Contra Cold War Redux: 4. Russia & the West
Western journos and pols now shocked—shocked!—at Russia’s war on Ukraine have known for years that this is exactly what Russia would do if the West kept doing what it was doing.
‘The mutual trust that emerged with the end of the Cold War was severely shaken a few years later by NATO’s decision to expand to the east. Russia had no option but to draw its own conclusions from that.’—Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, What is at Stake Now: My Appeal for Peace and Freedom
‘A child with a map can look at where the strategic border was in 1988 and where it is today, and work out which side has advanced in which direction.’—Georgetown Prof. Anatol Lieven in the New York Times, 14 February 2017
‘During his [Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s Rhodes-scholarship roommate] tenure [as Deputy Secretary of State to Pres. Bill Clinton], the United States made one of the most momentous foreign-policy choices of the post-1991 era: the decision to expand NATO eastward, first into the former countries of the Warsaw Pact, then into the former republics of the Soviet Union itself. Talbott was at first opposed, or at least, as he now puts its, ‘deeply riven.’ On one hand, Eastern-European countries, some of which were now led by heroic former dissidents, wanted very much to join the military alliance; on the other, the Russians warned Talbott—'with a mirthless smile,’ as he later recalled—that NATO was to them a ‘four-letter word.’ If the Cold War was really over, as the Americans kept saying it was, why expand a Cold-War military alliance set up expressly to deter and contain the Soviet Union. But as much as Talbott loved Russia, there were clear advantages to securing the West’s gains. “If the leadership of a country has any view but the following,” Talbott told me last summer, “it’s not going to be the leadership of that country for very long. And that is: we do what we can in our own interest.” But the NATO question, Talbott admitted, was complicated. “Should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?”’—‘The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia Imbroglio,’ New York Times Magazine, 8 May 2018
In 1990-91, Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and accede to the reunification of East and West Germany ensured a peaceful end to the Cold War. There has been a recurrent controversy, however, over what Western leaders promised Mr. Gorbachev in return for this concession.
According to the Russians, US Secretary of State James A. Baker promised Pres. Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended ‘a single inch to the east.’ The Americans, however, have denied that they ever made such a promise, and have subsequently doubled the size of NATO. In 1997, NATO expanded into Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland. In 2004, NATO expanded into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In 2009, NATO expanded into Albania and Croatia. In 2017, NATO expanded into Montenegro, and in 2020, into North Macedonia.
Pres. Donald Trump, despite campaigning on defunding the ‘obsolete’ NATO, outsourced his presidency to various Red-Party has-beens and never-wases, who ended up convincing that unprincipled gameshow host that the problem with NATO was that it was underfunded. NATO now spends $1.11 trillion per year on ‘defense,’ which is 16 times Russia’s entire military budget.
Recently declassified documents from the National Security Archive at George Washington University show that Pres. Gorbachev was, as a matter of fact, personally assured that NATO would not expand eastward not just by Sec. Baker, but by the American president George H.W. Bush, the West-German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West-German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the director of the CIA Robert Gates, the French president Francois Mitterrand, the British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, and NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner. Ignobly, none of these Western leaders ever came forward to corroborate the claims of their Russian counterparts, even as Western-Russian relations collapsed over this very controversy.
Even more recently, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported on a document from the British National Archives (the minutes of a meeting between foreign-affairs officials from the USA, France, and Germany, on March 6th 1991) further corroborating the Russian claim. ‘We made it clear in the two plus four negotiations that we would not expand NATO beyond the Elbe,’ stated German diplomat Jurgen Chrobog, referring to the negotiations with the Soviets to reunify East and West Germany. ‘We can therefore not offer NATO membership to Poland and the others.’ According to Raymond Seitz (US Assistant Secretary of State for Canada and Europe), ‘We have made it clear to the Soviet Union in two plus four talks and elsewhere that we will not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.’
The American response to these revelations, other than to pretend that they do not exist and bet on the apathy of the American public by simply ignoring them, is to quibble that what they and their allies evidently did promise the Russians was not legally binding because it was never put down in writing (and even if it were in writing, that promise was made to the now-nonexistent Soviet Union, not the Russian Federation). The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, speaks for the majority of pro-war American journos and pols when he complains that Russia is ‘accusing the United States of breaking an agreement they never made.’ According to Mr. Baker, ‘While there was indeed discussion in the months following the fall of the Berlin Wall between Mr. Baker [the US Secretary of State] and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev about limiting NATO’s jurisdiction if East and West Germany were reunited, no such provision was included in the final treaty signed by the Americans, Europeans, and Russians.’
There is such a thing as good faith, Mr. Baker, though that takes honesty and honour. Can no one trust a gentleman’s agreement with the Yanks? Is that the way that we Americans would like to be treated? If not, then why are we treating the Russians that way?
There is also such a thing as restraint, Mr. Baker. Even if whatever promises were made to Pres. Gorbachev are not legally binding today, should the foreign policy of the USA should be to do whatever it has a right to do regardless of whether it is right to do it? Russia has, reasonably or unreasonably, strongly communicated to us that it considers the continued eastward expansion of NATO a threat to its national security and that Ukraine itself is a ‘red line.’ Even if we have the right to keep expanding NATO anyway, we must ask if it is responsible to exercise that right. What are the costs and the benefits? Can there be a compromise? This is the difference between high-toned statesmanship and low-down jingoism.
The aggressive expansion of NATO after the Cold War was consistent with the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine,’ a classified document from Pres. H.W. Bush’s Department of Defense authored by Undersecretary for Defense Policy Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Undersecretary for Defense Policy Irve Leibovitz which was leaked to the New York Times. The Wolfowitz Doctrine, written in 1992, advocated that the end of the Soviet Union was an opportunity for the USA to turn the whole globe into its sphere of influence:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.
[Translation: We cannot let another country get strong enough to challenge our controul of the world or our controul of a region in which we have an interest.]
The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
[Translation: We cannot give other countries a reason to pursue global or regional power.]
Like the coalition that opposed Iraqi aggression, we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished. Nevertheless, the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the US will be an important stabilizing factor.
[Translation: The appearance of multilateralism is good but in actuality there must be unilateralism.]
While the US cannot become the world’s policeman, by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.
[Translation: We will intervene in conflicts whenever and wherever we deem it to be in our interest.]
We continue to recognize that collectively the conventional forces of the states formerly comprising the Soviet Union retain the most military potential in all of Eurasia; and we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others. We must, however, be mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.
[Translation: Russia is still a potential separate center of power which could challenge our controul of Eurasia and all of Earth.]
Now, imagine, if you will, that you are not so privileged as to have been born in the U.S. of A.: How would reading this American manifesto of world supremacy make you feel?1
In response to the controversy after the New York Times published the Wolfowitz Doctrine, Dick Cheney (then Secretary of Defense) and Colin Powell (then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) rewrote the document to be more politically correct in style if no less imperialist in substance. It was ultimately a prototype of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ adopted by Pres. H.W. Bush’s son, in whose administration Messrs. Wolfowitz and Leibovitz also served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense and Vice Pres. Cheney’s chief of staff, respectively. It was in this administration of Bush the Lesser that Russia began to resist NATO’s eastward expansion.
In 2008, the member states of NATO’s annual summit was held in Bucharest, Romania. ‘NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO,’ they announced. ‘We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.’ In 1997 and 2004, the Russians had resented the encroachment of NATO upon their borders but had been too weak to resist the West. By 2008, however, the Russians felt strong enough to assert their interests against the West. ‘Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which will have the most serious consequences for pan-European security,’ stated Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Pres. Vladimir Putin simply stated that NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine posed a ‘direct threat’ to Russia.
Russian opposition to NATO expansion into eastern Europe is analogous to the USA’s opposition to European expansion into the American continent. As Pres. James Monroe put it in his State of the Union address 199 years ago:
The American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers…
In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so…
We owe, it therefore, to candor, and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we shall not interfere. But with the governments whose independence we have acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling, in any other matter, their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States…
In other words, ‘Stay out of our yard just as we have stayed out of yours.’
Throughout American history, US Presidents have been veritably Putin-esque in how they have reacted to violations of the Monroe Doctrine, international law be damned. ‘International opinion matters,’ avowed Pres. Obama in a commencement speech to the United States Military Academy at West Point, ‘but America should never ask permission to protect our people, our homeland, our way of life.’ The Russians feel the same way, and would very much like for us Americans to treat them the way that we would like to be treated. Can we Americans imagine how we would feel if, after a hypothetical dissolution of these United States, Russia began entering into military alliances with neighbouring countries and forward-deploying its military in regions whence we had been invaded twice in the last century? That would, of course, entail having to imagine a war on American soil, which Americans cannot imagine,2 because we have been isolated from the great powers on the Eurasian continent. Indeed, we Americans are an extremely sheltered and privileged people with little understanding of ourselves, let alone of others. What the Founding Fathers believed would be a blessing—our physical isolation from the imperial powers of the Old World—has, ever since we became an empire ourselves, been a curse, for we are far too provincial to rule the world.
In 1949, Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-OH) made a speech explaining why he had voted against American entry into NATO by contrasting it with the Monroe Doctrine:
Why did I vote against the Atlantic Pact? I wanted to vote for it—at least I wanted to vote to let Russia know that if she attacked western Europe, the United States would be in the war. I believe that would be a deterrent to war. We issued this warning in the Monroe Doctrine, and though we were a much less powerful nation, it prevented aggression against Central and South America. That was only a President’s message to Congress, and there were no treaty obligations, and no arms for other nations. But it was one of the most effective peace measures in the history of the world. I would favor a Monroe Doctrine for western Europe.
But the Atlantic Pact goes much further. It obligates us to go to war if at any time during the next 20 years anyone makes an armed attack on any of the 12 nations. Under the Monroe Doctrine we could change our policy at any time. We could judge whether perhaps one of the countries had given cause for the attack. Only Congress could declare war in pursuance of this doctrine. Under the new pact the President can take us to war without Congress. But, above all the treaty is a part of a much larger program by which we arm all these nations against Russia. A joint military program has already been made. It thus becomes an offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia. I believe our foreign policy should be aimed primarily at security and peace, and I believe such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace. A third world war would be the greatest tragedy the world has ever suffered. Even if we won the war, we this time would probably suffer tremendous destruction, our economic system would be crippled, and we would lose our liberties and free system just as the Second World War destroyed the free systems of Europe. It might easily destroy civilization on this earth.
There is another consideration. If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. It may decide that the arming of western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack on Russia. Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is. But from the Russian standpoint it may not seem unreasonable. They may well decide that if war is the certain result, that war might better occur now rather than after the arming of Europe is completed.
How would we feel if Russia undertook to army a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?
Furthermore, can we afford this new project of foreign assistance? I think I am as much against Communist aggression as anyone, both at home and abroad; certainly more than a State Department which has let the Communists overrun all of China. But we can’t let them scare us into bankruptcy and the surrender of all liberty, or let them determine our foreign policies. We are already spending $15,000,000,000 on our armed forces and have the most powerful Air Force in the world and the only atomic bomb. That, and our determination to go to war if Europe is attacked, ought to be sufficient to deter an attack by armed force.
We are spending $7,000,000,000 a year on economic aid to build up these countries to a condition of prosperity where Communism cannot make internal progress. Shall we start another project whose cost is incalculable, at the very time when we have a deficit of $1,800,000,000 and a prospective deficit of three to five billion? The one essential defense against Communism is to keep this country financially and economically sound. If the President is unwilling to recommend more taxes for fear of creating a depression, then we must have reached the limit of our taxpaying ability and we ought not to start a new and unnecessary building project.
But, finally, I believe there is only one real hope of peace in the world to come—an association of nations binding itself to abide by a law governing nations and administered by a court of legal justice. Such a judicial finding must not be subject to veto by any nation and there must be an international force to enforce the court’s decree. Such a plan can only succeed if the public opinion of the world is educated to insist on the enforcement of justice.
The United Nations looks in this direction but it can be improved and should be. This pact might have set up such a system between the nations of western Europe. It unfortunately did not do so. We should undertake to make it a model to which the United Nations may later conform. But as set up, it is a step backward—a military alliance of the old type where we have to come to each others’ assistance no matter who is to blame, and with ourselves the judges of the law.
These are not ‘Putin’s talking points,’ as American journos and pols would pronounce them today, but a Senator known as ‘Mr. Republican’ speaking at the height of the Cold War after Winston Churchill had just declared, ‘An iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’
Speaking of Churchill, after the death of Stalin he saw in the softening of the Soviet Union’s stance an opening to begin ending the Cold War. Specifically, the post-Stalinist Soviets had removed their forces from Finland and Austria, relinquished their bases in Manchuria (which they had received at Yalta Conference), and recognised the independence of Yugoslavia and West Germany (without requiring reciprocal recognition of East Germany). Churchill, who wrote to his deputy prime minister, Anthony Eden, that they ‘ought to do justice to what is happening in Russia and to the many favorable events which have occurred,’ repeatedly tried to convince his American counterpart, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (and his Secretary of State John F. Dulles), to meet with Malenkov and Molotov at a summit. The Americans were certain that these reforms were ruses and that the Russians (Stalinist or not, Communist or not, &c.) were ‘whores’ never to be trusted.
Churchill was certainly no Russophile or crypto-Communist. ‘I must admit that my thoughts rest primarily in Europe—the revival of the glory of Europe, the parent continent of the modern nations and of civilization,’ he wrote to his cabinet member, Sir. Eden, during the Second World War. ‘It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe.’ In the fourth volume of his history of the First World War written in 1928, Churchill summarised the Russian Revolution thusly: ‘Russia has been frozen in an indefinite winter of subhuman doctrine and superhuman tyranny.’ Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in 1946, though eventually becoming one of the historical cornerstones of the Cold War, was initially considered alarmist by US Pres. Harry Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
What made Churchill a man for all seasons, and not a Russophobic and anti-Communist period piece like so many others in 1946-1953, however, was that he was certain that peace with the Soviet Union was possible in his time. ‘I do not believe,’ he stated in one of his final speeches in Parliament, ‘that the immense problem of reconciling the security of Russia with the freedom and safety of Western Europe is insoluble.’ Churchill wanted to end the east-west division of Europe (which was a consequence of the power of the Red Army’s military occupation rather than the power of an international revolutionary movement), but the formation of NATO in 1949 and that of the rival Warsaw Pact in 1955 only deepened that division. ‘It appeared as though the West was intent on maintaining and even stabilizing the partition of Europe,’ Churchill wrote to Sir. Eden. ‘We cannot accept as justified or permanent the present division of Europe.’
Indeed, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact ended 31 years ago, and yet NATO has continued to grow in size and occupy more of Europe. Why?
The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs provided a balanced assessment of this historical moment:
He had expected too much from his wartime comradeship with Eisenhower. There was a strong element of personal vanity in his belief that he could impress the new Russian leaders by talking to them directly, and thus end his historic career as an architect of the gradual cessation of the Cold War. He was also raging rapidly, and tired, and affected by a stroke, and wanting in self-discipline and stamina, and at times indifferent to the contrary advice of men of his own government. All this is true—and yet the historical record (and not only the revelations from the available Russian documents and sources) suggests that perhaps a great chance may have been missed fifty years ago, when Churchill, as so often during his life, was willing to act on his own vision and go against the tide, and when he was right and his opponents were wrong.
If Churchill could consider détente with Stalin’s henchmen in 1953, why cannot we consider détente with Vladimir Putin? Is he really worse than, say, Khrushchev, who helped carry out the Great Terror of the 1930s? Or is the problem not that Pres. Putin is so evil but that our leaders are just not as great as Churchill?
Since the end of the Cold War, many very different people coming from very different places with very different perspectives have spoken out with one voice against the continued expansion of NATO after the Cold War as a blunder and a danger. Yet a certain class of American journos and pols comprised of ethnic expatriates from the former Pale of Settlement have, in a manner of speaking, locked the rest of us in this car, with no brakes accelerating towards a cliff.
Pat Buchanan, one of the leading voices of the American Old Right (he was an adviser to the presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and a Republican presidential candidate himself), has criticised post-Cold War NATO expansionism. In 1999, Mr. Buchanan dedicated an entire chapter of his book, A Republic, not an Empire, to the subject:
‘Why the Rush to Expand NATO?’ asked the New York Times. Answer: Handing out NATO memberships like White House souvenirs has produced popularity for US politicians.
Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest are delighted, but Moscow seethes, and Belarus grows belligerent. Tension is greatest in the Baltic and Ukraine, where the US-Russian crisis is likely to come. Never has so extravagant a commitment been made. We have put the world on notice that the Americans are never coming home, that our duty is, henceforth and forever, to defend virtually every border in Europe.
NATO expansionists have won the day, but they have scheduled a series of clashes that will mean either a humiliating back-down by either Russia or the United States—or war. We have committed American children yet unborn to fight Russians yet unborn over land no president has ever considered vital. This hubristic attempt to impose a US protectorate over Europe will one day be challenged. That day we will awaken to find that a new generation is not willing to send its sons to fight in places they have never heard of, simply because this generation pledged they would go. NATO expansion is a rash and provocative act, unrelated to our true security interests and rooted in an ignorance of American history and traditions.
Our hegemonists are confident that America’s power is too great for any to resist. History teaches otherwise. Every attempt to establish hegemony incites resentment and hostility. Weaker nations instinctively seek security in each other, creating the very combinations the hegemonists most fear. It is a law of history: The thesis calls into being the antithesis; the weak collude to balance off the strong.
US assurance that its hegemony is benevolent only confirm the suspicions of those it is intended to constrict and circumscribe. Fifteen years after Britain established hegemony over North America, Americans were fighting alongside their old French enemies to overthrow it. Allied hegemony in Europe in 1919 persuaded Germany to make common cause with the Bolsheviks, whose agents they had just liquidated—Lenin and Stalin were happy to accommodate at Rapallo. Hitler’s conquest of France, our buffer state on the Atlantic, aroused America to take Iceland, send aid to Britain, and began hunting German submarines. Stalin’s hegemony over Central Europe called into being the NATO alliance. When the Soviet Union was in its ascendancy, Nixon, foremost anti-Communist of his generation, went to Beijing to embrace Mao. Even anti-Communists applauded, for they believed Nixon was trying to balance off the power of the greater threat to the United States.
America’s hegemonists have already begun to reap the predictable results. China and Russia, the two nations capable of doing mortal damage to us, have formed a strategic partnership—to oppose US hegemony.
If we are to remain a republic, each generation should decide when and whether to risk the life of the nation and the lives of its young. We ought not to be foreclosing future generations’ options or making their decisions. As Jefferson said, ‘The earth belongs to the living, not the dead.’
Noam Chomsky, one of the leading voices of the American New Left, has criticised post-Cold War NATO expansionism. In a Q&A session at the Royal Society in the fall of 2014, Prof. Chomsky discussed the subject:
Let’s distinguish Crimea from Ukraine. The Russian takeover of Crimea was obviously in violation of international law, and when the West condemns the violation of international law it’s correct—but, as usual, there are a few other things to think about. Yes, that’s in violation of international law, but it doesn’t compare with what the US does with British support. So, for example, take eastern Cuba. A hundred and ten years ago, the US took over eastern Cuba (what we call Guantanamo) by force. Cuba was invaded by the US forces. The guise was liberation; it was actually conquest. Cuba was compelled, at gunpoint, to hand over eastern Cuba to the United States. When Cuba finally gained independence in 1959 it tried to get it back, but the US refused and holds on to it—uses it, as you know, a torture chamber, as a place to confine people it doesn’t know what to do with, and so on. It’s also preventing the development of Cuba. One of the main reasons for keeping it is it contains Cuba’s main port, which points towards trade with Europe. So the main purpose for the last fifty years has been, essentially, to impede the development of Cuba—part of the whole embargo system. That’s much worse than the takeover of Crimea. Crimea...I don’t think it's justifiable, but you can give some reasons for it. In the case of the takeover of eastern Cuba, the sole reason you can give is to undermine Cuban independence and development. So if you condemn the takeover of Crimea—that’s fine, I do—then let’s add that the takeover of eastern Cuba is much worse.
What about the Russians in Ukraine? That's a complicated story...Going back to 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were questions about how the postwar system should develop. Gorbachev made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join a Western military alliance. You think about history, that’s pretty astonishing. Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia a couple of times in the century. Now he was saying unified, militarized Germany can join a hostile military alliance. There was a quid pro quo: NATO would not move, the phrase was, ‘one inch to the east,’ that meant East Germany, so NATO would not move to East Germany, that was the quid pro quo. NATO immediately moved to East Germany. Gorbachev was pretty upset, but he was informed by Pres. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, that this was just a verbal agreement, that there was nothing on paper, and the implication—they didn’t say it, but the implication is—if you’re dumb enough to accept a verbal, gentleman’s agreement with the United States, that’s your problem. NATO moved to East Germany. Clinton came in, NATO moved further towards, right to the borders of Russia.
Actually, a question that we ought to be asking ourselves is, ‘Why did NATO even exist after 1990?’ Throughout the whole history of the Cold War, we were told NATO is necessary to defend western Europe from the Russian hordes. Okay? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? It expands, it expands to the east. Its mission changed. Its official mission now is not to defend Europe from the Russian hordes. It's to control the global energy system and serve as a US-run intervention force. Well, you know, we’re all educated intellectuals. We can now ask the question, ‘What was the nature of the propaganda we were fed all those years?’ If NATO was there to defend the West from the Russians, why is it now expanding right to the borders of Russia, becoming a global US intervention force, protecting sea lanes and pipelines and so on. What that tells us is all that talk about the Cold War was just a pure lie. Educated intellectuals don’t pursue this line of thought, but it’s a pretty obvious one.
Well, going on to Ukraine, for any Russian leader—whoever it might be, Mahatma Ghandi—Ukraine is right at the core of their geostrategic concerns. For Ukraine to be taken into NATO, which is what is repeatedly threatened, would be a very serious threat to Russian security, quite apart from historical interests which go way back to the origins of the Russian Empire. So, you can give arguments against Russian interference in eastern Ukraine after the coup that took place there, but it’s a complicated story and the West is not without its significant initiatives there.
Peter Hitchens, a British journalist who was a foreign correspondent during the Cold War, has criticised post-Cold War NATO expansionism. ‘There is a temptation to conclude that we have returned to the days of the Evil Empire,’ stated Mr. Hitchens, writing about ‘Putin’s Russia’ in 2008. ‘Have we? And if so, whose fault is it?’ he asked:
My own view, formed in Moscow during the final months of Gorbachev, is that the US and its allies missed a great opportunity in Russia.
We continued to be absurdly suspicious, and needlessly triumphalist, as Gorbachev dismantled his country. We forced Russia back to the humiliating borders imposed on her by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the Carthaginian peace of Brest-Litovsk in 1917. We brought the NATO alliance up to Russia’s front door. We meddled in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
But we had neither the military power nor the long-term commitment to these places to sustain these actions. Russia, sadly for the people of Georgia, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics, will still be there waiting, long after Washington has lost interest in their fate.
And while we engaged in this maddening hubris, we thronged Moscow with experts on the free market and the outward forms of democracy but none on liberty or the rule of law.
Many Russians to this day sneer at the very idea of democracy, associating it with the Yeltsin years of suppurating corruption combined with bankruptcy, when their savings were wiped out and their wages and pensions went unpaid, while oligarchs prospered.
Instead of saying ‘demokratiya,’ the normal Russian word for ‘democracy,’ they say, with a twist of the mouth, ‘dermokratiya,’ which translates politely as ‘the rule of excrement.’ It is hard to blame them.
Writing about a trip to Sevastopol (the once-Russian, then-Ukrainian, now-Russian once more Crimean city), Mr. Hitchens reiterated his criticism of NATO’s continued expansion in particular and Western exploitation of Russia’s post-Cold War vulnerability in general:
I think our treatment of Russia since the fall of Communism has been almost unbelievably stupid and crude. We complain now about the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin. But it was our greed and our bullying of the wounded bear that created Putin and his shady, corrupt state.
We insisted on humiliating the Kremlin, when Mikhail Gorbachev had kindly dismantled the Communist machine. We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia. We pushed the anti-Russian NATO alliance (who else was its target?) ever further eastwards as if there were still a Soviet threat. We flooded Russia with spivs and carpetbaggers, and called this disgrace ‘democracy.’ Then we wondered why they didn’t love it.
And it is still fashionable to posture in the think-tanks of London and Washington with babble about the need to ‘contain’ Russia and to side with self-proclaimed people-power ‘revolutions’ in the capitals of Russia’s next-door neighbours. And if Russia objects we throw up our hands and gabble that a ‘New Cold War’ is in the making.
No, I am not an apologist for Comrade Putin. I like Russia, and I wish it had a better government. I think it would have done if we had been more thoughtful after 1991. But I am against stupidity in foreign policy, and this has been a particularly foolish, shortsighted episode.
In 2015, after the regime change and civil war in Ukraine, Mr. Hitchens declared, ‘It's NATO that's Empire-Building, not Putin’:
Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding?
There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss…
This diminished Russia feels the spread of the EU and its armed wing, NATO, like a blow on an unhealed bruise. In February 2007, for instance, Vladimir Putin asked sulkily, ‘Against whom is this expansion intended?’
I have never heard a clear answer to that question. The USSR, which NATO was founded to fight, expired in August 1991. So what is NATO’s purpose now? Why does it even still exist?
There is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet Europe. Even if Russia wanted to reconquer its lost empire, as some believe (a belief for which there is no serious evidence), it is too weak and too poor to do this. So why not invite Russia to join the great western alliances? Alas, it is obvious to everyone, but never stated, that Russia cannot ever join either NATO or the EU, for if it did so it would unbalance them both by its sheer size. There are many possible ways of dealing with this. One would be an adult recognition of the limits of human power, combined with an understanding of Russia’s repeated experience of invasions and its lack of defensible borders.
But we do not do this. Instead we have a noisy pseudo-moral crusade, which would not withstand five minutes of serious consideration. Mr. Putin’s state is, beyond doubt, a sinister tyranny. But so is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, which locks up far more journalists than does Russia. Turkey is an officially respectable NATO member, 40 years after seizing northern Cyprus, which it still occupies, in an almost exact precedent for Russia’s seizure of Crimea.3 If Putin disgusts us so much, then why are we and the USA happy to do business with Erdogan, and also to fawn upon Saudi Arabia and China?
‘I don’t care what your right- or left-wing “public intellectuals” think,’ one may say, ‘just what the actual experts in academia think.’ As you wish…
Stephen F. Cohen, who was a professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and NYU, criticised post-Cold War NATO expansionism. In one of his books, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, he enumerated NATO’s eastward expansion as an element of the ‘relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia’s post-1991 weakness’:
A growing military encirclement of Russia, on and near its borders, by US and NATO bases, which by August 2008 were already ensconced or being planned in at least half the fourteen other former Soviet republics, from the Baltics and Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the new states of Central Asia. The result is a reemerging iron curtain and the remilitarization of American-Russian relations, developments only belatedly noted, and almost always misexplained, in the United States. In the aftermath of the 2008 Georgian War, for example, a US Senator angrily declared, ‘We’re not going to let Russia, so soon after the last Iron Curtain fell, to again draw a dividing line across Europe.’ A New York Times editorial added that such a ‘redivision of Europe’ could ‘not be tolerated.’ But it was the eastward expansion of the NATO military alliance, beginning in the 1990s, that imposed ‘new dividing lines in Europe,’ certainly in the eyes of Russia’s political leaders, and threatened their country with ‘being pushed’ behind a new ‘iron curtain.’
A tacit (and closely related) US denial that Russia has any legitimate security concerns outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former Soviet republics such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia…
Even more, a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US intervention in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992…
Underpinning these components of the real US policy have been familiar Cold-War double standards condemning Moscow for doing what Washington does such as seeking allies and military bases in former Soviet republics, using its assets (oil and gas in Russia's case) as aid to friendly governments, regulating foreign money in its political life, and recognizing secessionist territories after using force to abet them…
Finally, the United States has been attempting, by exploiting Russia’s weakness, to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era…
In addition to ending American ‘triumphalism’ about the outcome of the first Cold War and ‘Blame Russia First syndrome’ in the new Cold War, Prof. Cohen emphasised that it is imperative to end NATO’s eastward expansion:
The third fundamental change follows from the previous two and is the most crucial. NATO expansion toward Russia, which has failed on all counts, must stop. It has served only to undermine the security of all parties involved; generate a militarized US-Russian relationship where there should be a diplomatic one; bring the two nations closer to war than ever before; and all but exclude the possibility of further nuclear arms reductions. By encircling Russia with military bases, along with facilities that have the potential to deprive Moscow of its hard-achieved defense capabilities, NATO’s encroachment has also caused even pro-Western Russians to feel ‘our fate is not in our hands.’ A nation fearing for its future will never wager on a partner that threatens it.
Of course, Prof. Cohen is assuming that you want to avoid another cold war or even a hot war with Russia, which cannot be reasonably assumed of most American journos and pols.
Richard Sakwa, who is a professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, has criticised post-Cold War NATO expansionism. In one of his books, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order, he describes the problem of NATO expansion—the problems which caused it and the problems which it caused—as a phenomenon of ‘the Cold Peace’:
With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that NATO had successfully achieved its purpose, above all containing the USSR, and could enter honourable retirement. Instead, the organisation spent the next quarter-century looking for a new role until it returned to fulfill the main function for which it had been created—containing Russia. In the cold peace years NATO survived by going ‘out of area’ (notably in Kosovo and Afghanistan) and enlarging to encompass a swath of former Soviet bloc countries and even some former Soviet republics. The tension between those who sought a transformation of the power system at the end of the Cold War, and those who emphasised continuity and the consolidation of the power shift in the surviving institutions, was at its sharpest when it came to the fate of the organisation. The struggle between ‘regime transformers’, who sought to use the full might of American civilian power to change Russia's domestic system, and ‘power balancers’, who argued that Russia’s domestic regime did not shape its foreign policy and, in any case, that the US had a limited ability to shape Russia’s internal order, characterised the cold peace years. The enduring tension between these two positions framed Russia’s early attempts to join the liberal international order and its security system. NATO faced an existential crisis of purpose, yet in the end the Atlantic security system survived and after 2014 assumed increasingly ramified features as it shifted towards a policy of hard containment.
‘The Cold Peace,’ according to Prof Sakwa, was a term that originated among Russian leaders to describe the persistence of Cold-War policies towards Russia as if it were still the Soviet Union despite a nominal end to the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union:
The twenty-five years between 1989 and 2014 quickly assumed the character of a ‘cold peace’, a period pregnant with the potential for renewed conflict. Instead of a transcendence of the sources of conflict at the end of the Cold War, a power shift was registered within the framework of a continuation of the structures of conflict. The concept emerged soon after the Soviet collapse, with [Stephen F.] Cohen already arguing in 1992 that inadequate attention was being devoted to the ‘cold peace’ with Russia in the American presidential election. The foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, as early as 1992 warned against NATO enlargement, and in 1993 Yeltsin complained that various items of Cold War legislation were still on the books in the US. He condemned in particular the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974 linking free trade with Jewish emigration, as well as the continuation of ‘Captive Nations’ discourse, even though most of the states in question had gained their independence. The term was used by Yeltsin at the Budapest OSCE conference in December 1994, when he warned that the American plan to enlarge NATO could plunge Europe ‘into a cold peace’. Reminding his audience that the significance of the end of the war half a century earlier was ‘the need for a historic reconciliation in Europe’, he went on to argue that ‘there should no longer be enemies, winners or losers, in that Europe. For the first time in history, our continent has a real opportunity to achieve unity’. In his trademark stentorian tone he went on to warn: ‘To miss that opportunity means to forget the lessons of the past and to jeopardize our future…Europe, even before it has managed to shrug off the legacy of the cold war, is at risk of plunging into a cold peace’. In an article the following year, Kozyrev warned that the choice lay between ‘cooperation’ or a ‘cold peace’. An asymmetrical peace order became established, in which one side acted as if it was the victor, while the other refused to ‘embrace defeat’. This established the conditions for the cold peace, a mimetic cold war that was unable to understand the sources of its own existence.
According to Prof. Sakwa, in spite of mutually attempted appeasement between the West and Russia throughout the ‘Cold Peace,’ the conflict continued to escalate out of their controul:
The puzzle to be explained, then, is why relations with both organisations deteriorated so spectacularly, to the point that outright military conflict is no longer excluded? Ultimately it was the failure to imagine a different future for Europe that created the new dividing lines. From Russia’s perspective, there was no security vacuum that needed to be filled; from the West’s perspective, who was to deny the ‘sovereign choice’ of Eastern European states if they wished to enter the world’s most successful multilateral security body. The former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states had joined NATO to enhance their security; but the very act of doing so created a security dilemma for Russia that undermined the security of all. This fateful geopolitical paradox—that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its own existence—provoked a number of conflicts. The Russo-Georgian War of August 2008 acted as the warning tremor of the major earthquake that engulfed Europe over Ukraine in 2014.
Prof. Sakwa makes a well-composed phrase and well-considered point. The former Warsaw-Pact states, which the other Soviet states took and kept by force during and after the Second World War, had every right and reason to join NATO even after the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Cold War was ended. Of course, Stalinism was no picnic for the Soviet states either, but the memory of annexation, occupation, and mass population transfers is especially traumatic for the Central-European and Baltic peoples, such as the Poles (1939), the Hungarians (1956), and the Czechs/Slovaks (1968).4
The problem is that whilst we may have had the right to expand NATO, as provocative as it may have been to Russia, what we did not have was the right to provoke Russia and not expect an eventual reaction. Will we learn that lesson? Or will we continue to dictate to Russia, as the Athenian envoy dictated to the Melians in the Peloponnesian War, ‘Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ (Beware! The favour of the gods is fickle: By the end of that war, the Athenians had gone from ‘doing what they could’ to ‘suffering what they must.’)
‘Those who can’t do, teach,’ one may say. ‘These professors, however educated, have no actual experience in diplomacy, intelligence, or the military.’ As you wish…
In 1998, after the expansion of NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman interviewed George Kennan, the American elder-statesman who had served as the US ambassador to Russia and Yugoslavia and who had conceived the Cold-War strategy of ‘containment’ in the late 1940s:
‘I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.
‘What bothers me is how superficial and ill-informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
‘And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia. It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.’
In 1991, Jack F. Matlock was the US Ambassador to the USSR and was present for the dissolution of the USSR. In 1997, Mr. Matlock was asked to testify to the Senate about the expansion of NATO:
I consider the Administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed…
The plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take into account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not appear to be the aim of the administration, and even if it is, the way to reach it is not by admitting new members piecemeal…
All of the purported goals of NATO enlargement are laudable. Of course the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are culturally part of Europe and should be guaranteed a place in European institutions. Of course we have a stake in the development of democracy and stable economies there. But membership in NATO is not the only way to achieve these ends. It is not even the best way in the absence of a clear and identifiable security threat.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pres. Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, was more sanguine about NATO expansion than Messrs. Kennan and Matlock, but only under certain conditions. In an article for Foreign Affairs, ‘A Plan for Europe,’ written in 1995 before the first round of eastward NATO expansion, Mr. Brzezinski argued why and how NATO should expand.
Mr. Brzezinski’s plan for NATO without its original raison d'être—containing the Soviet Union—was intra-European reconciliation. Being a part of the same alliance had enabled the reconciliation of France and Germany (despite having fought two total wars against each other in the same century), and West and East Germany (which had been on opposite sides of the Cold War for nearly a half-century). Prospective NATO membership was already enabling reconciliation between Germany and Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, Romania and Ukraine, Slovenia and Italy, and Lithuania and Poland. Mr. Brzezinski’s argument was that Russia should be included in that same alliance in order to enable this same reconciliation, not only with its former Cold-War allies over which it had ruled but also with its former Cold-War enemies. ‘Fundamentally, the political struggle within Russia is over whether Russia will be a national and increasingly European state or a distinctively Eurasian and once again an imperial state,’ stated Mr. Brzezinski. ‘If excluded and rejected, they will be resentful, and their own political self-definition will become more anti-European and anti-Western.’
The worst way to expand NATO, warned Mr. Brzezinski, would be as an anti-Russia alliance. ‘Talk of a Russian military threat is not justified, either by actual circumstances or even by worst-case scenarios for the future,’ he stated. ‘The expansion of NATO should not, therefore, be driven by whipping up anti-Russian hysteria that could eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ In order to ‘mitigate some of Russia’s legitimate concerns’ about NATO expansion into former Warsaw-Pact states, Mr. Brzezinski suggested that ‘no forward deployment of NATO forces in Central Europe would underline the non-antagonistic character of the expansion.’ According to Mr. Brzezinski, ‘The independent decision of the alliance to enlarge its membership should be accompanied by a simultaneous invitation to Russia to help create a new transcontinental system of collective security, one that goes beyond the expansion of NATO proper.’ Thus, Mr. Brzezinski was in favor of NATO expansion, but of a NATO expansion which included Russia in order to facilitate reconciliation rather than confrontation. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what happened.
Even Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser to Pres. Richard Nixon and an über-Cold Warrior who no one would dare call a dove, recognised that NATO expansion into Ukraine was foolhardy. In an op-ed in The Washington Post shortly after the Euromaidan, ‘To Settle the Ukraine Crisis, Start at the End,’ Mr. Kissinger outlined four points for a peace plan:
Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe.
Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.
Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the expressed will of its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country. Internationally, they should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence and cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility toward Russia.
It is incompatible with the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea. But it should be possible to put Crimea’s relationship to Ukraine on a less fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimea’s autonomy in elections held in the presence of international observers. The process would include removing any ambiguities about the status of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.
Except for number four, Mr. Kissinger’s first three points are more or less identical to those proposed by Pres. Putin, then and now. Was Mr. Kissinger ‘parroting Putin's talking points,’ as pro-war American journos and pols would say today, or is it possible that Russophobia has become far more intense in the last eight years and that the ‘Overton Window’ on foreign policy has shifted so far to the right that Americans can no longer distinguish a voice of reason from a voice of treason?
Let us just pause for a moment and contemplate the fact that Messrs. Kennan, Brzezinski, and Kissinger—three Cold-War realists and the preeminent American diplomats of the 20th century—were more or less in agreement that expanding NATO without including Russia would be a needless provocation and a missed opportunity for peace. Knowing that, how would you grade the past eight years of statecraft from the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations?5
Retired Col. Douglas MacGregor, in a televised interview on FOX News on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, criticised the American refusal to compromise on NATO expansion:
I really would prefer that the troops that are headed to eastern Europe right now were headed to the Mexican border. I’m also very concerned that we find a way to avoid a conflict with Russia. The first thing we’ve got to do is acknowledge that Putin’s basic point—not just his point, but the Russian government’s point, which they’ve made for 25 years—is valid. They don’t want US forces and missiles and NATO troops immediately across the border in eastern Ukraine. Absolutely! We didn’t want them in Cuba; he doesn’t want them in eastern Ukraine. We should acknowledge that. Stop pretending that’s a non-issue; it’s a major issue for them. Let’s acknowledge it and let’s get down to business and then tell them, ‘Fine, our concern at this point is we don’t want you to proceed west towards the Polish border over the Dnieper River in Ukraine.’ In other words, ‘You’re going to go into eastern Ukraine. That’s pretty obvious. That’s what the troop dispositions suggest. We understand it. We would prefer not, but ultimately we do understand your point and we acknowledge it. We are ready to neutralize Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t have to be in NATO, neither does Georgia, and we can discuss those terms of neutrality. Now if you will accept those terms, then let’s talk about the other things that are important: the INF treaty (making that relevant again), where troops are (when near borders and when they're not near borders and how they’ll exercise).’ We can sort through all of that. We have refused to do this, and because we’ve refused it, we’re going to watch as 130,000, 140,000 troops go into eastern Ukraine in the next few days. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
Col. MacGregor is the hero of ‘the last great tank battle of the 20th century’ in Iraq War I. Unlike the shameless self-promoter James Mattis (that ‘warrior monk’ who sits on the board of arms-manufacturers and writes generic books on ‘leadership’ and ‘character’ for middle-manager menopausal-males and whose idea of a great victory was the inglorious carpet-bombing of Fallujah), he is a real-life modern-day Gen. Patton. According to his colleagues, he was ‘the best war fighter the Army has got,’ but his service was sidelined because ‘the Army prefers generals who are good at bureaucratic gamesmanship to ones who can think innovatively on the battlefield.’
Retired Lt. Col. Daniel L. Lewis, in an online interview with The Hill on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, criticised the American refusal to compromise on NATO expansion:
We have to acknowledge some things here. First of all, that all bloodshed here is 100% on the shoulder of Vladimir Putin and nobody else. This did not have to happen. But, with that said, he has been signaling for 15 years that NATO advancement to his border through Ukraine is a red line. He has shown twice, in 2008 and 2014 that he is willing to use force to limit it. As recently as December he said, ‘Hey, y’all aren't listening to me. I am deadly serious about this red line on Ukraine,’ and then he signaled again with this massive build-up of forces which we just seemed to want to ignore. We don’t like it. We don’t want to be told we can’t do anything. What we should have done, and what is even still possible in this now-aftermath, is say, ‘Hey, Ukraine’s never coming into NATO. This is not something that the alliance needs. They’ll never qualify.’ So why should we say this door is open when all that’s gonna do is get Ukraine sucked into a war? Because Putin was very clear on that. We made certain, everybody understood, that they’re not coming in NATO, because every NATO nation has said, ‘We're not gonna fight Russia on your behalf.’ Now, if you’re not gonna fight them, then why not do the one thing that might have precluded war and say, ‘The door’s closed,’ so that we take off the table Putin’s red line, and then this may not have happened at all. But, it did, and now we’ve left the Ukrainians on their own. They’re fighting this on their own. Nobody’s coming to their aid. So, I think, they need to take this bull by the horns and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have to make some hard choices here.’ If you declare neutrality right now, if you say, ‘We’re not gonna join NATO anymore,’ that's gonna be a humiliating situation, but it could stop the war. If they, on the other hand, continue to say, ‘We’re gonna be brave, we’re gonna fight to the end,’ then all you’re gonna do is get lots of Ukrainians killed, because they cannot stand up to this Russian military. They just can’t do it, and that's the ugly place that we’re in right now.
Lt. Col. Lewis is a veteran of the Afghanistan War who, upon returning from his final tour of duty there, ‘blew the whistle,’ so to speak, on the lies which his military superiors—like Gen. Mattis—were telling civil branches of government about the status and progress of the terrorist-fighting and nation-building there. For his courageous integrity and public service, he received the Government Accountability Project’s ‘Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling’ in 2012. He is on the board of the Center for Defense Information and is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, where he works to end the post-9/11 culture of deception/self-deception in the US military and to end the USA’s post-9/11 ‘wars on terror.’
If Donald Trump, who got elected on a populist message of ‘let’s get the hell ’outta these foreign wars,’ had known what he was doing, he would have made men like Col. MacGregor and Lt. Col. Lewis his Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With these bona fide war heroes by his side, Pres. Trump could have brought the troops home, à la ‘only Nixon could go to China.’ Instead, Pres. Trump, wowed by puffy ribbons and shiny medals, turned to the peacock Gen. Mattis, who is such a creature of the military-industrial complex that he resigned in protest of Pres. Trump’s abortive attempt to withdraw the American troops occupying Syrian oil fields (which is as illegal as Russia’s presence is in Ukraine, for what it is worth).
The coup de grâce, however, in terms of criticism of the post-Cold War expansion of NATO, is this classified cable from US Ambassador to Russia William J. Burns (who is now the director of the CIA) in 2008, which was published by WikiLeaks. Titled ‘Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Red Lines,’ Amb. Burns summarised his communication with Russian officials such as the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.
According to Amb. Burns, Russia ‘had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.’ Regardless of ‘statements from the West that NATO was not directed against Russia,’ actions such as the ‘establishment of U.S. forward operating locations in NATO countries had to be evaluated not by stated intentions but by potential.’ NATO expansion was, in Russia, perceived as ‘not based on security reasons,’ but as ‘a legacy of the Cold War,’ nor was it perceived as ‘an appropriate mechanism for helping to strengthen democratic governments.’
Amb. Burns described Russian opposition to the expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, as ‘neuralgic and concrete,’ and issued the following summary:
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
‘Nyet Means Nyet’ is an invaluable source—thank you, Julian Assange!—because whilst lying to the public may be key to success in tradecraft, lying to oneself and to one’s superiors is not. Sources such as this show how much the insiders really know and what they are not telling us outsiders. Amongst themselves experts will issue more rational and realistic judgments, such as Amb. Burns’ final comment:
Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia is both emotional and based on perceived strategic concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region. It is also politically popular to paint the US and NATO as Russia's adversaries and to use NATO’s outreach to Ukraine and Georgia as a means of generating support from Russian nationalists. While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990s was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests.
Was this really so unreasonable? Was it really worth trying to push into Ukraine and Georgia in spite of how we knew Russia would react?
Amb. Burns sent ‘Nyet Means Nyet’ to the offices of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NATO-EU Cooperative, the US National Security Council, the US Secretary of Defense, and the US Secretary of State. I cannot stress the implications of this piece of information enough. The American journos and pols now shocked—shocked!—over Russia’s war on Ukraine have known for years that this is exactly how Russia would react if they continued what they were doing to Russia via Ukraine. In short, they knew what they were doing.
The political persecution which Mr. Assange is suffering is not because WikiLeaks’ publication of Clinton-campaign emails helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election (that is just agitprop for NBC-watching and WaPo-reading proles), but because of the systemic threat that his organisation poses to state secrets such as ‘Nyet Means Nyet.’
In a memoir published two years ago, Mr. Burns quoted from another memo that he sent to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
According to Mr. Burns, it was ‘hard to overstate the strategic consequences’ of NATO expanding into Ukraine, which would ‘create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.’
As is the case with most technological progress, the Internet has made everyone act dumber but feel smarter. There is an online army of armchair generals and other amateurs smugly snickering that since Russia has now invaded Ukraine, the critics of post-Cold War NATO expansionism have been discredited.
This argument is a rather obvious tautology, for one: NATO expansion, which we said would provoke a reaction from Russia, has provoked a reaction from Russia, so therefore NATO expansion was justified all along? For another, every time I have encountered this argument, I have seen it directed at straw men: An anti-war movement of left-wing internationalists and right-wing isolationists played for fools by pro-Russia propagandists, but never professionals such as CIA Director Mr. Burns. Is he a ‘useful idiot’ or a ‘fifth columnist,’ to invoke two of these tropes?
This same accusation was leveled at those of us who opposed the Iraq War, another piece of history from which we evidently learned nothing. ‘It annoys me,’ said Christopher Hitchens (brother of the aforementioned Peter, another professional writer, and one of the only apologists of the Iraq War whose other work is worth remembering), ‘when I read lazy journalism which refers to those who are opposed to the regime-change policy of President Bush as “anti-war.” Well, this is true if they are pacifists, which none of them are. It has to be said they are pro-war, actively pro-war, but on the other side.’ Peter, Christopher’s brother, was one such non-pacifist who was, when it came to Iraq, anti-war.6
Let us reject this as the calumny and fallacy that it is. We, the Peters of today who are protesting the march to a wider war on which the Christophers of today are leading us—the widening of which will encompass the Western and Eastern worlds—are not pro-war. We understand that there is more than one way to end a war than the total victory of ‘us’ and the total defeat of ‘them.’
Next: ‘5. Crimea & Russia’
Previous: ‘3. Ukraine & Russia’
Needless to say, the Wolfowitz Doctrine was far astray from the doctrine of George Washington:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.
Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.
With the exception of us Southerners, of course, who have always been something more or something less than American, depending on your point of view.
I would respectfully dissent from Mr. Hitchens’ analogy of Turkey’s annexation of Cyprus to Russia’s re-annexation of Crimea: The former, whilst perhaps technically as illegal under international law as the latter, lacks the extenuating circumstances of the invitation of the local government and the will of the local population. I recommend Christopher Hitchens’ book Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger and BBC documentary ‘Cyprus: Stranded in Time,’ authored and narrated by Peter’s brother.
On the other hand, it is unfair and fallacious to cast the crimes of Communism upon ‘the Russians,’ alone, as ex-Communist Eastern-European nations like Latvia and Ukraine have done for their newfound Western allies. The Russians were the victims of Communism as much as any other people within the Soviet Union, if not more so. As a matter of fat, given the numerical majority of Russians within the Soviet Union, the proportion of ethnic Russians in the Bolshevik Party was relatively low, while that of non-Russian minorities like the Latvians and the Jews was always relatively high. The Latvians, for example, had the highest rate of overrepresentation in the Bolshevik Party, and according to Yuri Slezkine, Latvians were, next to the Jews, ‘the most revolutionary national group in the Russian Empire,’ and acted as ‘the Praetorian Guards of the Revolution.’ Mr. Slezkine quotes D.S. Pasmanik: ‘In Soviet Russia, [the Latvians] played the most shameful role of bloodthirsty executioners.’ Unlike their Jewish comrades, however, during the ‘Great Patriotic War’ these bloodthirsty Latvian executioners turned their cloak from red to brown, forming battalions for the Schutzmannschaft (Nazi auxiliary police) and a legion for the Schutzstaffel (Nazi SS). Belarusians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians (those from historic ‘Ruthenia’ in the west rather than those from historic ‘Malorossiya’ in the east) did likewise, and together formed Reichskommissariat Ostland under the rule of chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. The Russian Revolution may have occurred in Russia, but how ‘Russian’ was it? Communism, of course, is not Russian in origin, but German, and not just because Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were German, but because the Germany colluded with Communist revolutionaries during the First World War in order to undermine Russia. The leader of the Russian Revolution, ‘Lenin’ (real name: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), was not simply ‘Russian’ himself, but was part-Jewish (readers of Part 2 now know what Ukrainians think about Jews and Communists), as well as part-Kalmyk (readers of Part 2 also know what Ukrainians think about Slavs race-mixing with ‘Mongoloids’). Who were Lenin’s closest confederates? The Ukrainian-born Jew Grigory Zinoviev (real name: Hirsch Apfelbaum) and the Jew Lev Kamenev (real name: Leo Rosenfeld). Who was the founder of the Red Army? The Ukrainian-born Jew ‘Trotsky’ (real name: Lev Bronstein). Who was the founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka and the OGPU? Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Belarusian-born scion of an aristocratic Polish family in Imperial Russia. Who was the most overrepresented ethnic group in the Cheka? Latvians, who comprised 0.09% of the Russian population (but 52.7% of all senior Cheka officials and 54.3% of all Cheka commissars), and 0.5% of the population of Moscow (but 35.6% of the Moscow Cheka). Who were the commissars in charge of the OGPU’s successor, the NKVD? Genrikh Yagoda (Jewish), Nikolai Yezhov (Lithuanian), Vyacheslav Menzhinsky (Polish), and Lavrentiy Beria (Georgian). Mr. Slezkine terms ‘the regime’s sacred center,’ the NKVD, ‘one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions,’ noting that by the time of the Great Terror Jews comprised 37% of all top officials (with Russians and Latvians in second and third) and Jews were in charge of 60% of directorates (including the elite State Security, within which non-Russians from the former ‘Pale of Settlement’ ran 7 out of the 10 departments). Was ‘Stalin,’ mass-murderer of millions, a Russian? No, he was a Georgian (real name: Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili). The Ukrainians blame Stalin and ‘the Russians’ for the ‘Holodomor’ so that they can shake down the Russian state for reparations the way that Israel still shakes down Germany for the Holocaust, but Stalin was a Georgian, and the actual perpetrators of the Holodomor were Vyacheslav Molotov (a Russian), Lazar Kaganovich (a Ukrainian-born Jew), Pavel Postyshev (a Russian), Stanislaw Kosior (a Polish-born immigrant to Ukraine), Vlas Chubar (a Ukrainian), and Mendel Khatayevich (a Belarusian-born Jew). Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were both Ukrainian, and Mikhail Gorbachev was half-Ukrainian. Since independence, Latvia and other ex-Communist states have driven Russophobia in Europe, rather protesting too much considering their complicity. For example, the Latvian president has recently called for ‘dealing with’ Latvia’s Russian-speaking minority who ‘do not support Riga’s anti-Russian policy’ and to ‘isolate them from society.’ Latvian Russophobia ranges from petty (the Latvian company that owns ‘Stoli’ vodka rebranding in protest) to the dire (the rise of monuments and marches honouring Latvian Nazi collaborators).
Speaking of President Brandon Biden, in the summer of 1997, when he was Delaware’s U.S. Senator and the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, he spoke at the Atlantic Council about the expansion of NATO: ‘I think the one place where the greatest consternation would be caused in the short term, for admission, having nothing to do with the merit, or the preparedness of the countries to come in, would be to admit the Baltic states now, in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations. If there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction—I don’t mean military—in Russia, it would be that.’
If this was how Sen. Biden expected Russia to react to NATO expansion into the Eastern-European states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, then how did he expect Russia’s to react to NATO expansion even further eastward into the Russia-contiguous states of Georgia and Ukraine?
Later in the same speech at the Atlantic Council, Sen. Biden laughed off the prospect of economic integration between Russia and China: ‘I had one interesting conversation with [Gennady] Zyuganov, and it was repeated with [Alexander] Lebed. They talked about how they don’t want this NATO expansion, they know it’s not in their security interests, and on and on, and said if you do that we may have to look to China. I couldn’t help but use the colloquial expression from my state, “Lots of luck in your senior year” [laughter]. Good luck. And if that doesn’t work, try Iran [laughter]. I’m serious. I said that to them, and they knew, I knew, everybody knew, that’s not an option. Everybody knows, every one of those leaders acknowledges—and they resent it—that they need to look West.’
At the time, the West was under the influence of ‘end of history’ and ‘unipolar world’ triumphalism, so leaders like Sen. Biden could only see post-Soviet Russia as an economic basket-case and Communist China as a glorified sweatshop, neither as ancient civilisations and empires, larger-sized and longer-lived than ‘the West’—let alone ‘America’—with ambitions in their own right. Behold, what Sen. Biden said would never happen in 1997—China economically surpassing the West and Russia looking to China over the West—is happening in 2022. Sen. Biden’s quip about ‘trying Iran’ is ironic, as the USA, after isolating Iran (and Venezuela) from the global economy and attempting to overthrow Iran’s (and Venezuela’s) government, is now trying to make a deal with Iran (and Venezuela) for oil.
Christopher and Peter Hitchens, although they traded Transatlantic shots at each other over the Iraq War for years (cf. ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ by Peter and ‘O Brother, Why Art Thou?’ by Christopher), eventually agreed to an interview and debate of the Iraq War in person (and, almost as an afterthought, the existence of God, each being the respective authors of God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me To Faith). Christopher and Peter were/are a contemporary Paine and Burke, respectively.