7/10/22, 5:16 PM Liberal Illusions About NATO Caused the Ukraine Crisis With Russia

ANALYSIS

Liberal Illusions Caused the Ukraine

Crisis
The greatest tragedy about Russia’s potential invasion is how easily it could
have been avoided.
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international
relations at Harvard University.

JANUARY 19, 2022, 5:49 AM

The situation in Ukraine is bad and getting worse. Russia is poised to invade
and demanding airtight guarantees that NATO will never, ever expand
farther to the east. Negotiations do not appear to be succeeding, and the
United States and its NATO allies are beginning to contemplate how they
will make Russia pay should it press forward with an invasion. A real war is
now a distinct possibility, which would have far-reaching consequences for
everyone involved, especially Ukraine’s citizens.

Putin’s War
How the world is dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

The great tragedy is this entire affair was avoidable. Had the United States
and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and
liberal idealism and relied instead on realism’s core insights, the present
crisis would not have occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have
seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today. The world is paying a high
price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics.

At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur
because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from
one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that
war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use
force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There
is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future,
which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to

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hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm
them at some point down the road.

Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers
as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world
where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is
driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the
connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that
embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and
maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of
autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to
topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the
belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are
bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.

After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer
relevant and liberal ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct. As the
Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffmann told Thomas Friedman of
the New York Times in 1993, realism is “utter nonsense today.” U.S. and
European officials believed that liberal democracy, open markets, the rule of
law, and other liberal values were spreading like wildfire and a global liberal
order lay within reach. They assumed, as then-presidential candidate Bill
Clinton put it in 1992, that “the cynical calculus of pure power politics” had
no place in the modern world and an emerging liberal order would yield
many decades of democratic peace. Instead of competing for power and
security, the world’s nations would concentrate on getting rich in an
increasingly open, harmonious, rules-based liberal order, one shaped and
guarded by the benevolent power of the United States.

Had this rosy vision been accurate, spreading democracy and extending U.S.
security guarantees into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence would have
posed few risks. But that outcome was unlikely, as any good realist could
have told you. Indeed, opponents of enlargement were quick to warn that
Russia would inevitably regard NATO enlargement as a threat and going
ahead with it would poison relations with Moscow. That is why several
prominent U.S. experts—including diplomat George Kennan, author
Michael Mandelbaum, and former defense secretary William Perry—
opposed enlargement from the start. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe
Talbott and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were initially opposed
for the same reasons, though both later shifted their positions and joined the
pro-enlargement bandwagon.

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Proponents of expansion won the debate by claiming it would help

consolidate the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe and create a
“vast zone of peace” across all of Europe. In their view, it didn’t matter that
some of NATO’s new members were of little or no military value to the
alliance and might be hard to defend because peace would be so robust and
enduring that any pledge to protect those new allies would never have to be
honored.

Moreover, they insisted that NATO’s benign intentions were self-evident and
it would be easy to persuade Moscow not to worry as NATO crept closer to
the Russian border. This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was
not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered,
of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the
future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had
no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the
case.

Although Moscow had little choice but to acquiesce to the admission of

Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO, Russian concerns
grew as enlargement continued. It didn’t help that enlargement was at odds
with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s verbal assurance to Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that if Germany were allowed to
reunify within NATO then the alliance would not move “one inch
eastward”—a pledge Gorbachev foolishly failed to codify in writing. (Baker
and others dispute this characterization, and Baker has denied that he made
any formal pledges.) Russia’s doubts increased when the United States
invaded Iraq in 2003—a decision that showed a certain willful disregard for
international law—and even more after the Obama administration exceeded
the authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 and helped
oust Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011. Russia had abstained on
the resolution—which authorized protecting civilians but not regime
change—and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates later commented
that “the Russians felt they had been played for suckers.” These and other
incidents help explain why Moscow is now insisting on written guarantees.

Had U.S. policymakers reflected on their own country’s history and

geographic sensitivities, they would have understood how enlargement
appeared to their Russian counterparts. As journalist Peter Beinart recently
noted, the United States has repeatedly declared the Western Hemisphere to
be off-limits to other great powers and has threatened or used force on
numerous occasions to make that declaration stick. During the Cold War, for
example, the Reagan administration was so alarmed by the revolution in

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Nicaragua (a country whose population was smaller than New York City’s)
that it organized a rebel army to overthrow the ruling socialist Sandinistas. If
Americans could worry that much about a tiny country like Nicaragua, why
was it so hard to understand why Russia might have some serious
misgivings about the steady movement of the world’s mightiest alliance
toward its borders? Realism explains why great powers tend to be extremely
sensitive to the security environment in their immediate neighborhoods,
but the liberal architects of enlargement simply could not grasp this. It was a
monumental failure of empathy with profound strategic consequences.

Compounding the error is NATO’s repeated insistence that enlargement is

an open-ended process and any country meeting the membership criteria is
eligible to join. That’s not quite what the NATO treaty says, by the way;
Article 10 merely states: “The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite
any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty
and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this
Treaty.” The key word here is “may”—no nation has the right to join NATO
and certainly not if its entrance would make other members less secure.
Details aside, shouting this goal from the rooftops was foolhardy and
unnecessary. Any military alliance can incorporate new members if the
existing parties agree to do so, and NATO had done just that on several
occasions. But openly proclaiming an active and unlimited commitment to
moving eastward was bound to further heighten Russian fears.

The next misstep was the Bush administration’s decision to nominate

Georgia and Ukraine for NATO membership at the 2008 Bucharest Summit.
Former U.S. National Security Council official Fiona Hill recently revealed
that the U.S. intelligence community opposed this step but then-U.S.
President George W. Bush ignored its objections for reasons that have never
been fully explained. The timing of the move was especially odd because
neither Ukraine nor Georgia was close to meeting the criteria for
membership in 2008 and other NATO members opposed including them.
The result was an uneasy, British-brokered compromise where NATO
declared that both states would eventually join but did not say when. As
political scientist Samuel Charap correctly stated: “[T]his declaration was
the worst of all worlds. It provided no increased security to Ukraine and
Georgia, but reinforced Moscow’s view that NATO was set on incorporating
them.” No wonder former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder described
the 2008 decision as NATO’s “cardinal sin.”

The next round came in 2013 and 2014. With Ukraine’s economy staggering,
then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych encouraged a bidding war

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between the European Union and Russia for economic help. His subsequent
decision to reject an accession agreement negotiated with the EU and accept
a more lucrative offer from Russia triggered the Euromaidan protests that
ultimately led to his ousting. U.S. officials tilted visibly in favor of the
protesters and participated actively in the effort to pick Yanukovych’s
successor, thereby lending credence to Russian fears that this was a
Western-sponsored color revolution. Remarkably, officials in Europe and the
United States never seemed to have asked themselves whether Russia might
object to this outcome or what it might do to derail it. As a result, they were
blindsided when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the seizure of
Crimea and backed Russian-speaking separatist movements in Ukraine’s
eastern provinces, plunging the country into a frozen conflict that persists to
this day.

It is commonplace in the West to defend NATO expansion and blame the

Ukraine crisis solely on Putin. The Russian leader deserves no sympathy, as
his repressive domestic policies, obvious corruption, repeated lying, and
murderous campaigns against Russian exiles who pose no danger to his
regime make abundantly clear. Russia has also trampled on the 1994
Budapest Memorandum, which provided security assurances to Ukraine in
exchange for its relinquishing the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the
Soviet Union. These and other actions have raised legitimate concerns about
Russian intentions, and the illegal seizure of Crimea has turned Ukrainian
and European opinion sharply against Moscow. If Russia has obvious
reasons to worry about NATO enlargement, its neighbors have ample reason
to worry about Russia as well.

But Putin is not solely responsible for the ongoing crisis over Ukraine, and
moral outrage over his actions or character is not a strategy. Nor are more
and tougher sanctions likely to cause him to surrender to Western demands.
Unpleasant as it may be, the United States and its allies need to recognize
that Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment is a vital interest for Russia—one it is
willing to use force to defend—and this is not because Putin happens to be a
ruthless autocrat with a nostalgic fondness for the old Soviet past. Great
powers are never indifferent to the geostrategic forces arrayed on their
borders, and Russia would care deeply about Ukraine’s political alignment
even if someone else were in charge. U.S. and European unwillingness to
accept this basic reality is a major reason the world is in this mess today.

That said, Putin has made this problem more difficult by trying to extract
major concessions at gunpoint. Even if his demands were entirely
reasonable (and some of them aren’t), the United States and the rest of

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NATO have good reason to resist his attempt at blackmail. Once again,
realism helps you understand why: In a world where every state is ultimately
on its own, signaling that you can be blackmailed may encourage the
blackmailer to make new demands.

To get around this problem, the two sides would have to transform this
negotiation from one that looks like blackmail to one that looks more like
mutual backscratching. The logic is simple: I wouldn’t want to give you
something you want if you were threatening me because it sets a worrisome
precedent and might tempt you to repeat or escalate your demands. But I
might be willing to give you something you want if you agreed to give me
something I wanted just as much. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch
yours. There’s nothing wrong with setting a precedent like that; it is, in fact,
the basis for all voluntary economic exchanges.

The Biden administration appears to be attempting something along these

lines by proposing mutually beneficial agreements on missile deployments
and other secondary issues and trying to take the question of future NATO
enlargement off the table. I have considerable respect for U.S. Deputy
Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s toughness, savvy, and negotiating skills,
but I don’t think this approach is going to fly. Why not? Because in the end,
Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment is a vital interest for the Kremlin and
Russia will insist on getting something tangible. U.S. President Joe Biden
has already made it clear that the United States will not go to war to defend
Ukraine, and those who think it can and should—in an area that lies right
next door to Russia—apparently believe we are still in the unipolar world of
the 1990s and have a lot of attractive military options.

Yet with a weak hand to play, the U.S. negotiating team is apparently still
insisting that Ukraine retain the option of joining NATO at some point in the
future, which is precisely the outcome Moscow wants to foreclose. If the
United States and NATO want to solve this via diplomacy, they are going to
have to make real concessions and may not get everything they might want.
I don’t like this situation any more than you do, but that’s the price to be
paid for unwisely expanding NATO beyond reasonable limits.

The best hope for a peaceful resolution of this unhappy mess is for the
Ukrainian people and their leaders to realize that having Russia and the
West fight over which side ultimately gains Kyiv’s allegiance is going to be a
disaster for their country. Ukraine should take the initiative and announce it
intends to operate as a neutral country that will not join any military
alliance. It should formally pledge not to become a member of NATO or join

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the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. It would still be free

to trade with and welcome investment from any country, and it should be
free to choose its own leaders without outside interference. If Kyiv made
such a move on its own, then the United States and its NATO allies could not
be accused of giving into Russian blackmail.

For Ukrainians, living as a neutral state next door to Russia is hardly an ideal
situation. But given its geographic location, it is the best outcome Ukraine
can realistically expect. It is certainly far superior to the situation
Ukrainians find themselves in now. It is worth remembering that Ukraine
was effectively neutral from 1992 until 2008—the year NATO foolishly
announced Ukraine would join the alliance. At no point in that period did it
face a serious risk of invasion. Anti-Russian sentiment is now running high
in most of Ukraine, however, which makes it less likely this possible exit
ramp can be taken.

The most tragic element in this whole unhappy saga is that it was avoidable.
But until U.S. policymakers temper their liberal hubris and regain a fuller
appreciation of realism’s uncomfortable but vital lessons, they are likely to
stumble into similar crises in the future.

Update, Jan. 26, 2022: This piece has been updated to reflect that James Baker and others dispute
this characterization of Baker’s meeting with Gorbachev in February 1990 and, in particular, whether
a pledge was made by Baker that NATO would not move eastward.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international
relations at Harvard University.

TAGS:
NATO,
RUSSIA,
UKRAINE,
UNITED STATES

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