Russian Aggression in Ukraine

Should we concede that Russia has a sphere of influence over its old empire?

Captain Tenille: Tell me young man, what do you want out of life?
Homer: I want peas.
Captain Tenille: Oh, we all want peace, but it's always just out of reach. So, what's the best way to get peace?
Homer: [reaches and picks up peas with his knife] With a knife.
Captain Tenille: Exactly! Not with the olive branch but the bayonet! Ah, Simpson, you're like the son I never had.
Homer: And you're like the father I never visit.

Full disclosure: my wife was born in Ukraine (and several of her relatives live in Kyiv); I have visited the country more than once; and I have watched several documentaries about the Maidan protests and the resulting War in Donbass, which have described the plight of Ukrainians at the mercy of Russians in great detail.

I decided to write this blog post in response to this Slow Boring blog post arguing for rapprochement with Russia. I strongly disagree with Lee Harris’s opinion expressed here:

A crucial sticking point in these talks is NATO’s open door policy, which American diplomats have defended, pushing back on Putin’s request that the military alliance halt its overtures to Ukraine and agree not to admit it in the future.

That obstinacy is a mistake. Even as the U.S. national security establishment vows to pivot from petrostates to peer competitors in the Indo-Pacific, it remains congenitally incapable of acknowledging tradeoffs.

The United States should end our flirtation with Ukrainian NATO membership, which the alliance agrees will not happen anytime soon and would hurt American interests if it did. Backing off now in the face of threats is a bad look, but that’s no excuse to stick with bad policy.

In fact, a Russia policy consistent with Biden’s own stated views of American interests would go further than negotiating Ukrainian neutrality toward real rapprochement. That follows clearly from Biden’s own goal of strategic competition with China. Cooperation is not as unthinkable, or as unpopular with the American public, as foreign policy elites suggest. The Obama administration even set some recent precedent.

The idea that Ukraine is on track to join NATO in the foreseeable future is laughable. In fact, we’ve already abrogated our “written” securities guarantees with Ukraine. But explicitly shutting the door on Ukraine’s NATO membership would embolden Russian aggression and represent a huge Russian propaganda win.

It’s true that many people want to pivot foreign policy to focus on China, and I’m not arguing that countering China is not a worthy foreign policy objective. But it’s important to remember that China does not have a recent history of assassinating political opponents (including on other countries’ soil), waging war on other sovereign countries, or intervening militarily to support autocratic regimes. Russia’s nuclear arms arsenal also easily dwarfs China’s.

The idea that NATO is encircling Russia can also be examined from a different perspective. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it certainly seems to me that Russia has been expanding its sphere of influence across nominally independent sovereign countries in its periphery, including Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Syria.

It’s true that the United States could choose real rapprochement with Russia. After all, we are effectively supporting or sponsoring Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, etc. In my personal opinion, our support for and cooperation with autocratic regimes both a) greatly undermines our moral high ground internationally when it comes to dealing with adversaries like China and b) has robbed Americans of a uniting moral high ground domestically. This does not mean that I think we should be sending US troops to Ukraine. But this is not a binary question, and Putin seems to have succeeded in making at least some Americans think that it is. Capitulating to Russian demands would render our foreign policy completely morally bankrupt.

My hope is that one day we adopt the policy prescriptions outlined in the book Blood Oil to create a clean break with autocratic regimes once and for all. But I have to say that the outlook seems poor given that some Americans think we should be cooperating with one of the most dangerous autocratic regimes in the world today.