Attachment #5: The Debate around NATO Enlargement
An essential debate centres around justification for Russia’s current actions, and here we have various opinions.As noted in the March 14 TheGuardian, the current confrontation between Russia and the west is fuelled by many grievances, but the greatest is the belief in Moscow that the west tricked the former Soviet Union by breaking promises made at the end of the cold war in 1989-1990 that NATO would not expand to the east.
In his now famous 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, Putin accused the West of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruins. But well before that NATO were backing the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine, and began its eastern expansion. The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 when the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were brought in. Then in 2004 seven more were added – Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. (Not to forget, also, that Albania and Croatia became members in 2009.)
Then NATO began looking even further east. In 2008 were was talk of admitting Georgia and Ukraine, although they reached a compromise of just endorsing the aspirations of these two country’s but declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.” Certainly Putin has always maintained that admitting these two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia.
History suggests that there has been a deep historical continuity in the use of power within and beyond its frontiers. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in the Globe & Mail “Eastern Europeans have always understood that an authoritarian Russia, whoever rules it, has never tolerated a free state on its borders. Mr. Putin’s brutality has a pedigree.” He argues that when looking at the stories of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981, Georgia in 2008, Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 – all under attack “makes nonsense of the claim that NATO expansion eastward caused the current crisis. After this history, Eastern Europeans understood that if they didn’t have a NATO security guarantee, they couldn’t keep their democracy. The West didn’t impose NATO upon Eastern Europeans: They demanded it and we would have been derelict not to have provided it.”
In a 2014 article in Foreign Affairs, professor at the University of Chicago John Mearsheimer’s thesis was that the West’s triple package of policies (NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democratic promotion) added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in 2013 when the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych “rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead.” All hell broke loose, a coup ensued with Yanukovych off to Russia in exile. Mearsheimer says it is clear the US backed the coup. He stated that “for Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president – which he rightly labelled a coup – was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base.”
Mearsheimer goes on to say, “Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West…This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory.” The professor frames it thus: “the two sides have been operating with different playbooks. Putin…thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas (his) Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the US and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.” Remember this was written in 2014.
It is prophetic to read the final part of Mearsheimer’s article. He rejects the arguments that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia’s borders, and that “having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine.” He didn’t think Putin wanted Ukraine. It “lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country…An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation…Furthermore, Russia’s mediocre army would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and US experiences in Afghanistan, the US experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine.”
Mearsheimer’s solutions may resonate in this critical point in the war. The US and its allies should make Ukraine a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia. The goal should be “a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western camp.” The West “should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine “ and “put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution.” The sad truth is that when great-power politics are in play “abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states…There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine… especially if its defence is not a vital interest for them.” He finishes with the following: “Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time…The US and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has proved.” Current policy is “driving Moscow and Beijing closer.”
Six years later Mearsheimer gave a lecture at Carleton University. One of his main themes was that nationalism trumps liberalism, and realism trumps liberalism. “Nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet, and if you invade a country like Afghanistan you move from being a liberator to an occupier, and then nationalism kicks in for the locals.” He wrapped up his lecture with a final prescient observation: ”If you want to beat Russia, encourage them to take Ukraine.” He repeated his 2014 remark that it “would be like swallowing a porcupine”.
Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at Oxford and U of T, when interviewed on CBC by Matt Galloway March 28, decidedly does not agree with Mearsheimer. “The expansion of NATO didn’t happen just because NATO took those countries over. Those countries – Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the first three to come in – wanted to be in NATO, very badly. We have to acknowledge that countries have a right of self-determination. They have a right to join whatever alliance they want…but It seems to me nothing excuses what Russia is doing today in Ukraine.”
Historian Mary Sarotte, and author of “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate” in a recent webinar refers to the often quoted comment by Putin that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.“ She went on to say that Putin, when posted in Dresden in 1989 and wanting to act in inhibiting those protesting against the Soviet Union, remains haunted by the words he received back from his boss, “Moscow has been silent”. She implied that he was determined that that would never happen again.
In her recent book, she points out that the title Not One Inch has two meanings. To the first she relates the conventional wisdom among most historians, namely that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many Western leaders gave informal assurances that NATO would not expand – not just to the territory of the former East Germany but also across central and eastern Europe. And specifically that secretary of state under George W. Bush, James Baker, promised that NATO “will not move one more inch eastward.” But “not one inch” had a second meaning, that to America meant that “not one inch would be off limits to NATO.”
Since Moscow failed to secure any formal guarantee, however, Western leaders later went ahead anyway, downplaying or denying any contradiction. Sarotte concludes that the charge of betrayal is technically untrue, but has a psychological truth. She argues more speculatively that this perceived betrayal was a major factor in the subsequent collapse of democracy in Russia and the further deterioration of relations between the West and Russia under Putin.
But a review in Foreign Affairs, has suggested that most of her evidence actually leans in the opposite direction and suggests that US Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and their top diplomats slowed NATO expansion to try to stabilize the government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the short term and held off as long as he still looked viable. It was only when Yeltsin’s fall became imminent, and a hardening of East-West relations started to seem inevitable, that the US moved to expand the alliance. However, George W. Bush in 2008 made a big mistake by inviting Ukraine (and Georgia) to join NATO (but the other NATO members were never really going to let it in; it was considered too Far East, too close to Moscow).
The West is not blameless, of course, and there are examples. Writer Kevin Elson wrote in a recent Peterborough Examiner op ed that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is not much different than what the West had done within the Middle East. “Under the guise of peacekeeping and searching for weapons of mass-destruction, we have overthrown governments and destabilized nations.” Many civilians, including children, have been killed in Afghanistan, some from American drone strikes.
As professional counsellor, Calvin White, says “The West, especially America, clings to the image that we are right, we are the good guys of the world, and how we think countries should operate is the right way. We insist that our version of democracy and freedom is the right one, and then lecture other leaders about how they run their countries.” Putin considered a NATO expansion into Ukraine, a former integral part of his birth nation the USSR, as allowing an alliance openly adversarial to Russia to be on its doorstep. “Of course, he had to draw a line.” America did precisely the same with Cuba in 1962 and Iraq in 2003. “Putin repeatedly pled that the West was not listening to Russia’s concerns, and they in fact were not. The West kept insisting Ukraine had the right to have whatever connection with NATO that it wanted, even though that flies fully against what America, or likely any nation in the West, would accept if the roles were reversed.”
All this is history now. The horrors of war, with cities disintegrating, people dying and millions fleeing now obliterate any other rationale in what the Western world now sees.