Americans keep forgetting the lessons of history—of both the Cold War and the pandemic.
(Originally published Jan. 27 in “What in the World“) It has fallen to the World Health Organization to be the lone voice of reason in a widening epidemic of ignorance, irrationality and apparent memory loss about Covid-19. After pointing out early in the week that the scale of deaths it is causing can hardly justify Omicron being classified as “mild” or that it will be the last strain we face, the WHO is warning that the new strain will be even more contagious than Omicron, but there’s no guarantee it won’t be as virulent or moreso.
Indeed, Omicron’s new subvariant BA.2, first identified in Denmark, is already showing up in California. Fingers-crossed it’s as warm and cuddly as everyone is behaving towards Covid. Meanwhile, more Americans are now dying daily than ever did during the surge of much-deadlier Delta and cases are at record highs across the Western Hemisphere.
The U.S. and Russia meanwhile appear locked on course for conflict over Ukraine, with the U.S. saying it refuses to yield to Russian demands for guarantees not to add Ukraine to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Russians refusing to yield to U.S. demands that it withdraw forces around Ukraine without having obtained those guarantees. Add now an additional Russian demand that NATO pull back forces sent into its newer Eastern European members (and former Soviet satellites) in response to Russia’s buildup around Ukraine.
The U.S. position is wrapped in the kind of inflexible dogma that led it into such wildly successful endeavors as Vietnam and Afghanistan and results in American lives being lost in a conflict over principle that has little basis in reality. For an excellent overview of the historical forces at play here, read University of Chicago political science Professor John Mearsheimer’s 2014 article on the subject in Foreign Affairs.
Washington has essentially demanded that Russia submit to allowing its closest neighbors to joining an anti-Moscow military alliance. Washington argues that countries should be allowed the freedom to do what they want (especially if that means allying with the U.S.). It’s called self-determination and Americans repeatedly convince themselves that self-determination yields democracy, democratic governments are pro-American, and that it’s America’s duty to fight for anyone the media identifies as pro-democracy freedom fighters anywhere in the world. It’s doubtful Washington would commit troops, however, to defending Ukraine’s democratic right to join a Chinese-led military alliance.
Instead, Washington seems dedicated to convincing Vladimir Putin that he yield to a trend that prevailed in the decades following the fall of the Soviet Union, when former satellite after satellite fell into NATO’s embrace, depriving Russia of the buffer states and warm-water ports it has long sought to shelter itself from an even longer and better-established pattern of European (mainly German) and Central Asian invasions over the course of history.
The policymakers who steered the United States safely through the most dangerous days of the Cold War knew that the best way to contain a nuclear Russia was to let it have those buffer states. If George F. Kennan were still around, he might argue that Putin’s desire to use Ukraine to protect Russia from European invasion is outdated and irrational, but that the Russian president’s objection to border nation joining a mutual defense treaty pitted against Moscow is not. Putin doesn’t see yielding Ukraine to NATO as something Russia can accept. Putin can’t back down.
Mearsheimer goes on to argue that the U.S. should avoid antagonizing Russia, which is a natural ally against China. And to some extent this is true: Moscow and Beijing have always been uneasy allies at best. Their historic distrust goes back much farther than that with America and they have a much longer and more unstable border region to fret over. If you think Russia is sensitive about Ukraine joining NATO, watch how fast relations between Moscow and Beijing sour if China were dumb enough to try prying a Central Asian republic or even Mongolia away from the Russian sphere of influence. If a war is going to erupt between the U.S. and China, it’s most likely going to be over access to the semiconductor foundries in Taiwan—the oil wells of the Pacific.
But Kennan or anyone else familiar with Putin might also say it’s naïve to think Ukraine is where Putin’s strategic ambitions end. At the risk of falling back into Washington’s weakness for “domino theory,” Putin’s goal isn’t just to fend off the West in Ukraine, but to restore Russia to the kind of regional influence it enjoyed in the Soviet era, which paralleled his own career and of which he is a direct product. Putin wouldn’t hesitate to peel the Baltic states away from NATO, and then the rest of its former satellites in Eastern Europe, including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Although reading the long list of nations that have joined NATO since 1991—14 of the 30 were part of the Soviet bloc—and you get a sense of Putin’s frustration.
But it’s particularly irksome to Washington that Putin is trying to turn the tables in Ukraine while the West is already on the back foot thanks to the pandemic. Putin’s moves in Ukraine are part of a wider move among anti-American nations to take advantage of the situation, from China’s stepped up incursions into Taiwan’s airspace to North Korea’s flurry of missile tests this month, including a sixth test on Thursday involving short-range missiles.
And Putin isn’t waiting for a formal Western refusal to launch his counter-offensive: he’s already infiltrated Ukraine with saboteurs, Washington alleges, launched a cyberattack against the country and sent additional Russian forces into the Baltic, Belarus and apparently Moldova. So it might seem he’s negotiating in bad faith and that his demands are just a stalling tactic.
The challenge for Biden, however, is largely domestic: backing down to Russia over Ukraine, while clearly the smart thing to do, would follow the fall of Afghanistan (another smart move) as another colossal “loss” to such intangible interests as America’s democratic imperialism, foreign-policy “prestige” and what generals like to call “credibility.” What, they’ll ask, will allies in Asia worried about China think if we won’t go to war with Russia over Ukraine? Worse, yielding to Putin in Ukraine is a policy of the Trump administration and something right-wing nincompoops like Tucker Carlson are now calling for. So through a domestic political lens, it’s almost impossible for Biden to surrender American ambitions to add Ukraine to its expanding list European clients. And if the situation in Ukraine goes south, Republicans will undoubtedly try to capitalize on it in mid-term elections (despite Trump’s memorable infatuation with Putin), saying Biden is “soft” on Russia. Biden can’t back down either.
Ultimately, however, Russia has more at stake in Ukraine than the United States. So it’s the U.S. that will need to Blinken, er, blink. It just needs to find a face-saving way to do so that doesn’t make Biden appear weaker than he already does. Indeed, it may have already done so. After saying the U.S. wouldn’t meet Russia’s demand for a written response to its demands on Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinked delivered one on Wednesday. The U.S. wouldn’t share the document publicly, but said it repeated Washington’s refusal to rule out Ukraine’s membership in NATO and upheld Ukraine’s right to self-determination. But one suspects it offered Moscow some way to reassure itself that, while Ukraine might always have the right to join NATO, NATO may never get around to letting it in.
