Was the Ukraine crisis tragic and unnecessary?
Does Vladimir Putin have a point?
The underlying cause of the Ukraine crisis is the Russian President’s belief that NATO, by expanding into former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europeafter the Cold War, is threatening the security of its old enemy Russia. As well as seeking a guarantee that Ukraine will never join the Western alliance, Putin wants NATO to pull troops and weapons out of states like Poland and Romania that were once behind the Iron Curtain. President Joe Biden has refused such demands since they would shatter the alliance’s core purpose, appease Russian aggression and desert nations that embraced democracy after decades under Soviet repression. He ordered US troops to both Poland and Romania last week.
Putin is right that NATO moved east after the Cold War, in a way that may almost have been guaranteed to anger Moscow. The bloc's assurances that it is a defensive alliance get no hearing in the Kremlin. Had Russia transformed into a western-style European democracy, this wouldn’t have been an issue. But starry-eyed optimists who held such hopes in the 1990s were always disregarding lessons of the country’s scorched-earth political history.
So did NATO’s triumphalism and stampede over Russian pride pave the way for where we are now? It was always a possibility that a future strongman in the Kremlin would use NATO expansion to spark a foreign policy crisis and as a nationalistic tool for his own legitimacy as Putin has done. George Kennan,the diplomat who in the 1940s coined the core US containment policy against an expansionist Soviet Union, predicted exactly this scenario after the Clinton administration decided to go ahead with NATO expansion.
“That the Russians will not react wisely and moderately to this decision of NATO to expand its boundaries to the Russian frontiers is clear,” Kennan wrote in his diary on January 4, 1997. He predicted a “strong militarization” of Russian politics and claims by Russia that it was an innocent victim of foreign aggressors. He predicted Moscow would seek to unite Iran and China to form an anti-Western bloc. “Thus will develop a wholly and even tragically unnecessary division between East & West and in effect a renewal of the Cold War," he wrote.
Twenty-five years later, the final plank of Kennan’s warning fell into place as Putin clinched a new strategic friendship Friday between China and Russia in his Olympian summit with President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
The case for NATO expansion
But what would have happened had NATO not expanded?
President Bill Clinton told historian Taylor Branch for his contemporary taped oral history of his administration that he spent a 1994 trip to Europe dancing between Russian fears of NATO expansion and NATO’s fear of Russia. He said then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl worried about the possibility of Russian influence on the eastern border of his newly unified nation and also about the threat of authoritarianism in newly liberated post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Clinton also presciently noted that Poland’s move west would leave Ukraine isolated.
Critics of NATO expansion must also answer the question of why nations that had been suppressed, ruled by outsiders and even been wiped off the map at times, should not grasp the freedom denied them even before Soviet domination? And would a vacuum in Eastern Europe have already caused a resurgent, imperial Russia to move west once more and again threaten European democracies?
Biden’s actions have reaffirmed a 70-year American commitment to Western European security. US power allowed market democracies in Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltics to grow and thrive, despite some political backsliding in recent years. But Putin also knows that US commitment is not a given in the long term. In a speech in Poland in 2017, then-President Donald Trump implied that the West was more threatened by the weakening of white culture and tradition through waves of outside immigration than it was by the Kremlin. His far-right populism and vision of national sovereignty is closer to Putin’s worldview than the traditional US creed. A new Trump presidency, should he run again in 2024, would raise new doubts about NATO’s purpose and his own affinity for Putin. Already, pro-Trump Republican senators are questioning Biden’s dispatch of more troops to Europe.
With all this in mind, the current standoff is hardly remarkable. It’s perhaps surprising that all the post-Cold War forces that have precipitated the crisis took so long to hit boiling point.
Ukraine’s plight is part of a broader crisis. It's about whether individual nations have the chance to choose their own political destiny or whether they must live in the sphere of influence of a greater, hostile power. And whether the US still has the stomach to serve as Europe’s security guarantor nearly a century after the political madness that caused World War II and forged the modern world.
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