In confronting all three foreign policy dilemmas, Washington needs to incorporate an understanding and acknowledgment of the things the United States has done that contributed to them.
Washington is grappling with seemingly intractable foreign policy dilemmas involving the Russian war in Ukraine, percolating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. In each case, the United States has failed or refused to wholly confront its own share of responsibility for creating the problem. This has profound implications for establishing a stable peace in these three hotspots.
In the case of Ukraine, much ink has been spilled in the debate over the extent to which NATO expansion in the decades after the Cold War fueled Putin’s decision to launch the war. Washington’s response to the invasion has largely treated that debate as irrelevant. Instead, it has essentially adopted the premise that Putin never got over the collapse of the Soviet Union and always intended to reincorporate Ukraine into Russia forcefully. This perspective has largely ignored evidence and historical logic that the invasion was not inevitable and was contingent on external variables, including U.S. actions.
In his seminal 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russian and Ukrainians,” Putin wrote that after the Soviet collapse, Moscow “recognized the new geopolitical realities and not only recognized but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country.” This was because “many people in Russia and Ukraine sincerely believed and assumed that our close cultural, spiritual, and economic ties would certainly last. . . . However, events—at first gradually and then more rapidly—started to move in a different direction.” These “events” included Ukrainian political developments that led to closer ties between Kiev and the West. “Step by step,” Putin wrote, “Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia.” But the West deflected Moscow’s concerns about this trajectory.
In his recent interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin reiterated this narrative. He said Russia had “agreed, voluntarily and proactively, to the collapse of the Soviet Union” because it “believed that this would be understood . . . as an invitation for cooperation and associateship” with the West. This could have taken the form of “a new security system” that would include the United States, European countries, and Russia—rather than the enlargement of NATO, which (according to Putin) Washington promised would extend “not one inch” to the east. Instead, there were “five waves of expansion,” and “in 2008 suddenly the doors or gates to NATO were open” to Ukraine. However, Moscow “never agreed to NATO’s expansion, and we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO.” Putin went on to blame the subsequent war on what he characterized as the U.S.-backed, anti-Russian “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine in 2014, the West’s embrace of Kiev at Russia’s expense, and Washington’s persistent disregard of Moscow’s security concerns.
It is easy to dismiss Putin’s narrative as self-serving, disingenuous propaganda. He is indeed a monstrous figure, as the recent death of imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny demonstrates. But that does not address—instead, it evades—the historical question of whether U.S. policies toward NATO expansion in general and Ukraine’s candidacy in particular contributed to Putin’s ultimate decision to invade Ukraine.
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