The article was originally published by 19FortyFive.
The increasingly fraught endgame to the Russia-Ukraine war reflects a larger ongoing debate in the US policy community about who is ultimately responsible for the conflict.
US President Donald Trump has asserted on several occasions that the war happened mostly because of the incompetence of the Biden administration. Several commentators have stepped forward, opining that the United States is ultimately responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because, allegedly, Washington broke the promise given to Moscow in the waning months of the Cold War that if the Soviets agreed to the unification of Germany, there would be no NATO presence east of the German border.
By this logic, even the first round of NATO enlargement in 1999 that brought Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into the Alliance should be seen as the cause of the subsequent devastation unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. Of late, academics with impeccable credentials have been repeating this argument in lectures and podcasts.
In short, much public debate over the war in Ukraine seems increasingly disconnected from reality. The responsibility for the invasion and the carnage is unequivocally Russian President Vladimir Putin’s, and this simple fact ought to be the departure point for any rational path forward to ending the conflict.
Here are the fundamentals: In 1991, the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, as it could no longer compete either in the economic, political, or military spheres. The Lenin-Stalin empire simply imploded, collapsing under its own weight, ripped asunder by the very contradictions Marxist ideologues claimed would be the West’s ultimate undoing. The West prevailed and was thus positioned to shape the post-Cold War order in ways that favored its interests and priorities.
There is nothing untoward, immoral, or “treacherous” in this simple statement of fact. Had the reverse happened, the Russians would have claimed the right to do the same, i.e., shape the post-Cold War order according to their interests and priorities. Of course, one key difference in 1999 and beyond compared to such a putative Soviet victory scenario was that NATO enlargement (not “expansion” as Moscow prefers to call it) reflected the wishes and desires of the nations finally liberated from under the Soviet yoke.
Victory in a war has consequences—this is what realism in international affairs has always looked like.
Simply put, what happened after the Cold War was not a devious US plot to betray Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his successors but a simple consequence of the Soviet Union’s defeat. And the logic of this was perfectly understood by Yeltsin and Putin, notwithstanding the fact that the latter would subsequently bemoan the disintegration of the Soviet empire as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.” Post-1991, the United States exercised its victor’s prerogative, together with its democratic allies, to structure the post-Soviet space in Central Europe and the Baltics in a way that stabilized the region and served the United States’ interests and those of its European allies.
This is what the NATO and European Union enlargement cycles were all about. These are the basics of great power politics, and a country can only forget them at its own peril.
What, then, explains the hand-wringing today about the West’s alleged responsibility for triggering the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Let me concede that the West is in part responsible for what happened, but not for the reasons the current preferred narrative suggests. The West is responsible not because it sought to redefine the security architecture of Europe’s historical crush zone in a way that favors its interests and the region’s stability and security, but rather because it failed to take the second fundamental step: the West failed to back up the new security architecture with hard power.
Unlike in the aftermath of World War II, when the United States brought massive amounts of power to stabilize and rebuild Europe and to deter any attempts at Soviet aggression against the free world, the post-Cold War settlement was accompanied by a bewildering degree of disarmament across the collective West.
NATO enlargement was treated as a political exercise, in which the NATO flag and a few liaison officers were supposed to complete the process, while the “end of history” crowd veered left in pursuit of its neoliberal global economic agenda. And while Europe disarmed at speed and scale, the United States launched its global war on terror after the 9/11 attacks, expending trillions of dollars on democracy-building and nation-building projects that had virtually zero prospects for success.
The real reasons for conflict
In short, it was not the West’s aggressive pursuit of an anti-Russian agenda, but rather the weakness and lack of strategic clarity it communicated at every turn post-Cold War that encouraged Moscow’s revisionism. It was not the West’s alleged geostrategic assertiveness, but its timidity each time Putin used military power to occupy territory—first in Georgia in 2008, then in Ukraine in 2014, in Syria in 2015, and finally in Ukraine for the second time in 2022—that set the stage for the unfolding tragedy in Eastern Europe.
If the West is responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s not for the reasons its critics now propound, i.e., because of its allegedly aggressive behavior, but because of its inability to grasp the basics of power politics as it swam into an ideological soup of its own making that bore no resemblance to how the world really works.
The West is poised to communicate weakness once again, only this time unabashedly and without pretense that it is doing so because of norms or the “rules-based international order.” If the final peace agreement on Ukraine simply ratifies the status quo on the battlefield, the Trump administration will hand Moscow a major win, in effect undoing the consequences of the Western victory in the Cold War.
It will communicate in no uncertain terms that Russia can structure its sphere of domination in Eastern Europe at will, and that the West will accept Moscow’s role as an imperial power shaping the future of Europe as a whole. And as the tragedy of Ukraine reaches its denouement, it should be said that the culpability for defeat in Ukraine—a defeat that will effectively reverse the gains made by the West in the twentieth century—falls in part on the United States, through the diffident “escalation management” policy in Ukraine pursued by the Biden administration.
The United States’ key allies in Europe are also to blame, especially Germany, the very country that benefitted most from the collapse of the iron curtain, and then proceeded to do more than any other European power to bring Russia back into European politics through the nefarious Nord Stream energy deals and Berlin’s policy of engaging with Moscow irrespective of Washington’s warnings—including from the first Trump administration—and above the heads of the countries threatened by Russia along the Eastern flank of NATO.
What history teaches us
Defeat always carries with it structural changes when it comes to regional and global power distribution. For the past twenty years, Russia has been pursuing a revisionist policy with the goal of relitigating the end of the Cold War. In the fields of Ukraine, it has fought not just Kyiv, but every Western capital. In fact, Putin has stated outright that he is waging a civilizational war against NATO and the West. Russia is now poised to score an unequivocal civilizational victory, the consequences of which will reverberate not only in Europe, but also in the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and in the Indo-Pacific.
A “deal on Ukraine” that in effect confirms Russia’s territorial gains and allows it to claim the right to shape Ukraine’s systemic transformation going forward—and possibly even to absorb the country altogether down the line—will be 1991 in reverse, freeing Russia to leverage the new power distribution and its alliance with China to its own advantage. Add to this the strategic myopia of key European politicians who, instead of recognizing what their weakness has wrought, speak instead about “being abandoned by America,” and you have the perfect storm brewing just over the horizon.
Deterrence is both about military capabilities and the willingness to use them. If you have neither, the correct term is “appeasement,” with all that this is likely to entail down the line.
Andrew A. Michta is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft GeoStrategy Initiative. The views expressed here are his own.
Further reading
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Image: Banners displaying the NATO logo are placed at the entrance of new NATO headquarters during the move to the new building, in Brussels, Belgium April 19, 2018. Reuters/Yves Herman.