Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the Wests Fault [627972]

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Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
By John J. Mearsheimer

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine
crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes,
annexed Crimea out of a long -standing desire to resuscitate
the Soviet empire, and he may eventu ally go after the rest of
Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this
view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in
February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision
to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukra ine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European
allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The
taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central
element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s
orbit and in tegrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s
expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro –
democracy movement in Ukraine – beginning with the
Orange Revolution in 2004 – were critical elements, too.
Since the mid -1990s, Russian leaders hav e adamantly
opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have
made it clear that they would not stand by while their
strategically important neighbor turned into a Western
bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s
democratically elected and pro -Russian president – which he
rightly labeled a “coup” – was the final straw. He responded
by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO

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naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it
abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all,
the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and
threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made
emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and
Europe have been blindsided by events only because they
subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend
to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the
twenty -first century and that Europe can be kept whole and
free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law,
economic interdependence, and democracy.
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there
shows that realpolitik remains r elevant – and states that
ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders
blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western
stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences
have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistak e to
continue this misbegotten policy.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT
As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that
U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an
arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany
pacified. But they and t heir Russian successors did not want
NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western
diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton
administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid –
1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought
in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second
occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia,

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Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow
complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995
bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example,
Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of
what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian
Federation’s borders. … The flame of war could burst out
across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak
at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement – which, at
any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new
members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic
countries.
Then NATO beg an looking further east. At its April 2008
summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting
Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration
supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the
move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Ru ssia. In the
end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did
not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it
issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and
Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become
member s of NATO.”
Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a
compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy
foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership
in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have
most serious con sequences for pan -European security.” Putin
maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO
would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian
newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush,
“very transparently hinted that if Ukraine w as accepted into
NATO, it would cease to exist.”

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Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have
dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination
to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian
President Mikheil Saakashvili, wh o was deeply committed to
bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer
of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and
South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and
divided – and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between
the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists,
Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning,
NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia
and Ukraine int o the alliance. And NATO expansion
continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia
becoming members in 2009.
The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it
unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster
prosperity in such c ountries as Ukraine and integrate them
into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view
the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past
February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accuse d the EU of trying to
create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of
Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO
expansion.
The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has
been its efforts to spread Western val ues and promote
democracy in Ukraine and other post -Soviet states, a plan that
often entails funding pro -Western individuals and
organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of
state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in
December 2013 that the United States had invested more than

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$5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it
deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has
bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The
nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed
at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s
president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest
prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election
in February 2010, the NED decided he was underminin g its
goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition
and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.
When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in
Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And
such fears ar e hardly groundless. In September 2013,
Gershman wrote in The Washington Post , “Ukraine’s choice
to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of
Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added:
“Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on
the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia
itself.”
CREATING A CRISIS
The West’s triple package of policies – NATO enlargement,
EU expansion, and democracy promotion – added fuel to a
fire waiting to ignite. The spark c ame in November 2013,
when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been
negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion
Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to
antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the
following three months and that by mid -February had led to
the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western
emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On
February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal
that allowed Yanukovych to st ay in power until new elections

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were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled
to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro –
Western and anti -Russian to the core, and it contained four
high -ranking members who could legitimately be labeled
neofascists.
Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come
to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland
and Republican Senator John McCain participated in
antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych’s
toppling that it was “a day for the history books.” As a leaked
telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime
change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy
Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government,
which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the
West played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.
For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had
arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian for ces
to take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he
incorporated it into Russia. The task proved relatively easy,
thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at
a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also
made for an ea sy target since ethnic Russians compose
roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out
of Ukraine.
Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in
Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against
Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a
functioning state before he would allow it to become a
Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep. Toward that end, he
has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the
Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the

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country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the
Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government
cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price
of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded
payment for past exports. Putin is playing hardball.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse
of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and
Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine
serves as a buf fer state of enormous strategic 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 governm ent there that was determined
to integrate Ukraine into the West.
Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should
understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great
powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their
home terr itory. After all, the United States does not tolerate
distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the
Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the
outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military
alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic
aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts
on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into
Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to
turn those countries against Russia – a message that the 2008
Russian -Georgian war also made crystal clear.
Officials from the United States and its European allies
contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that
Moscow should understand that NATO has no designs on

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Russia. In add ition to continually denying that its expansion
was aimed at containing Russia, the alliance has never
permanently deployed military forces in its new member
states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO –
Russia Council in an effort to foster coop eration. To further
mollify Russia, the United States announced in 2009 that it
would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in
European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or
Polish territory. But none of these measures worked; the
Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO
enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is
the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what
counts as a threat to them.
To understand why the West, especially the United States,
failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the
groundwork for a major clash with Russia, one must go back
to the mid -1990s, when the Clinton administration began
advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a variety of
arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no
consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in
the United States and their relatives, for example, strongly
supported expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect
such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few reali sts also
favored the policy because they thought Russia still needed to
be contained.
But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a
declining great power with an aging population and a one –
dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contain ed.
And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an
incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S.
diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998
interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first

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round of NATO ex pansion. “I think the Russians will
gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,”
he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for
this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”
Most liberals, on the other hand , favored enlargement,
including many key members of the Clinton administration.
They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally
transformed international politics and that a new,
postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to
govern Europe. The United States was not only the
“indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus
unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in
essence, was to make the entire contin ent look like western
Europe.
And so the United States and its allies sought to promote
democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase
economic interdependence among them, and embed them in
international institutions. Having won the debate in the
United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their
European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given
the EU’s past achievements, Europeans were even more
wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer
mattered and that an all -inclusive liberal order could maintain
peace in Europe.
So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse
about European security during the first decade of this
century that even as the alliance adopted an open -door policy
of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The
liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials.
In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a
speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about

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“the ideals” that motivate Weste rn policy and how those ideals
“have often been threatened by an older, more traditional
view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to
the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just
don’t in the twenty -first century behave in ni neteenth -century
fashion by invading another country on completely trumped –
up pretext.”
In essence, the two sides have been operating with different
playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and
acting according to realist dictates, whereas t heir Western
counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about
international politics. The result is that the United States and
its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.
BLAME GAME
In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO
expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents
of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how
the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have
portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine
predicament. In M arch, according to The New York Times ,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was
irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.”
Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no
evidence supports the charge that he is mentally u nbalanced.
On the contrary: he is a first -class strategist who should be
feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign
policy.
Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the
demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to revers e it by
expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation,
Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if

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the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern
part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward othe r
countries in Russia’s neighborhood. For some in this camp,
Putin represents a modern -day Adolf Hitler, and striking any
kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich.
Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain
Russia before it domina tes its neighbors and threatens
western Europe.
This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin were
committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions
would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But
there is virtually no e vidence that he was bent on taking
Crimea, much less any other territory in Ukraine, before that
date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion
were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use
military force. Putin’s actions in Crimea took them by
complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous
reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin
said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing
his mind.
Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capabili ty to
easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the
entire country. Roughly 15 million people – one-third of
Ukraine’s population – live between the Dnieper River, which
bisects the country, and the Russian border. An overwhelming
majority of t hose people want to remain part of Ukraine and
would surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore,
Russia’s mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning
into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of
pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poo rly positioned to
pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer
even more in the face of the resulting sanctions.

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But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and
an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable
to suc cessfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the
Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S.
experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience
in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually
end badly. Putin surely under stands that trying to subdue
Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response
to events there has been defensive, not offensive.
A WAY OUT
Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin’s
behavior might be motivated by legitimate sec urity concerns,
it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling
down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to
deter further aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that
“all options are on the table,” neither the United Sta tes nor its
NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine. The
West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce
Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern
Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place
their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high –
level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and
some high -profile banks, energy companies, and defense
firms. They also threatened to unleash another, tougher round
of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy.
Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are
likely off the table anyway; western European countries,
especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that
Russia might retaliate and cause ser ious economic damage
within the EU. But even if the United States could convince its

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allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter
his decision -making. History shows that countries will absorb
enormous amounts of punishment in order to pro tect their
core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia
represents an exception to this rule.
Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies
that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice
President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and
told them, “This is a second opportunity to make good on the
original promise made by the Orange Revolution.” John
Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when,
that same month, he visited Kiev on a tr ip the White House
said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the
Ukrainian government.
The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern
Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of
the European Commission, summarized EU thin king on
Ukraine, saying, “We have a debt, a duty of solidarity with that
country, and we will work to have them as close as possible to
us.” And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed
the economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully
rejecte d seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of
NATO members’ foreign ministers, it was agreed that the
alliance would remain open to new members, although the
foreign ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by
name. “No third country has a veto over NATO enlargement,”
announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary –
general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various
measures to improve Ukraine’s military capabilities in such
areas as command and control, logistics, and cyberdefense.
Russian leaders have naturally recoiled at these actions; the

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West’s response to the crisis will only make a bad situation
worse.
There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however –
although it would require the West to think about the country
in a fu ndamentally new way. The United States and its allies
should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead
aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia,
akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Western
leaders should acknowledge th at Ukraine matters so much to
Putin that they cannot support an anti -Russian regime there.
This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government
would have to be pro -Russian or anti -NATO. On the contrary,
the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the
Russian nor the Western camp.
To achieve this end, the United States and its allies should
publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and
Ukraine. The West should also help fashion an economic
rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the EU, the
International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States –
a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in
having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank.
And the West should considerably limit its social -engine ering
efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western
support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S.
and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect
minority rights, especially the language rights of its Russian
speakers.
Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this
late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the
world. There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the
costs of continuing a misguided strategy would be much
greater. Furthermore, oth er countries are likely to respect a

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state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a
policy that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That
option is clearly open to the United States.
One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to
determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have
no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a
dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy
choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when
great -power poli tics are at play. Abstract rights such as self –
determination are largely meaningless when powerful states
get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to
form a military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold
War? The United States c ertainly did not think so, and the
Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West.
It is in Ukraine’s interest to understand these facts of life and
tread carefully when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.
Even if one rejects this analysis , however, and believes that
Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the
fact remains that the United States and its European allies
have the right to reject these requests. There is no reason that
the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing
a wrong -headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a
vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not
worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the
Ukrainian people.
Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled
relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that
Russia constitutes an enemy that will only grow more
formidable over time – and that the West therefore has no
choice but to continue its present policy. Bu t this viewpoint is
badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only
get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power,

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moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate Ukraine
into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States 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. It would therefore be the height of folly to
create a new NATO member that the other members have no
intention of defending. NATO has expanded in the past
because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to
honor its new security guarantees, but Russia’s recent power
play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could
put Russia and the West on a collision course.
Sticking with the current policy would also complicate
Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United
States needs Russia’s assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment
from Afghanistan through Russian territory, reach a nuclear
agree ment with Iran, and stabilize the situation in Syria. In
fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these
issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who
pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal
under which Syria agr eed to relinquish its chemical weapons,
thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that Obama had
threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia’s
help containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however,
is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer together.
The United States and its European allies now face a choice on
Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will
exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in
the process – a scenario in which everyone would come out a
loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a
prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten
Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with
Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.