The Ukraine Crisis: Will America Ever Grow Up?

As we have greatly miscalculated Russia’s sense of betrayal and alienation, Russia has greatly miscalculated Ukrainian tenacity and patriotism. But we have all already fallen into a no-win situation. It doesn’t matter how this ends, whether with the collapse or humiliation of Russia, or the incorporation of Ukraine into a larger federation of Slavic states—or anything in between—we lose.

None of our myriad blunders over the last 30 years—not our criminal invasion of Iraq, nor our absurd attempt to create a democratic, pluralistic state in Afghanistan, not our reckless, arguably illegal, creation of Kosovo, or our foolish terminating of the Iran Nuclear agreement, or our brutal bombings of Serbia and Libya, or our drawing and then redrawing of redlines in Syria, not even the militarily and strategically inane enlargement of NATO—can rival the wanton, needless tragedy of Ukraine. Just a modicum of common sense, a little less hubris, a little more understanding of how the world works, a less hypocritical view of the world and even just a slightly deeper knowledge of history and human nature could have forestalled this horror.

Too much of US foreign policy is now a toxic blend of self-righteous indignation, sophomoric idealism, and a frustratingly inconsistent and irritating moralism. Over the last few years there have been a number of articles bemoaning the loss of an American bipartisan foreign policy. That is, tragically, a baseless worry. With remarkable consistency from Clinton and Bush to Obama and Trump and now Biden, our presidents have been uniformly disappointing in pursuing foreign policy blunders.

But before anything else, let’s make one thing clear: Russia has blood on its hands. The scale of destruction and slaughter is deplorable, yet it is hardly unexpected. The Russian military has never been anything but a blunt instrument, and if any American or European official expresses surprise by the level of violence now being inflicted on Ukraine, he should immediately resign. The military response was predictable and unsurprising. The real failure here is not the excess of Russian military violence, but the stunning absence of vision and wisdom on the part of our diplomats and political leaders. “War is hell,” as that rarest of human beings—an American adult—once put it. That is why we have diplomats and politicians who are supposed to find reasonable means to avoid war. Saying Russia has pursued a ruthless war cannot absolve us from all blame, although that is what our typically cowardly, clueless leaders are already striving to do. But that is also to have been expected: that is, after all, what children do: deflect blame.

1 Corinthians 13:11

How do we behave like children? Let me count our childish ways. Perhaps the most obvious way is the manner in which we keep insisting that reality is more important than perceptions. It is genuinely bewildering how many officials kept responding to mounting Russian concerns about NATO enlargement by matter-of-factly responding that NATO poses no threat to anyone. Is that really an answer to those who live in fear, regardless of how misplaced that fear may be? Shouldn’t we have at least tried to provide some tangible assurances and guarantees that NATO will not threaten Russia, instead of blithely, inexorably, seemingly ruthlessly, moving NATO closer and closer to Russia’s borders?

I wish we could chalk it all up to ignorance, but these are well-educated children who manage our foreign policy. They know how many millions of Russians died to stop the Nazis; they even know that it was Russian blood far more than American and British blood that won World War II. They know about Napoleon and they know about Charles XII and even about Batu Khan. They know very well the depth and reach of Russian paranoia and yet they scoffed. Even though our foremost expert on Russia, George Kennan, warned way back in 1998 that NATO enlargement would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies” of Russia and would “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to (our) relations.”  Even though such hardliners as Kissinger and Brzezinski warned against offering Ukraine NATO membership, their words went unheeded. As Kissinger put it, “the West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. …Ukraine to survive and thrive, … should function as a bridge” between Russia and the rest of Europe. Instead, it will now serve as a wall—or perhaps, a crater—between them.

None of this is to discount the justifiable fear felt by Russia’s neighbors, who have suffered whenever Russia invaded/“liberated” them. (This is especially true of Ukraine, which naively handed over its entire nuclear stockpile in 1994 in exchange for guarantees from both the Western powers and Russia that its territorial integrity would be safeguarded.) It was for the US to bridge that chasm of distrust and fear, and foster trust and provide assurances to both sides in the current crisis. We failed miserably. Somehow, inexplicably, we thought we could forestall this war by exercising our economic might—but only childlike Americans would think economic pain could convince any country to forsake its perceived security. This is especially true of Russia where suffering for one’s  homeland is almost a national sport. From the Russian perspective, regardless of the reality, this war was a matter of life or death.

Another childish thing is to see one’s own actions in a far more positive light than those of the other. For example, putting more troops ever closer to Russia and supplying Ukraine with more and more military equipment served only to exacerbate tensions, but we could only see those steps as being supportive of Ukraine and preserving the peace. Yet we all know that a cornered bear is far more dangerous and Putin’s calculation was rather straightforward: attack now before even more military equipment is sent to Ukraine or risk far greater casualties a year or decade from now.

NATO, we hear ad nauseum, is a purely defensive military alliance and decades of European peace prove it. Unless you are from Serbia, of course. There was nothing “defensive” about NATO’s 78 days of bombing Serbia, during which hundreds (at least) of civilians were killed. Serbia had not attacked any NATO country; Serbia posed no threat to NATO. While there are legitimate arguments that may have justified military action—such as the brutal treatment of Serbia’s Muslim minority—it was not in keeping with any notion of mutual defense as set forth in the NATO charter. And if NATO can interfere once in a country like Serbia that did not threaten it, why should any country near NATO’s perimeter feel safe from a future attack? Again, I agree that NATO poses no real threat to Russia. Being afraid of NATO is like being afraid of the guests at your grandmother’s tea party, but so what? What I think or Biden thinks or Blinken thinks is irrelevant to those responsible for Russia’s security. Russia’s long, dreary history of multiple invasions has warped its historical perspective. We should have found diplomatic ways to assuage those fears, rather than “inflaming” them.

NATO’s “Open Door” Now a “Closed Casket”

Yet another infantile notion tossed about by diplomats and politicians who should know better is that “any sovereign nation should be able to join whatever alliance it wants to join.” Thus, NATO’s much-heralded and incredibly imbecilic “open door” policy. You hear this senseless blathering and you just want to scream: Grow up! Invitations to join NATO have the air of someone being invited to join a social club rather than a military alliance. And getting invited has all the trappings of getting an invite to high tea with the Queen. If Putin made one strategic error it was in taking NATO too seriously. But Russian paranoia always trumps good sense, just as American inconsistent moralism always wins over pragmatism.

If there is one thing that is especially irritating about spoiled children it is their double standards. When they do something, it is completely understandable, but when someone else does the same thing, it is unreasonable and provocative. At least when I went to school, the teachers touted the Monroe Doctrine as a cornerstone of American power and prestige. And we have been wielding that power over the Western Hemisphere for two centuries without ever thinking any neighboring country has some inalienable right to join a foreign alliance. Throughout the Eighties, especially, our resolve to prevent Latin American countries from determining their own future caused considerable bloodshed. For years we financed a ruthless regime in El Salvador that had death squads exterminating thousands of civilians, including Archbishop Oscar Romero, while he celebrated Mass at the altar. In Nicaragua, we violated our own laws to undermine a communist takeover. And even regarding tiny little Grenada, we were so nervous and frightened by that unthreatening Marxist regime, we invaded. We reacted far worse (given the weakness of the threat) to those mere footholds of communism than Russia has to the stranglehold it feels from NATO. One can only imagine what our reaction would be if in another decade or two Mexico tries to allow China a military base on its territory.

And then there is that other example of American hegemony: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. If Ukraine can join NATO, shouldn’t Cuba—having been invaded by Cuban dissidents financed by the US—have been allowed to have Russian missiles to ensure against any further invasions? We retain this moral disconnect: we want to both preserve our right to forbid Western Hemisphere countries from allying with foreign states, but we also want to preserve the myth that each sovereign country has the right to join whatever military alliance it chooses. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended with Russia backing down. As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk triumphantly put it: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” More childish bravado. The real reason we avoided nuclear war in 1962 was that the Russians, realizing that we genuinely feared for our existence if those missiles were installed, backed off. They didn’t argue that US perceptions were absurd and that America had nothing to worry about from a few nukes in Cuba. If only we had as much sensibility when it came to Russian fears about Ukraine joining NATO. Russia showed wisdom, even courage, during the missile crisis by reaching a compromise with us; we, petulant as ever, showed neither virtue regarding the current crisis, refusing every effort at a genuine compromise.

The David and Goliath Syndrome

It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the brave Ukrainians who are standing up to Russia. Not only are they brave, but staggeringly outnumbered. What child doesn’t dream of heroically standing up against a larger, better equipped adversary? So we easily fall into the emotional trap of conflating courage with goodness. We all tend, unthinkingly, to see bravery as affirmation of the rightness of a cause. The Spartans at Thermopylae were brave, as were the Nazis at Stalingrad. Thomas Becket was brave, and so too were the 9/11 hijackers. It’s a clever ploy by advocates for either side in a conflict to emphasize the courage of their favored group, but in any conflict, there is both courage and cowardice on both sides. Courage is admirable and even enviable, but courage has nothing to do with the wisdom or rightness of a cause. Neither does smallness. For more than a decade in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam duped many sentimentalists in the West to look upon it as the good guy simply because it was fighting a much larger opponent; many of these sympathizers were later surprised when their Vietnamese heroes invaded Cambodia shortly after the war with America ended. It is difficult for children, but we should try to look beyond the current carnage and the pull on our heartstrings, to see more clearly the root causes of this horror. And we should never forget that for all his good qualities, even King David, once he attained power, had some seriously dangerous, even murderous, inclinations.

Name-Calling and Chest-Thumping

Even before retiring nearly seven years ago, I had grown weary—and wary—of how many of my diplomat colleagues could not refer to our Russian counterparts as anything but “thugs” and “scum.” Thugs was an especially favored term tossed about with great fervor and a child’s moral outrage. How could it be possible to ever develop any genuine rapport and reasonable accommodation with Russia if even our diplomats are so ill-tempered and righteously indignant? As mentioned in an earlier essay from five years ago (“Russia: Friend or Foe”), even high officials who should know better, such as the then-Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, began a conference by characterizing the earlier dispute between Ukraine and Russia in Manichean terms of absolute good against absolute evil. Such a hyperbolic, childish description should have been met with derisive laughter, but nearly all those sage and august ambassadors attending the conference quaffed down the kool aid eagerly.

And then there is our Commander-in-Chief. Chest-thumping is so unseemly, so childlike, it would be laughable, if it didn’t cause such mischief. Is it just coincidence that Putin chose February 21, the eve of the invasion, to announce that Russia was recognizing the two Ukrainian breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk? February 21 was exactly two years after President Biden’s now infamous, still ludicrous, tweet insisting that Putin did not want him to become President because he was the only candidate who had ever “gone toe-to-toe” with him.

Amateur Hour at the State Department

Choosing your best pal for your sports team, regardless of his or her qualifications, is not something any adult would do. And while there is some benefit to having people around you that you are comfortable with, there are few people less qualified as leaders than professional staffers: people who progressed in their careers primarily by being well-trained guard dogs for their masters. Other than being extraordinarily devoted and efficient in catering to their bosses, they have remarkably little to commend them. Sycophancy is a poor quality for leadership. Professional sycophants are the worst possible leaders in times of crisis: they bluster and whine, they are full of self-righteousness and fear. They should be ashamed for helping to precipitate this horror. But they aren’t. They are children. And they are American officials. They are not to blame. For anything. Ever.

A Few More Childish Things

One should never host a block party and then snub one of your neighbors by not inviting him. Children like to exclude those they don’t like so much, but it often makes matters worse. The US should have taken Gorbachev’s plea to join NATO seriously, rather than mocking it like snooty little triumphalists.

One should never think that compromise and accommodation are synonyms for appeasement. Children like to think of things in black and white; grown-ups know better. But too many of our leaders have been stuck in a time warp—the only years that matter to them are the decade from 1938-1948, and that decade began with Chamberlain shamelessly appeasing Hitler. But even children should be able to see that not every opponent is another Hitler and that not every dictator is out to conquer Europe. But to Biden and the leaders of both political parties, the other 5,000 years of history are but a mere footnote; all they understand is a decade that is irrelevant to this crisis. We would have done better to have focused on parallels with World War I and even the Peloponnesian Wars.

One should always put oneself in the other person’s shoes. Another lesson that children often fail to appreciate, but that our diplomats at least should aspire to. There is a simple question we should all have asked ourselves: What would I do if I were the Russian president? Hopefully, you would be less tyrannical, less corrupt, more tolerant, more democratic. But would you risk the security of your country? Would you sit by idly as an adversary moved ever closer to your borders? How would history judge you? How would your own people judge you if you left them vulnerable to encirclement and attack?

One should never gloat over those who lose. Who will lose and what will be lost is still unclear, but all those American armchair cheerleaders should understand that the only thing worse than a Russian victory would be Russia’s defeat. A swift victory would have been better for all involved, and a protracted war of attrition will cause far greater destruction and loss of life, and ultimately have a dangerously destabilizing impact on both Ukraine and Russia. But war is almost always a brutish slugfest, and this one is no different.

One should always be clear in one’s own mind about the value of things. This is a particularly difficult concept for children to grasp. At its inception, we joined NATO to protect our vital national interests in Europe. Protecting Ukraine, therefore, is obviously not in our vital national interest or else we would already be engaged militarily, as we would if Germany or France had been invaded. But if Ukraine is not in our vital national interest, then should it even be considered for NATO membership? How does joining NATO magically make Ukraine more important to us? Haven’t we, perhaps, already overextended ourselves in Europe? There is broad consensus in America that we would fight, even risk nuclear war, if one of our traditional European allies was attacked. Would there be that same consensus if say Bulgaria or Montenegro were attacked? Do Americans even know Montenegro is in NATO? Does the average American even know Montenegro is in Europe?

And the Winner Is….

Russia is culpable, but we ought not to ignore our own culpability. Of course, we meant well. Children almost always mean well, as if that is an excuse for repeatedly doing things wrong. Appallingly self-satisfied about our moral superiority and hubristically dismissive of Russian history and xenophobia, we have helped plunge Europe into a conflict as useless and avoidable as was World War I. That our hatred of Russia far outweighs our affection for Ukraine is now obvious. Like a latter-day Brutus, America should candidly confess that it is not that we loved Ukraine less, but that we hated Russia more. And like the Hungarian people in 1956, the Ukrainians have been horribly led astray by the West. As have the Russians. They genuinely believed that after the fall of the Soviet Union they would be welcomed into Europe and not remain an adversary. Recently, a Russian TV commentator, Dmitry Kiselev, starkly explained why Russia would be willing to launch nuclear warheads at Western Europe: “The principle is: why do we need the world if Russia won’t be in it?”

As we have greatly miscalculated Russia’s sense of betrayal and alienation, Russia has greatly miscalculated Ukrainian tenacity and patriotism. In a recent, rousing speech the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, declared that “If Ukraine fails, the whole of Europe will fail.” This heroic, defiant warning has been met with the usual emotional outcry of support that one has come to expect from the childlike masses—reality must never get in the way of sentiment. But we have already failed. We have all already fallen into a no-win situation. It doesn’t matter how this ends, whether with the collapse or humiliation of Russia, or the incorporation of Ukraine into a larger federation of Slavic states, or anything in between, we lose. We lose.

There is only one clear winner regardless of the outcome of this crisis and that is China. China will bring Russia ever closer into its orbit as Europe pushes Russia further away. This does not bode well for the future. The whole point of the US opening to China half-a-century ago was to create a new counterweight to the Soviet Union, and for a while that worked. But now it will be the US, along with its European allies, that will have to contend with two belligerent nuclear powers that have grown closer to each other and more suspicious of the West. Time is running out. For all the horrors of war, war sometimes provides an opportunity to fix long-festering problems. If we had the vision and the courage, we could ensure a good outcome that would preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and also assuage Russia’s fears. But that is not likely, even though a decade from now we will find ourselves in a far more precarious global situation, all because we failed to bring Russia into the European fold.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.