This is the last thing I wish to write about, but given that I have the opportunity to speak to the former American ambassador to NATO and participant in negotiations concerning Ukraine today, it likely behooves me to add on to last week's more philosophical digression a more concrete explication of the situation as the isolationist might see it. Those of us caught up in the emotional whirlwind of current events might find it difficult to break down, in an analytical fashion, just what it is a circumspect defense of non-action might imply. So I present three separate but intertwined propositions that one might take on Ukraine as it now stands:
P1: NATO, and particularly the US, bears the brunt of the blame for the current crisis.
P2: Notwithstanding P1, the US (and NATO) should refrain from any deeper involvement in the Russo-Ukraine war.
P3: Russia is largely justified in its decision to begin a war in the Ukraine.
Now, anyone who might take a cursory glance at these three propositions would probably settle on some consensus intuition that P1 is the easiest to defend, P3 the hardest, with P2 falling somewhere in the middle depending on your own proclivities. Fair enough. I am going to attempt to provide a rationale for all three. The matter is further complicated by the fact that these are, to some degree, a mixture of positive and normative statements that must defend themselves against both legal and moral argumentation that are themselves entwined.
P1 finds itself in a struggle against those who resist the idea that NATO expansion precipitated the crisis. They point to the fact that NATO was under no obligation to take Russian concerns into consideration, that its expansion strengthened the security of Central and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and that NATO-Russia cooperation was in fact very strong up until the year 2003, with diminishing returns after that. They point specifically to the Partnership for Peace (PFP) program, a NATO initiative that promotes political-economic reform within states, enhances military cooperation and capabilities, and seeks to alleviate diplomatic conflict between and within European states, usually involving the surrender of extraterritorial claims in exchange for "fast-tracking" their accession to the alliance. Fine as far as it goes, but rather meaningless when we consider that both Ukraine and Russia are part of PFP and that, by itself, this clearly did not do much to resolve territorial conflict between them. As for the rest, Poland did not find itself under threat from separatist regions in the post-war period. Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved itself. Hungary surrendered its territorial claims to Romania, which is about the only success that this program can really claim. One must remember that NATO is a defensive alliance and that alliances are always oriented against something. In this case, the compulsion that brought these countries to entertain the PFP was not a genuine desire to resolve disputes within and between them, but to hedge against a possible future Russian threat. Small wonder, then, that Russia would view the alliance in these same terms.
If the aim of the PFP was to build trust between states in the post-soviet world, then at worst it split that world in half and at best is ineffective at addressing matters of real sensitivity. Hungary, for instance, sought to block Ukrainian accession to NATO due to domestic laws the latter had passed restricting its substantial Hungarian minority's access to education in the Hungarian language. The PFP process, it seems, does not have any mechanisms to address this kind of backsliding. Poland and Hungary are, after all, illiberal democracies commanded by populist parties. So not only has NATO failed to incentivize the democratic reforms it claims have contributed to peace in Europe within states that have already joined the alliance (or perhaps, it is more accurate to say, liberal reforms), the logic of participation by states who partook in the post-Cold War expansion strengthens the rationale for Russian aggression against states which have not yet joined.
P2 runs up against a legal and moral argument. The legal argument points to the language of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The Memorandum sought to relocate the Ukrainian portion of the former USSR's nuclear arsenal back to Russia in exchange for assurances against any future territorial aggrandizement. As mentioned last time, assurances are not guarantees. There are no binding treaty obligations contained within this memorandum. Ukraine is not in a formal defensive alliance with the United States. It is not a member of NATO. It hosts no American military bases. It has not even ever received the designation of major non-NATO ally. As such, one cannot argue that there are any binding legal obligations to defend Ukraine.
The other argument is primarily moral in nature and these can be divided into two further strands. One is that American assurances were morally binding. But if this is so, there is no reason why similar assurances to Russia that were laid out in the previous post should not be similarly binding. By what criterion do we choose between assurances to adhere to and why? The other argument is that to defend Ukraine is to defend freedom, democracy, and liberty. All well and good, but the precise liberty at dispute here is Ukraine's freedom to accede to NATO. Both they and Russia see their security at stake in this decision and so we are already leaving behind the lofty language and getting at the reality of the issue, which is not of "values" but of "interests" and so to pretend that Russia had no stake in this, that it should have just let this go when the Ukrainian Rada removes specific language in its constitution designating it a "neutral country", is absurd. To abandon neutrality implies that there are sides to pick and Ukraine made it clear which side it aimed to choose. NATO wields an effective veto over who accedes to the alliance and so to pretend they lacked agency to stop this is to simply disregard that they never took Russian interests seriously in the first place. Instead of placing Ukrainian neutrality on the negotiating table, they repeatedly issued declarations to the effect that they were working to incorporate Ukraine into the alliance.
There are those who might also argue that the Minsk 2 agreement, signed in 2015, was highly favorable to Russia and that to implement it in accordance with the supposed Russian interpretation would be tantamount to surrendering Ukrainian sovereignty. But those who argue along this line might have trouble explaining just what is so different about an autonomous Donetsk and Luhansk from an autonomous Kosovo, which is free to conduct its own political and diplomatic relations with entities outside of Serbia. Kosovo, we may recall, was defended by NATO and its declaration of independence was welcomed by the United States, among others. Regardless of the means by which the political settlement in Minsk 2 was to be reached, it would not "break the back" of the Ukrainian state any more than Kosovo's autonomy broke Serbia's.
To defend P3 requires a history lesson in itself. But the idea goes something like this: Euromaidan, the trigger for this crisis, didn't really build a critical mass of support. The movement was largely confined to Kyiv where, not coincidentally, the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005 was carried out. Yanukovych was toppled from power but his 2010 election was monitored by the OSCE which deemed the election results free and fair. Kyiv is not all of Ukraine. A little over 1 million Ukrainians came out to demonstrate, at most, out of a total population of 44 million. That's 1/44th of the country dictating to the rest. One metropole should not dictate the country's foreign orientation to the rest of the country and should not have the power to decide whether presidents are removed via electoral means or by force. When someone like Putin calls what happened there anti-democratic, maybe the pot is calling the kettle black, but there is a real point buried in there somewhere. Kyiv's Europeanists chose, in essence, to subvert the mechanisms of procedural democracy. To westerners who retained a Cold War mindset, this was perfectly fine, and Russia's response to the violent ousting of a democratically elected government which had previously toed the line between the EU and Russia's own multilateral institutions was viewed as tyrannical and aggressive.
It would seem, given all of this, that Ukraine is actually hostage to Kyiv. Every attempt to end the conflict on reasonable terms has met with rioting and murder on the part of Kyivans. The Ukrainian state might be hopelessly corrupt, reliant as it is on a patron-client system (much as our Afghan republic was), but the cosmopolitan class in the capital has, on numerous occasions, attempted to take the destiny of the country into its own hands at the expense of the wider body politic. The results are plain to see. Ukraine has it coming. Specifically, Kyiv has it coming. If they are to make an Aleppo or Grozny of Kyiv, then so much the better for Ukraine.
