Not enough appeasement, or not enough deterrence?
I have been watching the Harry Potter series of films, a decade or two after first reading the books. Aside from being extremely entertaining, they show Rowling to have been weirdly prescient about the moral dilemmas only developing as she was writing, and now flourishing in grotesque fashion. How large sectors of supposedly civilized populations can be attracted to blatant racism. How cruelty, destruction, and contemptuous corruption can likewise become an attractive political brand. How corrupt powers corrupt the truth first, and then replace merit with lickspittle devotion among their followers, with predictable consequences. What seemed comically phantasmagoric has now turned into our day-to-day reality, with phones taking the place of wands.
It is not only relevant to US political scene, but also internationally, in the turn taken by Russia from a struggling post-Soviet democracy or at least quasi-democracy, back to an imperial emperorship under Vladimir Putin. After sending clouds of misinformation into the West, he started attacking Georgia and Ukraine with dementors, trying, without success so far, to squeeze the soul out of his "little brother".
Alexander Vindman has something to say about the matter, in his new book, "The Folly of Realism". Vindman came to fame through his testimony against Voldemort, -er, Trump- during the first impeachment hearing, which revolved around corrupt conditioning of aid to Ukraine to get false political testimony against his foes. Vindman was on the NSC, and had participated extensively in Defense department and White House policy development around the changing conditions in Ukraine and Russia. His book recounts the long historical road that led to the current Ukraine war, and the many missteps by the US that are now part of that history.
The question is about US policy around the catastrophe in Ukraine- what was the US role in it? What should our policy have been, and what should it be now? The "realism" in Vindman's title refers to the foreign policy school that foreswears idealism. It says that we should ignore any sympathetic feelings about democracy or independence for Ukraine and recognize that Ukraine was always going to be in Russia's sphere of influence and not get tangled up in its defense. Under this reading, our policy mistake was to lure Ukraine towards the West with empty promises of joining NATO and the EU, while our paramount interest was actually in maintaining a stable relationship with Russia so that no one starts World War 3.
On the other hand would be a more values-based, idealistic approach. Under this reading, our promises were not wrong, only our unwillingness to back them up. It is patently obvious that neither Russia nor anyone else is going to use nuclear weapons in these kinds of conflicts- that would be self-defeating when the aim is to gain territory and population (or even to defend one's own population, when pitted against other nuclear powers). In all honesty, having nuclear weapons is more of a prestige thing at this point than a real factor of military strategy, let alone tactics. But to give Putin his due, he used them with consummate skill, rattling the nuclear saber at critical times to cow the West and particularly the US from intervening in Ukraine, much to our shame.
Idealism posits that our interests are inextricably linked to our values. There are no durable and dependable international relationships without shared values, and we should be extremely grateful that, at least up to the current administration, the liberal West has had a solid core of shared values that undergird our entire collective security structure. Thinking that we can pursue "interests" that conflict with those values is chimerical and tends, as we are seeing in the current administration, to sell out and destroy exactly what is most valuable to us on the international stage.
But perhaps even worse than the philosophical differences within the US policy establishment that led to the schizophrenic and catastrophic approach to Ukraine was the inattentive way we sleepwalked into it. Emblematic of this is Obama's "reset" with Russia. Even after Putin had declared that the loss of the Soviet empire was the most catastrophic event in the last century, even after Russia attacked and set up a simmering conflict with Georgia for trending democratic, even after Russia had spent years pumping offensive and destabilizing propaganda into its enemies in the West, Obama was anxious to get Russia off his plate and initiated the reset. This was a policy of turning a blind eye to all the geopolitical trends that clearly showed that Russia was not going to be a democratic partner to the West, but was, on the contrary, heading rapidly in the opposite direction, despite the window dressing of Dmitri Medvedev. More specifically, it failed to recognize that Ukraine was in mortal peril from these trends. The prior president Bush had declared that his ultimate goal was to bring Ukraine into NATO. But no plan was offered, no timeline or support was given, even while Russia's apoplexy over the prospect was, to those who were paying attention, growing by the year.
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| Current status of NATO. Whatever the rhetoric, the new eastern European members of NATO are members in order to defend themselves against Russia. The whole point of NATO is to unite Europe defensively against Russia. Naturally, Russia takes this as an insult, but the history is self-explanatory, as is the same historical reasoning in case of Ukraine. As long as Russia takes no responsibility for its many past crimes, and its current lies, offensive behavior, and ongoing crimes, there can be no question of reversing this fundamental relationship. |
The reset ignored all this and assumed, as we all did, that a new war in Europe was inconceivable- whatever complaints Russia had would be raised in some appropriate forum. During this time, Russia was carefully playing its cards for Ukraine, using Paul Manafort to dress up its proxy, Viktor Yanukovych, electing him president, and getting him to cancel progress towards joining the EU. Unfortunately, in 2014, the Ukrainian people wised up to the direction all this was going, and ousted Yanukovych in a popular uprising, sending him fleeing to Russia. Immediately thereafter, Russia extracted its pound of flesh, invading and taking over Crimea, and for good measure starting a war in Eastern Ukraine, to be kept on the simmer.
All this should have been foreseen by US policy makers. But instead, they had their reset, with a few temporary benefits weighing against the disastrous direction portended by Russia's actual policies and intentions. If the US model for Ukraine was the same as for Belarus, we should have been honest about that and not promised any future relationship or alliance such as NATO. We should have clarified that Ukraine was in Russia's sphere, and tough luck.. they would have to deal with the neighbor that nature had dealt them. On the other hand, if we truly valued the independence of Ukraine and its civilized aspirations, in light of its being in its own right a very large country, both in area and in population, then we would have put more effort into deterring Russia rather than appeasing it.
Ukraine was not ready for NATO membership- that much was understood. We can see by the example of Hungary how dangerous it is to have backsliding, regressive and frankly traitorous countries within the alliance. Ukraine's democracy was by no means ready for full membership. In light of that, the US should have offered a direct security relationship, as the Georgia war played out, to put teeth behind our desire for Ukraine to remain independent and work out its own relationship with democracy and with Europe. The point was not to influence the government or people of Ukraine, but simply to deter Russian meddling. For by this time, the truth was visible- that Russia wanted to rebuild its empire / sphere of influence, whether its neighbors wanted to be assimilated or not. The race was on, between the gathering strength and determination of Russia to recover "its" former possessions, and its neighbors' growing sovereignty and ties to Europe.
One might ask.. how is this model different from Vietnam? Wouldn't this have tied us to a corrupt government that would have been fatally impaired, politically speaking, by taking assistance from the US? Wouldn't Ukraine have come to rely on our security crutch, while thumbing its nose at Russia and miring itself ever deeper in corruption and dysfunction? I think the differences are significant. Firstly, the Ukraine war had not happened yet. We would be deterring, not trying to repel, an attack. Secondly, the ultimate prize of European integration remained as a more significant goal, quite beyond any bilateral relationship with the US. It is clear that the people of Ukraine were quite strongly motivated in that direction, and part of that was gaining a functioning liberal political system.
As a Ukrainian by birth, Vindman was and is appalled by the path to war, some of it paved by the US. He is casting about for historical counterfactuals and alternative paths, and, given the dysfunctions of our own political system, those are hard to come by. Perhaps preventing the first election of Donald Trump would have been significantly more productive than any policy adjustments farther back in time. But I have to agree that our split-the-difference approach to Ukraine, which was initiated in the Bush administration, was fundamentally in error, and was a temporizing solution (which the Obama administration fatally continued) to a problem that turned out to be far more urgent than was anticipated. Though it should have been anticipated.
- Are we second-rate yet?
- There's something about postmodernism...
- War is now IT.
