The Ukraine War Was Not Inevitable

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

There are two opposing schools of thought regarding Vladimir Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine. The first holds that Putin was reacting to the West’s contempt for his security concerns as NATO got closer to his borders. The second believes that the lack of response to a series of earlier aggressive acts encouraged him.

The latter, more favoured by neoconservatives, has a simple premise: Whenever one of the West’s enemies strays from the straight and narrow, any failure to administer immediate punishment is seen as encouraging them and provoking more serious aggression in the future.

In Ukraine, it is not the growing U.S. presence on Russia’s borders that explains, even partly, the Russian offensive, but the fact that NATO denied Kyiv the military means to deter its powerful neighbour. For them, the West’s fault is not NATO enlargement but allowing Putin to intervene in Georgia, then Syria, then Crimea. After that, why would he stop at the borders of Ukraine?

Yet this tragedy could have been avoided. Most experts acknowledge that the Bush administration was playing with fire in 2008 when it held out the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, in full knowledge that it would be impossible to protect it in the event of aggression. This attitude was all the more reckless given that in Munich, the previous year, Putin had expressed his concern that NATO had put its frontline forces on Russia’s borders.

Great powers naturally tend to equate their security with the defence of their zones of influence, by force if necessary. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out on Feb.10, “Even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin, Russia, like the United States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its neighbours. Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?”

In February 2019 Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a constitutional amendment committing the country to becoming a member of NATO. As Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, noted in “Putin’s War in Ukraine is a Watershed. Time for America to Get Real,” (The New York Times, April 11), “the West erred in dismissing Russia’s legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop on the other side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine.”

Indeed, Kupchan adds, “Moscow’s objections to NATO membership for Ukraine are very much in line with America’s own statecraft, which has long sought to keep other major powers away from its borders.” The exercise of hemispheric hegemony continued during the Cold War, with Washington determined to keep the Soviet Union out of Latin America.

After Russia hinted that it might deploy its military to Latin America, State Department spokesman Ned Price Jan. 27 replied, “If we do see any movement in that direction, we will respond swiftly and decisively.” Shouldn’t Washington have given greater credence to Moscow’s objections to bringing Ukraine into NATO?

NATO has avoided direct involvement in Ukraine in order to avert war with Russia. Even as they impose severe sanctions on Russia and send arms to Ukraine, NATO does not deem the defence of the country to be a vital interest.

“But if that is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a security guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense? asks Kupchan.

Russia has now sent a formal diplomatic note to Washington warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict there.

It is hypocritical for Westerners to be indignant today about the similar crimes they themselves committed, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which 15 of the European Union’s 27 member states took part. Ukraine, too, was involved in this.

As the British columnist Peter Hitchens contends, in “How NATO Lost its Way” (Compact, March 22), NATO, once an apolitical defence organization, has become an instrument of a new idealism. “We have all heard about beating spears into pruning hooks, but NATO has done something much more adventurous. It has beaten a shield into a sword.”