alleged necessity for expanding the alliance provided fresh rationale for its existence.  It helped that the countries of Eastern Europe were eager to join.  Having freed themselves from the yoke of Russian communist domination, they wanted to be part of the West and were vocal about that aspiration.  US domestic politics also entered the picture.  Ethnic East European-Americans in the Midwest were happy to see their ancestral countrymen brought under the American umbrella, and US arms manufacturers eyed a new market east of the old Iron Curtain.

So, NATO expansion, however unwise, was arguably overdetermined. The last major step in this unwisdom was the 2008 NATO declaration, aggressively pushed by the GW Bush administration over allied resistance, that Ukraine and Georgia would become candidates for NATO membership. This prompted William Burns, the US ambassador to Russia at the time (and the current director of the CIA) to write an impassioned letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, observing that

Ukraine’s entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

This history is relevant to the question of how the current crisis might be resolved.  Its resolution will have to involve giving Putin a way out.  I don’t think there is any way out for Putin without offering him something substantial, and that something will have to include some form of reassurance that Ukraine will not become part of NATO.  That was Putin’s bottom line before he invaded, and a fair view of the history is that that was a reasonable demand.  I don’t think he can accept less. Of course, giving Putin the huge prize of Ukrainian neutrality will be a bitter pill.  It will seem to be, and it will be, a reward for aggression.  But whoever said that justice always prevails in international politics?  The blunt fact is that Putin, even with the poor showing of his military thus far, has the power to pulverize Ukraine.  We have the power to stop him, but not the willingness, because the full exercise of our power would involve the risk of nuclear war.