In February 2016, Donald Trump scandalized Republican Party elites at a CNN town hall event in Columbus, Ohio, when he dared to call George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq “a big fat mistake” and “the worst decision any one has made, any president has made, in the history of this country.” Trump’s assertion infuriated GOP insiders not because it was clearly mistaken or even easily disputable, but because it was all too true. A glance at the titles of major books on America in the Middle East written by authors across the political spectrum—Fiasco, Grand Delusion, Losing the Long Game, The Age of Illusions—reveals that plenty of experts had arrived or would arrive at the same negative assessment as Trump.
Trump’s ability to rouse voters and command their loyalty meant that he, unlike the experts, could not be ignored. Those furious Republican insiders initially consoled themselves with the prediction that because Trump had denounced the Iraq invasion in South Carolina—a bastion of patriotic pride in the US military—his insurgent campaign would collapse under the weight of such heresy. But the opposite occurred. Republican voters, and veterans above all, were exasperated by the establishment’s refusal to confront an obvious truth and rallied to him.
Trump’s willingness to speak unflattering truths has been key to his ability to rouse the passions of his supporters and opponents alike. His readiness to break from prior policy toward Ukraine and host a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin has again infuriated the US foreign policy establishment.
The stakes of American policy in Eurasia are greater now than they were a quarter-century ago in the Middle East. Washington is deeply engaged in the largest and most intense war the supercontinent has seen since the Korean War. Indeed, given Washington’s essential role in funding, arming, training, and directly assisting Ukrainian combat forces with targeting and other forms of intelligence, it is virtually a combatant. Although the Russian Federation is substantially less formidable than the Soviet Union in size and strength, it is incomparably more powerful and dangerous than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or coalitions of jihadists like ISIS and al-Qaeda combined.
“Washington threw down a gauntlet to Moscow.”
By aggressively courting Ukraine as an ally and turning it into a military partner against Russia, Washington threw down a gauntlet to Moscow. This was the culmination of a longer process of reckless confrontation. The same post-Cold War bipartisan consensus of heedless liberal internationalists and proponents of a quasi-utopian global primacy that squandered American lives and treasure across the Middle East has now led the nation into a strategic dead end on the Great Eurasian Steppe, draining American money and scarce resources and weapons needed elsewhere. More than three years into the war, there is no compelling reason to believe Russia will suffer defeat. Its economy has proven resilient in the face of sanctions, and it fields a larger and more capable army than Ukraine.
Yet, in confirmation of Thucydides’ insight that men act on hope when reason fails them, America’s bipartisan elites, out of indignation and wounded pride, cling to the belief that Russia will somehow be vanquished—and so prolong a war they cannot win. Proponents of continuing the war argue that it has weakened Russia. That is debatable. What is not debatable is that the war has wrecked Ukraine, crippled Europe’s economy, and consumed American resources. It has also driven Russia into China’s embrace, handing America’s one peer competitor a long, quiet border and secure access to valuable natural resources.
To stifle dissent about the war and its origins, its bipartisan defenders deplore Trump and other skeptics as either ignorant, naïve, or somehow secretly beholden to Vladimir Putin. The reality is that hardheaded skepticism of the war and the policy that produced it stands in the tradition of some of America’s most accomplished diplomats, intelligence officers, and national security officials who waged—and won—the Cold War. This elder generation of Cold War veterans spoke loudly against NATO expansion. Among their successors were those who likewise questioned the wisdom of Washington’s course, yet at the behest of less discerning leaders they carried out that expansion, voicing their candid reservations and objections only in private or in the pages of their memoirs. America’s Ukraine debacle, then, is the product of a bipartisan coalition in which the misguided were full of passionate intensity, while might‑have‑been wise men lacked all conviction.
The push to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance to Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the second term of Bill Clinton’s presidency sparked fierce debate among foreign policy experts. The most notable and prescient critic was George Kennan, who warned in a 1997 New York Times article that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” He further predicted that expansion would trigger a backlash from Moscow, and when it did, proponents would obtusely dismiss it by saying, “that is how the Russians are.” Kennan, a former ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union and the architect of the policy of containment that won the Cold War, was widely regarded as one of America’s greatest diplomats and authorities on Russia. As even proponents of expansion grudgingly concede, Kennan’s unequivocal condemnation of NATO expansion should carry some weight.
“Kennan was no voice in the wilderness.”
Kennan was no voice in the wilderness. In fact, he was expressing the expert consensus. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s point man on expanding NATO, lamented that virtually everyone he knew with expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe opposed it. Standing with Kennan against NATO expansion was a coalition of America’s best foreign policy minds and most experienced hands. Their numbers included noted anti-Soviet hardliners from the Republican Party such as Fred Ikle and Paul Nitze as well as foreign policy luminaries among the Democrats such as Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Bradley. Reagan’s adviser on Eastern European and Soviet affairs, Harvard historian Richard Pipes—known for his deep pessimism about Russia’s political culture—not only inveighed against NATO expansion as unnecessary and unwise, but even regarded the alliance as an anachronism that should be dissolved. Moreover, in 1997, the debate over NATO expansion concerned Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, with perhaps Romania and Slovenia to follow. Neither Ukrainian nor Georgian membership was on the table. Nonetheless, the weight of expert opinion even then deemed NATO expansion a folly.
Perhaps the most prominent dissenter and advocate of enlargement was Zbigniew Brzezinski. A political scientist and Sovietologist who served as National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was known for his abiding antagonism toward Moscow. As he explained in The Grand Chessboard, his 1997 guide to why and how America should seek primacy in Eurasia, Brzezinski saw NATO as a tool for the extension of American power.
Siding with Brzezinski to overrule the Cold War veterans in favor of NATO expansion was Bill Clinton. A Baby Boomer who came of age in an era of unprecedented American abundance and who had escaped reckoning with the harder edge of American power by avoiding service in Vietnam, Clinton’s main interest in the American military was using it abroad to distract attention from his serial private scandals. Some in his administration, however, were more ambitious. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a protégée of Brzezinski’s, was known for her casual attitude to the employment of force. As she infamously put it to then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell during a debate about bombing Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
The Clinton administration deployed that superb military under NATO auspices on two occasions, conducting airstrikes and coordinating ground offensives in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1994-95 and in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999. The administration billed both operations as humanitarian, although they involved America or NATO partnering with entities that American and European security agencies had formerly regarded as terrorist and criminal, like jihadists in Bosnia, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and elements of the Croatian army. The operations marked a radical departure for NATO. An alliance that had originally been founded for self-defense was now conducting interventions outside its members’ territory, redrawing Europe’s borders, and even midwifing a new state (Kosovo).
Washington’s insistence on maintaining NATO despite the end of the Cold War had puzzled some Russians, but its conversion of the Cold War alliance into an organ for intervention and its desire to enlarge it alarmed Russians across the political spectrum. Aleksandr Lebed, a Russian general whose criticism of Boris Yeltsin’s invasion of Chechnya made him one of Russia’s most popular figures in the 1990s, predicted that NATO expansion would lead to a world war. NATO’s intervention in Bosnia led him to compare NATO to “a big drunken hooligan in a kindergarten who says he will hit anyone he likes.” Russia’s leading liberal politician of the time, Grigory Yavlinsky, declared, “If NATO expansion were to aim at ultimate membership for the Baltic States and Ukraine, without Russia, that would be utterly unacceptable.”
Yeltsin had been unabashedly pro-American and famously got along so well with Bill Clinton that their partnership was known as the “Bill and Boris show.” Washington’s use of NATO to bomb Serbia in 1999 brought that show to a crashing end as Yeltsin warned of war and even risked one by ordering Russian paratroopers to seize Pristina’s airport ahead of NATO troops. Before the end of that year, Russia had a new leader, Vladimir Putin. Clearly, Russian opposition to NATO was a function not of Russian domestic politics but of American and NATO behavior.
Few in Washington cared. Officials ignored the Russians’ vociferous objections to NATO’s actions. When Secretary of Defense William Perry questioned Clinton’s intention to bring Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and the Baltic states into NATO, Vice President Al Gore rejected his concerns as overblown.
Like his predecessor, George W. Bush was a Baby Boomer whose most consequential brush with international security affairs before coming to office was a successful effort to avoid service in Vietnam with a stint as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. Although Bush vigorously criticized the foreign policy of his Democrat predecessor, on NATO enlargement he stayed the course, even as he embroiled America deeper in the Middle East following the attacks of 9/11.
Bush’s first contact with a Russian leader came at a summit in Slovenia in June 2001. The Bush administration was more interested in cooperation than conflict with Russia. But only on Washington’s terms. As Donald Rumsfeld framed it in a memorandum, Russia faced a binary choice: It could “consort with Cuba, North Korea, Iran, [and] Iraq,” thereby depriving itself of Western investment and condemning itself to weakness; or it could adopt liberal democratic and market norms, integrate into the American-led liberal international order, and prosper. Rumsfeld laid out his view dispassionately during a meeting in Moscow with his Russian counterpart in August 2001. His logic is difficult to fault, but what’s telling is that in his memorandum he pointed to post-World War II Germany, Japan, and Italy as the models Russia should emulate. In Washington’s eyes, it had vanquished Russia, and Russia should behave accordingly.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 scrambled the Bush administration’s vision for America’s role in the world. When they occurred, Russia was battling an Islamist insurgency that had taken root in its North Caucasus during the first Chechen War of 1994–96. During and after that war, jihadists, including al-Qaeda, had been endeavoring to take advantage of Russia’s defeat in Chechnya to turn Russia’s North Caucasus into a second Afghanistan from which they could export jihad through the rest of the Caucasus and even Tatarstan in the heart of Russia on the Volga. They mounted a determined insurgency and terror campaign, including mass kidnapping, torture, and eventually an invasion of Dagestan and the bombing of residential buildings there and then Moscow in the summer of 1999. It was the jihadist threat that catalyzed Putin’s rise from an intelligence officer to president of the country.
The 9/11 attacks gave Putin what he thought might be an opening to establish a cooperative relationship with Washington. Clinton, if not the Western media, had backed Yeltsin against Chechen rebels in the mid-1990s, so he had reason to think that Bush after 9/11 might support him against jihadists. Putin made sure to be the first foreign leader to telephone Bush after the attacks, and he promptly offered his assistance. When Putin hosted a Pentagon delegation at the beginning of November 2001, Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith found him nervous but knowledgeable, genuine, and substantive in his knowledge and offers of aid. Putin delivered on his promises, facilitating the rapid establishment of American bases in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and providing other forms of support to the US military campaign in Afghanistan.
Just a month later, Washington announced its decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Bush justified the move on the basis of America’s need to develop missile defenses against limited missile threats from “rogue” actors like Iran and North Korea, but Moscow saw it as a destabilizing attempt to exploit America’s technological edge and blunt or neutralize Russia’s nuclear forces and achieve strategic dominance. Then, in November 2002, Bush announced in Prague that NATO would accept seven more states from Eastern Europe as members, including the three former Soviet Baltic states that border Russia.
Bush’s decision, over the objections of France and Germany as well as Russia, to invade Iraq did little to reassure Putin of Washington’s circumspection, particularly since Russian intelligence was aware that Bush’s allegations that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction were unfounded. These developments all overshadowed the establishment of a joint organ called the NATO-Russia Council in May 2002, particularly since the council was merely a consultative body.
In 2004, NATO took in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, as well as the three Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Bush administration saw no reason to pause and looked ahead to another round of expansion that would include the extension of Membership Action Plans to two more former Soviet republics on Russia’s borders, Ukraine and Georgia.
Putin continued to cooperate with NATO, albeit begrudgingly, while echoing Yeltsin’s criticisms of NATO expansion. But the more Putin objected, the more determined Vice President Dick Cheney became to press forward with expansion.
“Cheney’s antagonism to Russia long predated Putin.”
Cheney’s antagonism to Russia long predated Putin. As the Soviet Union was dissolving in 1990—so suddenly and smoothly that the process seemed almost miraculous—Cheney, then secretary of defense, believed that was not enough. He sought to hasten its unraveling by stoking the rivalry between Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and the subordinate Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic President Boris Yeltsin, hosting the latter at a major Pentagon reception. In fact, Cheney had already concluded that the goal should be the dismemberment of Russia itself, lest it ever again pose a threat to the world. This vision of a world without Russia, with its seductively utopian promise of permanent peace in Eurasia, appealed to others in Washington.
Cheney’s thinking on Russia reflected the same maximalism as the controversial Defense Planning Guidance prepared under his oversight in 1992. That document advised that the United States should act—unilaterally and preemptively, if necessary—to deter or suppress the rise of any power that might challenge its global predominance. The logic behind its vision of infinite hegemony sustained by eternal vigilance was irredeemably quixotic. Patrick Buchanan deplored the guidance as a “formula for endless intervention” and a “blank check given to all of America's friends and allies that we’ll go to war to defend their interests.” William Pfaff, writing three decades before the Ukraine war would expose the appalling incapacity of America’s defense industry, noted critically that the guidance “tries to substitute military primacy for the industrial and economic predominance the United States enjoyed between 1945 and 1975 but now has lost.”
The NATO candidacies of Georgia and Ukraine were, for reasons of culture, history, and geostrategy, qualitatively different from those of the Baltic states. Whereas even Tsarist administrators had openly acknowledged that their rule of the empire’s Baltic periphery was anomalous because it boasted higher levels of development than the imperial center due to the Catholic and Lutheran Balts’ long history of integration with Europe, Georgia was an Eastern Orthodox land in the remote Caucasus where it had been a victim of Persian depredations and perennial raids by Muslim slavers from Crimea and the North Caucasus. Russia, responding to fellow Orthodox Christians’ appeals for protection, annexed it in 1801. It was Tsarist authorities who abolished serfdom in Georgia, albeit slightly later than in the empire’s Slavic lands out of deference to Georgia’s nobility.
That Georgia, too, should now become an outpost of the West rankled. But more substantively alarming was that Georgia borders on Chechnya, where Federal Russian forces and loyal Chechens were battling a chronic jihadist insurgency, complete with suicide bombings, hostage seizures, and beheadings. Georgian territory had served as a conduit for fighters, funds, and arms to those jihadists. The precedents of Bosnia and Kosovo, in which Washington and NATO tolerated or even facilitated the flow of arms to jihadists and the KL before intervening and changing international borders, loomed large.
Even as Americans were hunting down jihadists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world, detaining some in Guantánamo and renditioning others to less hospitable places like Albania, Egypt, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Syria, Western media relentlessly criticized Russia’s conduct of its war in Chechnya. Brzezinski’s chairmanship of the Washington-based American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, which he and former Secretary of State General Alexander Haig founded in 1999 and whose members boasted multiple advocates of muscular American defense policy, could hardly have assuaged Russian suspicions of America’s real interests in the Caucasus.
Ukraine was a bigger deal than Georgia, because both its territory and population are much larger and closer to the Russian center. Its border with Russia ran over 2,000 kilometers in length largely across open steppe. Delineated in the 1920s by Soviet authorities, effectively as an internal administrative boundary, the border acquired practical significance only in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Crimea, formerly a favored summer retreat of tsars and Soviet leaders alike and the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, became a lingering object of dispute.
Ukraine’s population overlapped considerably with the Russian Federation’s in the realms of language, culture, and religion. Nearly 1 in 5 of Ukraine’s citizens identified as ethnically Russian, and far larger percentages spoke Russian and held affiliations with the Moscow Patriarchate of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Surzhik, a blend of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, is used throughout much of Ukraine. The spiritual and historic origins of Russians and Ukrainians are thoroughly intertwined. For centuries before Putin, Russians identified Kiev as the birthplace of their civilization. Both nations identify Prince Vladimir’s—or Volodymyr’s—conversion to Christianity in 988 as a foundational moment in their histories. It is not a coincidence that the leaders of the two countries share the name of the same prince. Contra Putin, these facts do not mean that Russian and Ukrainians do not constitute distinct and separate nations, but they do mean that the necessary but artificial conventions of statehood such as clear borders and indivisible identities are in high tension with social realities throughout Ukraine and Russia.
“The experience of Soviet Communism inevitably intensified their anti-Muscovite sentiments.”
Journalists and other observers in the 1990s routinely described independent Ukraine as a “torn” or “cleft” country, with those in eastern Ukraine generally neutral or favorably disposed toward Russia and those in western Ukraine starkly hostile. That dynamic of enmity predated the Soviet period and was a product of Ukraine’s status as a borderland between Catholic Poles and Orthodox Russians. Stalin reinforced it when after World War II, he stripped from Poland and incorporated into Soviet Ukraine Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, territories whose predominantly Ukrainian populations had known Hapsburg rule and never Tsarist, let alone Soviet domination. The experience of Soviet Communism inevitably intensified their anti-Muscovite sentiments.
Given Ukraine’s polarized population and its weak tradition of statehood, its political orientation was up for grabs, its nationalism under construction. Since opposition to Russia supplies the raison d’être of NATO, membership in the alliance would ineluctably reshape Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia in a hostile direction. Points of commonality would no longer be sources of solidarity but would instead become sites of contention.
Ukraine at the beginning of the century was a most unlikely candidate for NATO. It was so misgoverned and corrupt that, despite possessing some of one of the most generously endowed territories in Europe and a large, educated population, only in 2006 did its economy return to the size it had been in 1990. The economies of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, let alone Poland, had all outstripped Ukraine in growth. In 2009, the International Monetary Fund quit the country in protest of its pervasive corruption and abysmal governance. Moreover, Ukraine’s population expressed no vocation for NATO. To the contrary, opinion polls revealed that less than 30 percent of the population favored membership in NATO and solid majorities opposed it. So why was Washington so insistent that this distant, diffident, and floundering country become a treaty ally?
In 2007, a visibly nervous Vladimir Putin delivered a demarche at the Munich Security Conference. He opened by cautioning his listeners that his remarks would likely come across as “unduly polemical.” He went on to excoriate Washington’s use of force without regard for international law and norms, and to denounce what he termed America’s embrace of “hyperpower.” NATO expansion, he declared, “represents a serious provocation.” Asking the rhetorical question, “against whom is this expansion intended?” he vowed to do everything he could to prevent it.
The speech triggered an uproar among American officialdom, although its content should not have surprised anyone. Moreover, as the sometime American official and scholar Angela Stent acknowledged, the reaction of some Europeans revealed that they agreed with much of Putin’s critique.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was sitting in the audience. As a career CIA analyst and former Director of Central Intelligence with a doctorate in Soviet studies, Gates was exceptionally well positioned to interpret Putin’s message and thinking. Nonetheless, Putin’s speech, Gates recalled, took him aback. In his response the following day, Gates declined to exchange vitriol and escalate, opting instead to deflect from the situation with humor, to avow that “one Cold War was quite enough,” and to accept Putin’s invitation to visit him in Russia.
Upon his return to Washington from Munich, however, Gates chose to perpetuate Washington’s self-deception that Putin was erratic. When George W. Bush asked about the speech, Gates explained it away as psychological in essence, “the product of deep and long-term resentment and bitterness” at Russia’s fall from superpower status. Yet Gates in his memoirs confesses that he was not forthright with Bush 43. Inexplicably, he failed to share with the president his conviction that “the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41.” At the heart of that mismanagement, Gates believed, lay NATO enlargement.
Gates was not alone in his misgivings about NATO expansion. The ambassador to Moscow at the time was William Burns, a highly regarded diplomat who was well qualified for his post with his knowledge of Russian and prior experience in the country. The plan to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO alarmed him too. As he famously warned his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in February 2008, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite” from “the knuckle-draggers” in the Kremlin to “Putin’s sharpest liberal critics.” If Washington insisted on pushing Georgian membership, the ambassador predicted, the “prospects of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed conflict” would be high.
Rice, like Gates and Burns, had professional expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe, having been trained in that field in graduate school and then serving under George H.W. Bush. And like her colleagues, she too had deep misgivings about the NATO expansion, in part because France and Germany made clear they opposed membership for Ukraine and Georgia. She judged the candidacies of Ukraine and Georgia to be so problematic that she hoped that the president, now in the final year of his second term, would simply quietly decline to take up the issue and run the clock out.
Why, then, did Washington insist on bringing Ukraine into NATO?
Dick Cheney remained a consistent—if not always well-informed—advocate of expansion. Undeterred by the debacle over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Cheney’s staffers attempted to browbeat National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill into changing her assessment when, in a briefing to President Bush on Ukraine and Georgia, she conveyed the intelligence finding that the potential for conflict with Russia was high.
Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley scheduled a National Security Council meeting to take up the issue of Ukraine and Georgia. With less than a year left in office, Bush was looking to deliver on his “Freedom Agenda,” the quasi-mystical belief that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands” and that America had a divinely ordained mission to spread democracy to “every nation and culture.”
That agenda was floundering in Iraq and Afghanistan, but bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO might at least partially redeem it. Hadley therefore had the Ambassador to NATO and former Cheney deputy Victoria Nuland speak to the meeting via teleconference from Brussels. Nuland assured Bush that the Georgians and Ukrainians had successfully battled corruption and reformed their politics and economies and therefore deserved membership. She then said of membership, “If they want it and meet the criteria, how can the United States be the ones saying no?”
According to Nuland’s simple, clear, and misguided rationale, the question of whether the United States should bind itself by treaty to war on behalf of two sovereign states was now a procedural one. The final decision was already beyond the purview of the elected representatives of the American people.
George W. Bush went along with Nuland, seconding her logic that American sovereignty had to be subordinate to the mission of democratization: “If these two democratic states want MAP [Membership Action Plans], I can’t say no.” Gates and Rice advised caution at the meeting but offered no dissenting counsel despite their misgivings. Rice rationalized her temporizing by telling herself that Bush had made his decision “on principle,” and that it was his commitment to doing “what was right” that she so admired.
“Public opinion in Ukraine was overwhelmingly against NATO membership.”
If Nuland’s logic was arguably fallacious, her assessments of Georgia and Ukraine were misleading, if not deliberate misrepresentations. Public opinion in Ukraine was overwhelmingly against NATO membership, with multiple polls showing 55 percent to 70 percent opposed and only 20 to 25 percent in favor. As Nuland herself later put it, NATO at the time was so unpopular that it was a “four-letter word” in Ukraine. To get around this popular opposition, the Americans arranged for Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and chairman of the parliament to sign a letter requesting membership. That act outraged many Ukrainian voters. The prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, began to go wobbly. Worried about reelection, she said that Ukraine had no need for NATO. The US secretary of state had to intervene personally to get Tymoshenko back on track.
Rice anticipated that a battle royale would ensue at the NATO summit in Bucharest scheduled for April 2008. Only fourteen of NATO’s twenty-six members were ready to support Ukraine’s membership. Germany and France were leading the resistance, but standing behind them were Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Norway. Even Great Britain, normally so dutiful toward Washington, was wavering. But Rice had her orders from Bush. Where logic and argument could not prevail, sanctimonious scolding had to. When the German foreign minister laid out his reservations about the candidacies of Georgia and Ukraine, Rice stepped aside to allow Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, a former journalist and firebrand from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, to silence his counterpart by browbeating him over German responsibility for World War II. How could a German respond?
The second day proved equally tense as Bush personally pressured German Chancellor Angela Merkel to give in. Eventually, Merkel agreed to a compromise statement that affirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would become members and simply refrained from setting a precise date.
Washington had asserted its will: NATO would expand, skeptical allies, diffident Ukrainians, and recalcitrant Russians notwithstanding. As Rice put it, “Moscow needs to know that the Cold War is over and Russia [sic] lost.” America’s secretary of state apparently took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis so literally as to believe that time had stopped in 1991 and the Russian Federation, as a successor to the Soviet Union, was obliged to remain a supplicant in perpetuity.
The Bucharest decision combined the mystical idealism of Bush’s freedom agenda with the pseudo-Machiavellian maximalist primacy expressed in Cheney’s 1992 Pentagon Planning Guidance.
On the night of August 7, 2008, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his American-trained army to fire upon Russian peacekeepers and attack in South Ossetia in a bid to seize that republic, which had broken away from Georgia after a civil war in the early 1990s, and return it to Tbilisi’s control. Waiting Russian army units, however, pounced, drove the Georgians back, and advanced into Georgia, threatening Tbilisi. After French mediation, the five-day war concluded in a decisive Russian victory.
The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 should have surprised no one. Burns had predicted a war and Putin at Bucharest had promised one. Tension between Georgia and Russia had been building visibly through the spring and into the summer. Rice had paid a visit to the American-trained and educated Saakashvili in July and made a point to appear with him in public to demonstrate Washington’s solidarity. In private, however, she warned him not to trigger a war. He, however, did precisely that, as an EU fact-finding mission conclusively established. After the crisis, Rice bemoaned Saakashvili as “proud” and “impulsive,” while Gates deplored the would-have-been NATO ally as “an aggressive and impetuous nationalist.”
Yet somehow despite the abundant warnings and signs of an impending clash in the Caucasus, CIA Director Michael Hayden was surprised when, on Aug. 8, he received a phone call from the White House requesting urgent intelligence assistance for Georgia. So low was Georgia on his list of priorities that he was not even sure the CIA had personnel covering the South Caucasian country and had to scramble to put together an ad-hoc team of case officers to go to the country and spot the furthest advancing Russian forces with GPS equipment. As the CIA was groping to make sense of what was taking place, heady talk of retaliation against Russia was filling the White House. Cheney, according to different accounts, began advocating for air strikes on Russian forces until Hadley sobered the discussion with a question, “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?” It was a rare invocation of American national interests, and the question answered itself.
The war was devastating to Georgia, and an embarrassment for the United States. Few countries had been so effusively pro-American as Georgia, which had even deployed a brigade to Iraq to buck up Washington’s fiction of robust multi-national support for the American war there. Yet when Georgia was in its hour of need, the most Washington could do to repay its would-be NATO ally was to airlift those soldiers back from Iraq and deliver humanitarian supplies. Dick Cheney, the would-be architect of perpetual primacy, paid a visit to Georgia. So uninformed was he about the conflict in which he had proposed to intervene that even after visiting he remained under the false impression that South Ossetia and Abkhazia were majority Russian in population, when in fact exceedingly few Russians lived in either.
It was precisely because America had so little at stake that Cheney and the rest of Washington could afford the luxury of giving little heed to Georgia. To anyone paying attention, the debacle had revealed a disturbing level of strategic illiteracy and incompetence on the part of George W. Bush and his national security team. But what American would find it worthwhile to pay attention to a tiny country on the periphery of Eurasia? Reflecting in 2014 about NATO expansion to Georgia, Robert Gates conceded that the effort to bring Georgia into the alliance had been “truly overreaching.” His judgment about America’s Ukraine project was even more acrid.
Recognizing that by 2009, relations with Russia had reached a dead end, Barack Obama came into office hoping for a “reset.” Obama’s initiative got off to an inauspicious start, however, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed her Russian counterpart a gimmick button with a mistranslated label that was meant to be labeled with the Russian word for “Reset” but instead said “Overload.” The responsibility for that botched translation fell to Michael McFaul, a professor of political science from Stanford serving as Obama’s senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs.
McFaul had been an early backer of Obama and the two were close. In 2012, Obama appointed him ambassador to Moscow. It was an unusual choice and not universally welcomed by career US diplomats. True, McFaul had familiarity with Russia. He had studied there as an undergraduate, had worked there, spoke the language, albeit imperfectly, and continued to write about the country’s politics. Yet, as he himself emphasized in an interview with a Russian publication right before leaving to take up the post of ambassador, he did not regard himself as a Russia hand. He lacked knowledge of the subjects that had traditionally defined diplomatic expertise on Russia, such as Russian literature or nuclear strategy, and instead described his area of specialization as “democratization, anti-dictatorial movements, and revolutions.”
Thus, by his own admission, McFaul was not so much a scholar of democracy as an evangelist of democratization. His mission was not to understand or interpret Russia but to change it. Obama’s ambassador may have been more exuberant and less discreet than the average American diplomat, but his belief in the imminent triumph of a pro-American liberal order, and his innocent disbelief that anyone could legitimately object, did not reflect a personality quirk but rather a bipartisan delusion. As the historian and former Obama State Department official Michael Kimmage observed, animating American policy toward Russia and its neighborhood was a persistent conviction that “democracy promotion—an enthusiasm of the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations—was a neutral enterprise, almost an act of political philanthropy.”
“This worldview denied Russia any legitimate claim to sovereignty.”
This worldview denied Russia any legitimate claim to sovereignty. Non-democracies, McFaul believed, forfeited their right to international sovereignty because they failed to respect the sovereignty of their citizens. He conceded that this denial stood at sharp odds with diplomatic norms, but, he believed, those norms were obsolete. “There was a time when championing state sovereignty was a progressive idea,” he wrote, “since the advance of statehood helped destroy empires.” But today, “those who champion the sovereignty of the people are the new progressives,” and progressivism determines international norms.
McFaul’s liberal internationalism was entirely consistent with George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Indeed, McFaul wrote in support of Bush and the invasion of Iraq in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in 2003, arguing that to “gain more legitimacy as the voice of the international community, the UN must make efforts to represent the people of the world.” In other words, “take up the cause of democratization” or face irrelevance—or worse.
McFaul was a crusader, but a guileless one. The proponent of democratic revolution never stood a chance in Moscow, a former epicenter of world revolution. True to his activist instincts, McFaul ignored the advice of professional diplomats and ventured to wage an information war against the Kremlin on Russian social media. He quickly discovered that he was at something of a disadvantage: Although the US embassy in Moscow might have possessed formidable capabilities, the government of the Russian Federation happened to command greater resources for reaching the Russian public than it did. In February 2014, just over two years after arriving in Moscow with high hopes and boundless ambition, he announced his premature resignation.
McFaul’s departure coincided with a new low point in relations with Russia, but this had little to do with his clumsy attempt to reinvent diplomacy by wading into the domestic politics of his host country. A far more consequential struggle had been unfolding in neighboring Ukraine, where massive protests against the elected government were reaching their culmination.
The movement roiling Ukraine in the winter of 2013-2014 was foreshadowed by the so-called “Orange Revolution” that took place 10 years earlier. When in the second round of the fall 2004 presidential elections the candidate favored by Moscow, Viktor Yanukovych, claimed victory, a vast coalition of non-governmental organizations inside and outside Ukraine swung into action. Almost instantly, buses bearing supporters of the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko poured into the Ukrainian capital to protest. By late November, the protesters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, living in a massive tent city that had been set up for them and calling for the annulment of the elections. The pressure helped compel state authorities to call for a third round of voting. Yushchenko won that round and thereby clinched the office of president.
The degree of coordination behind the protests, with motor pools to transport participants, tent cities to shelter them, provisions to water and feed them, and concerts and fireworks to keep them entertained, belied an impressive logistical base. As McFaul attested in a 2007 analysis of the Orange Revolution, “The protest was not spontaneous.” It reflected months of careful planning and preparation by a network of pro-democracy activists from inside Ukraine and neighboring Georgia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Romania, trained, funded, and advised by American and European experts. This is not to deny that the frustrations and aspirations of Yushchenko’s Ukrainian supporters were genuine. But it is to agree with McFaul that American assistance was critical to the success of the Orange Revolution.
Why was Washington so invested in Ukrainian elections, protests, and changing the dynamics of Ukrainian domestic politics? Charles Krauthammer put it plainly in The Washington Post: The Orange Revolution “is about Russia first, democracy only second.” “The West,” he continued, “wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe’s march to the east.” Russia needed to be driven back conclusively, and the place to do that was Ukraine.
Belying the triumphalism of 2004, the victors of the Orange Revolution quickly demonstrated that their passion for self-enrichment was stronger than their commitment to democracy, self-determination, or the rule of law, and so in 2010 Ukrainian voters chose Yanukovych. International observers judged the elections free and fair. The elections confirmed not so much a polarization in values among voters as a stark and worrisome geographic divide, with voters in the east heavily favoring Yanukovych and those in the west Tymoshenko.
The Orange Revolution had soured, but as the Bucharest Summit had conclusively revealed, Washington’s ardor for Ukraine never waned. Writing in The Washington Post in September 2013, Carl Gershman, head of the National Endowment for Democracy, described an intense competition for influence heating up all along Russia’s borders. Echoing Krauthammer, he named Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in this competition and called for a more assertive stance. By pressing Russia hard in its neighborhood, Gershman speculated, Washington might even bring down Putin.
Gershman’s portrayal of bullied populations eager for Western protection bore little resemblance to reality in Ukraine. Polls from 2009 through 2013 continued consistently to show weak support in Ukraine for accession to NATO—generally between 15 percent and 25 percent—and robust opposition, ranging from 57 percent to 70 percent.
In the fall of 2013, Yanukovych was expected to sign an association agreement with the European Union. For Ukrainians mired in a perpetually stagnant economy, the agreement offered relief from bleak prospects and therefore enjoyed considerable popular support. A major hitch was that the agreement would require a sharp reduction in commerce with Russia—far and away Ukraine’s largest trading partner. Ukraine was being forced into a binary choice: either Europe or Russia. Putin responded to the EU offer with a mix of economic threats and incentives for Kiev, including very generous loans. On November 28, Yanukovych met with EU representatives in Vilnius and stunned them by refusing to sign the agreement.
His decision did not, however, stun everyone in Kiev, where demonstrations against Yanukovych had begun a week before the meeting in Vilnius. Immediately upon Yanukovych’s refusal, a network of opposition activists again went into action, coordinating the arrival of tens of thousands of protestors to Kiev’s Independence Square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. As in 2004, many of them had been trained in Poland and elsewhere abroad in the tactics of protest and civil disobedience.
Washington was in the thick of the showdown that was underway. Speaking before the US-Ukraine Foundation Conference in Washington, DC on December 13, 2013, Victoria Nuland famously boasted that Washington’s $5 billion investment in democracy promotion in Ukraine was now paying off. As the numbers of demonstrators in and around Kiev’s central Maidan swelled to 200,000, Washington’s encouragement was visible and significant. Nuland and US Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy were among the Americans who traveled to Kyiv to cheer on the Maidan demonstrators.
Initial attempts by Ukrainian police and security forces to disperse the protestors backfired, as news and images of their violence spurred more Ukrainians to join the Maidan or local protests in their own cities.
Government security forces, however, had no monopoly on violence on the Maidan. Alongside the peaceful demonstrators were militias of hardcore Ukrainian nationalists armed, ready, and even eager to clash with the government. On Feb. 18, street clashes escalated into gun battles as militiamen joined in. Who started shooting is hotly disputed and largely irrelevant. By Feb. 20, over 100 protestors and 13 policemen had lost their lives.
With the demonstrations having boiled over into lethal clashes, Yanukovych yielded to pressure from Putin among others and agreed on February 21 to sign a deal brokered by the Europeans with his opposition. The agreement provided for a presidential election before the end of the year and required the opposition to abjure further violence and disarm. Within hours, however, the agreement fell apart and Yanukovych fled Ukraine in fear for his life to Russia. The Ukrainian parliament formally removed Yanukovych from office and appointed a rival as acting president.
This was a heady moment for the American foreign policy establishment. Obama Administration and State Department personnel exchanged celebratory emails. Some speculated that the Euromaidan triumph would catalyze the downfall of Putin, a domino theory of democratization in the service of geopolitics.
But the rejoicing was premature. On February 20, protests in Crimea broke out. Seven days later, Russian military personnel in unmarked green uniforms popped up throughout the peninsula. By the end of the next day, they had assumed control of the peninsula almost bloodlessly. On March 16, Crimea voted in a referendum to join Russia and two days later Moscow formalized its annexation.
Russian public opinion had always regarded Crimea as properly part of Russia, and Putin saw his recovery of the peninsula rewarded with an upshot in popular support. Meanwhile, the overthrow of Yanukovych played badly in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where, as in Crimea, residents identified culturally with Russia. They felt disenfranchised by events in Kiev and stood to lose economically from the EU accession deal. Propelled by those sentiments, pro-Russian separatists—backed by Moscow but predominantly local—declared Luhansk and Donetsk independent in April. A sharp Ukrainian military response, directed with gusto by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, inflicted suffering and casualties on the Donbas population. As the war in the next two years took the lives of over 10,000, including more than 3,000 civilians, local and Russian popular opinion alike rallied behind the separatist cause. The arrival in the Donbas of hardcore Ukrainian nationalist militias espousing virulently anti-Russian ideas and embracing pro-Nazi aesthetics solidified support for Russian separatism.
“It had gotten America embroiled in a struggle of peripheral interest to it.”
Far from delivering the “great prize” of Ukraine to the West, the Euromaidan tore the country apart as the passions ignited by the protests and stoked by the likes of Nuland and McCain polarized and radicalized Ukraine’s population. This outcome was entirely predictable. Ukraine had always been a divided society and fragile state. What is more, Washington’s recklessness had even reversed the domino theory of democratization. Far from undermining Putin, the Euromaidan had consolidated support for him where it counted most: at home and in eastern Ukraine.
Washington’s second cardinal strategic error was that it had gotten America embroiled in a struggle of peripheral interest to it but of vital interest to its rival, Moscow. Even Barack Obama acknowledged this reality: Because Ukraine was a core interest for Russia but not for the United States, Washington would inevitably face significant disadvantages there.
Meanwhile, Brzezinski, the old sorcerer of American primacy in Eurasia, belatedly recognized that his apprentices were not equal to the task. Seeing that events were getting out of control and that Washington’s Ukraine policy was leading America, its allies, and Ukraine into treacherous territory, on February 24, 2014, he urged Washington to guarantee Moscow that Ukraine would, following the model of Cold War–era Finland, maintain strict neutrality and “no participation in any military alliance viewed by Moscow as directed at itself.”
“Washington spurned any notion of ‘Finlandization’ as a craven betrayal of sovereignty.”
But Washington spurned any notion of “Finlandization” as a craven betrayal of sovereignty and a disgraceful act of appeasement. Washington’s national security bureaucracy wanted to pursue confrontation, and pursue confrontation is what it did. As The New York Times revealed, within mere hours of Yanukovych’s departure from Ukraine, the CIA and Britain’s foreign intelligence organization, MI6, began pursuing a partnership with Ukraine’s intelligence services. This was before Russia acted in Crimea or the Donbas.
The attraction was obvious. Perhaps no other intelligence service in the world could be as familiar and knowledgeable about Russia and its security services as Ukraine’s. Beyond the countries’ linguistic and cultural proximity, many in the Ukrainian intelligence services had been educated and trained in the Soviet Union alongside their Russian counterparts. The Ukrainians offered an unparalleled ability not only to spy and operate on Russian territory but also to run operations against the Russians in third countries. Against the express direction of the White House to exercise restraint in the burgeoning security relationship, the CIA eagerly trained Ukrainian commandos for kinetic operations as well as spies. When in 2016 its Ukrainian partners mounted a botched raid on Crimea and assassinated Russians using explosives, the White House reacted in fury. Obama, however, proved unwilling or unable to assert control. As The New York Times put it in describing the close collaboration between the American, British, and Ukrainian intelligence services against the Russians, “a shadow war was now in overdrive.”
Thus, by the time Donald Trump took office in 2017, the American national security establishment was thoroughly imbricated in a civil war involving ethnic Russians on Russia’s border. The new partnership rendered the question of Ukraine’s membership in NATO largely irrelevant. Trump’s skepticism about the wisdom of pursuing conflict with Russia scandalized the foreign policy elite to the point where many made or entertained allegations that the American president was colluding with Russia, constricting his room for diplomatic maneuvers. His appointments in April 2018 of two notorious Russia hawks—the ambitious yet unimaginative Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and the simple-minded and comically combative John Bolton as national security advisor—ensured that America would continue to slide down the same path toward a confrontation in Eurasia.
Both Pompeo and Bolton expanded and deepened American military and intelligence collaboration with Kiev, authorizing still more new “secret” bases and training programs. Designating those installations as secret perhaps hid them from the sight of average Americans, but they did not escape the Russians’ notice. A range of NATO members such as Britain, France, Poland, and Turkey also supplied military equipment and training to the Ukrainian armed forces, steadily building their capacity. Ukraine was effectively a Western military partner.
Proponents of an aggressive stance sometimes like to point out that Putin had by his own acts created on his borders the strategic nightmare he claimed he was seeking to prevent. By annexing Crimea and backing the Donbas separatists, he had transformed Ukraine from a potentially hostile neighbor into an avowed enemy. Moscow, however, saw this as making the best of a situation that became irretrievable in February 2014, salvaging what it could from a Ukraine that the United States had coopted.
Washington certainly had no interest in Ukrainian-Russian reconciliation. Indeed, it drove the wedge between the two countries still deeper by promoting the breakdown of the cultural and spiritual bonds that still joined them. Ukraine in 1991 inherited its borders and political sovereignty from Soviet Ukraine, but the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, an institution that predated the Soviet era, remained under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. Following Ukraine’s emergence as an independent state in 1992, a rival patriarchate was established in Kiev, but it lacked autocephaly—that is, a patriarch recognized by the other Orthodox patriarchs as legitimate and independent. Pompeo, the American Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, and the ambassadors to Ukraine and Greece, among other officials, endorsed and assisted a concerted and controversial effort to obtain autocephaly for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
In 2019, the Patriarch of Constantinople granted the Ukrainian church autocephaly, a move backed by three other churches but opposed or ignored by ten, splitting the Orthodox world and sparking bitter disputes among Ukrainians over parishes and church properties. What had been a shared religious heritage was now a rift—a neat bit of cultural sabotage.
With the Donbas War unresolved, a peace process mediated by the OSCE moribund, and Ukraine’s armed forces and security services growing stronger and more integrated as NATO’s military partner, Moscow again faced the choice of escalating now or acquiescing later. American officials in the Biden administration and bureaucracies alike certainly saw little incentive to compromise with Russia, which, as they emphasized routinely, they saw as a power in ineluctable decline.
In July 2021, Putin published an article, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” His argument that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians constitute one people by virtue of common descent from Ancient Rus and common historical experiences is certainly open to contestation, but it was hardly new or crackpot. History encompasses change as much as continuity and thus can never be dispositive in debates over identity and belonging. But it can provide context. It is useful to remember that Russia and Ukraine were part of the same state for longer than the territories making up the Louisiana Purchase have been part of the United States, for longer than Geneva has been part of Switzerland, Rome a part of Italy, or Lorraine and Nice a part of France. The fundamental message Putin sought to convey was that Moscow regarded Ukraine as an inalienable part of its sphere of interest and would fight for it rather than see Ukraine turned against it as an “anti-Russia.” Far from engaging in duplicity or obfuscation, Putin again was speaking clearly and directly.
The prospect of war did not intimidate Washington. It had little skin in the game. Some Washington officials seemingly reveled in the possibility. If Russia did invade, they explained, they would bring it to ruin by backing a robust Ukrainian insurgency to wear down and bleed it to death. The notion echoed Brzezinski’s buoyant words to Jimmy Carter following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” The belief that the Soviets’ war in Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union later entered the conventional wisdom in Washington. Ironically, the desire to avenge Washington’s own defeat in Afghanistan in 2021 colored American thinking on Ukraine in 2022. If using Ukrainians to bleed the Russians white was not enough, the Biden administration was supremely confident that it could crush Russia’s economy with unprecedented economic sanctions and thereby bring Putin to heel.
But what about Ukraine and the Ukrainians? What price might they pay?
In 1980, as worker unrest gripped Communist Poland, the United States learned through a high-level spy in the Polish military that the Soviet army was on the verge of invading to restore order. Such an invasion would have encountered popular resistance, and the resulting bloodshed would have thrown the Warsaw Pact into severe crisis, handing the West a public-relations windfall on the scale of the Soviets’ 1956 invasion of Hungary. But as Brzezinski knew, it would also have devastated his birthplace of Poland and inflicted lasting damage on US–Soviet relations.
It was only roughly a year earlier that Brzezinski had played on Soviet fears to entice them to intervene in Afghanistan. In Poland, he did the opposite. Determined to avert an invasion, he ensured that Carter’s message to Brezhnev paired warnings of retaliatory measures with a promise “not to exploit the events in Poland, nor to threaten legitimate Soviet security interests in that region.”
Despite being divided by an ideological rift far deeper than any today and engaged in a global competition with far higher stakes, Washington and Moscow during the Cold War managed to sustain a sober relationship grounded in mutual respect and shared understandings—enough to communicate effectively and to avoid blow-ups. The invasion was averted.
American intelligence on Russian military movements and activities near and along Ukraine’s border was exceptionally good. In late 2021, it detected preparations for an invasion. In November, Biden dispatched Bill Burns, now serving as Director of Central Intelligence, to deliver a blunt message to Putin: We are fully aware that you are contemplating an invasion of Ukraine and if you follow through, we will assist Ukraine, we will rally the whole of the West, and we will impose crushing sanctions on you. The message, conveyed both orally and in a personal letter from Biden to Putin, was designed to intimidate and deter. It failed.
It failed because it violated the ancient admonition of Sun Tzu not to press a desperate enemy too hard, for even a weak opponent will fight ferociously if convinced he has no other choice. From the end of the Cold War, Washington had pursued a consistent expansion of its presence in Eurasia, virtually doubling the size of NATO from 16 members in 1991 to 30 in 2022. Washington has done this despite the consistent objections and then explicit warnings of the only logical target of this alliance, the Russian Federation. Although Washington failed to bring Ukraine into NATO as a formal member, it did transform Ukraine into a de facto ally of the United States after 2014. Following the Russian invasion, multiple officials in Washington openly—and cynically—hailed Ukraine’s war as a means of weakening Russia.
Almost as if it feared anyone might wonder whether it bore any responsibility for the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted on affixing the qualifier “unprovoked” to references to Russia’s invasion. Yet even Robert Gates—a self-described hardliner on Russia with a record to prove it—had called Washington’s effort to bring Ukraine into NATO as “an especially monumental provocation.”
America’s current predicament, where it finds itself one step away from becoming a direct combatant against a rival nuclear power in war that involves neither territory nor principles that are vital, is puzzling. The experience of the Cold War offers instructive precedents on how to manage the crisis with Russia. There is also a rich literature on the myriad structural shortcomings, weaknesses, and irresolvable dilemmas of Putin’s authoritarian Russia, some of which are even more acute than those that brought down the Soviet Union. Confronting Russia on territory fairly described as sacred to it in terms of both religious (Kievan Rus) and secular (Tsarist and World War II) history was, paradoxically, perhaps the best way to give Putin’s regime a new lease on life.
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has persuaded itself that expanding US power in Eurasia is akin to an act of altruism. It has clung to this belief even as it violated the democratic principles and values it was professing to promote by engineering Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership despite the Ukrainian public’s opposition; by pretending Georgia had not initiated war in 2008; and by abetting the mass upheaval that led to violence and culminated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s appallingly corrupt but democratically elected government in 2014.
Convincing themselves that any who objected were anti-democratic and therefore illegitimate and driven solely by base motives, Washington policymakers and their pursued policies and used a language of will and power that cast the world as an arena of competition—some countries as prizes to be won, others as pivots to control, and still others as regimes to be countered. This strategic and moral confusion in foreign policy bred a combination of overconfidence and breathtaking ineptness that has secured not primacy but disaster for America and its allies and partners.
Washington’s Eurasian morass has been decades in the making. Extricating America will be a long-term and perilous challenge. Almost alone among major Western leaders, Donald Trump has had the fortitude to characterize the Ukraine war as the calamity it is. May the Alaska summit mark the beginning of a return to an American foreign policy anchored in its earlier tradition of clear-eyed assessments of national interest and the prudent use of power.