NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was a good idea
Spare a thought for the Holbrookes, Albrights, and Nulands of the world.
Note: This essay was originally published on February 22, 2022. As my views, as well as events, have evolved significantly, I am currently working on a small review of what it got wrong and what it got right. In the process of writing that piece, I accidentally unpublished this, so I am putting it back up.
“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.”
-George Kennan
“Russia invested $200 billion into the Ukrainian economy over 20 years, the US – $5 million into the “development of democracy.” It seems we didn’t invest correctly. An important lesson.”
–Alexey Pushkov, United Russia MP
It is my opinion that, at this point, (February 18, 2022) Russia should invade Ukraine.1 Briefly put, it is now or never. The Ukrainian regime has made it clear it will not tolerate organized pro-Russia political opposition and the State Department has made it clear it approves of this attitude. Even if Ukraine was prepared to give Putin’s cronies a say in how the country is run, Russia disenfranchised 2 million voters sympathetic to herself when she annexed Crimea, which also hardened opinions against her in many other sectors. Draining eastern Ukraine of its remaining russophone elements may be good policy, but it will also prove a tactical disadvantage if Russia seriously wants the country to peacefully Finlandize.
The truth is that Ukrainian elites are now committed to creating a distinct identity for their pseudo-country and, if things are allowed to go on their present course, the russophile and russophone populations will become too small and irrelevant to make Ukraine’s integration into Russia’s sphere of influence a possibility. While the basic Russian talking point that Ukraine owes its modern statehood to the Wilhelmine Minister of Foreign Affairs and Soviet apparatchiks is fundamentally true— one must never forget that German intelligence sponsored Lenin because of his support for Ukrainian separatism —, it ignores that Ukrainian nationalism is a real and not all that young phenomenom; elites regularly convince masses of things much more stupid than the notion Ukrainians and Russians are distinct and separate.
It’s the time to move because the end of Chimerica makes courting Chinese support much easier, Europe still depends substantially on Russian gas and its political elites remain ambivalent about making life too difficult for Putin (cue Draghi begging the EU to please not sanction Russia’s energy sector if she decides to go ahead with the invasion), and Russia’s economy is too big and diversified to crack under western sanctions (if Iran can manage, surely Russia can, too).
All of this and more is true, but invading Ukraine is still going to be a headache. Sanctions, even if they have some positive side effects — kicking the oligarchs’ children out of Oxford and helping Russia gain a good manufacturing and agricultural base — spook foreign investors and hurt economic dynamism in the long-run; building a warchest has meant fiscal retrenchment and a slowdown in economic growth, while the Kremlin’s paranoia has increased the State’s share of economic activity to a degree that is now excessive and counterproductive. The Nordstream II saga will only lengthen if Russia goes to war, assuming the Germans don’t dump the project outright. The decline of Russian soft power can be largely attributed to the western response to the events of 2014 and, once the shells start flying, the Kremlin can kiss goodbye to the détente with Washington. Russia would defeat Ukraine quickly, sure, but at least a couple thousand troops would die in the process. Pacification would not be nearly as hard as some think-tank grifters would like to believe, but Russia would still need to shell out signicant sums to occupy and rebuild a territory that was last functional in 1991. The Kremlin hasn’t been decisive because this is a pretty hard decision; costs and benefits have to be weighted carefully: realistically, there are only bad and less bad options. And yet…
Washington is barely trying
Many of the more intelligent observers of this conflict like to talk about the absurd promise Gorbachev extracted from the US regarding NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. For the record, I think it’s true the US broke its word — western ideologues confirm as much when they insist that, ultimately, it was Poland, and Slovakia that asked to join the alliance, as if the United States had no say over who it allies with.2 I also think it does not matter too much and that assurances it does should be reserved for soundbites on CNN and Fox News, or even the New York Times. I would appreciate Tucker Carlson getting on Fox every Sunday night to remind suburban fathers across the country of how the US betrayed Russia. It would be good if the New York Times tapped into some soviet-era leftover lefty sympathy for the Kremlin by reviewing the “not one inch eastward” controversy. That is all perfectly fine, but actually smart people deserve a better discourse. Namely, they deserve something the Western world has been incapable of for around two years: cost-benefit analysis.
It is my contention that NATO’s eastward expansion has been all benefit and no cost to the United States. Indeed, while the kremlins probably haven’t slept for a week or two, it is not at all obvious Biden cares much about whatever happens to Ukraine, while his government, which refuses to shut the door on NATO expansion and won’t force Ukraine to swallow the bitter Minsk II pill, deserves at least as much of the blame for the crisis as Russia. Partly, this is a function of how little the average American (voter) cares for whatever happens in an industrial wasteland he can’t find on a map, but it is also a matter of priorities. No matter how much Victoria Nuland seethes, it is simply impossible for the United States Government to care about Ukraine as much as the Kremlin does. The United States has done almost nothing to assuage Putin’s security concerns and yet the only party that seems in any way desperate is Russia, because the fate of Ukraine directly concerns her, while the number of Americans who would meaningfully care if Kiev fell tomorrow numbers in the low thousands (Foggy Bottom nobodies, essentially).
The United States wields enormous influence in Eastern Europe almost effortlessly and seemingly costlessly. It can prop Ukraine up and annoy the Putin regime with near certainty that, short of war, it cannot meaningfully retaliate.3 The best the Kremlin can realistically do is ban imports of Italian cheese, which harms Italy, not the United States.4 No, Russia is not going to shut down its exports of gas and oil to Europe tomorrow, for the simple reason that would be idiotic and harm her more than it would anyone else, but Biden can and will instruct the US Treasury to make it impossible for third parties to do business with Gazprom, at little visible cost for his administration. In other words, meddling in Eastern Europe means lots of upside, in the sense that it disrupts the development of a rival power, and very little downside for the United States. Is disrupting the development of a rival power necessarily an unalloyed good? No, but…
Unfortunately, most bureaucrats are more stupid than George Kennan
George Kennan was the finest American foreign policy thinker of the twentieth century, but had the US followed his advice on NATO expansion, the kremlins would have had a much easier time dealing with Russia’s near abroad. This is perfectly fine and compatible with the conduct of sane, intelligent foreign policy, but is ultimately incompatible with the sort of ideas the American ruling class, by and large, is capable of even conceiving. In a macabre dialectical process, personnel, ideology, and basic principles of geopolitics conspire to make some sort of confontration between the United States and Russia a matter of when, not if.
Personnel is policy, and having a career in the State Department almost definitionally involves caring a lot about things like the rights of transgender immigrants in the Fergana Valley, the state of “civil society” in Laos, and, of course, making sure the largest country on earth has a State that champions the right values. If you are George Kennan, obviously, none of these things matter to you, but there are only so many Kennans lying aroung at a given point in time. Real bureaucracies are staffed with all sorts of midwits and their goals, wrongheaded as they might be, are better served by their own methods. Treating Russia as a more or less equal partner, recognizing her security concerns and accepting she feels the need for a sphere of influence makes perfect sense if the United States wants to only seriously commit to defending its core interests, but such a policy can’t really be expected of a country so seeped in messianism and whose interventionist foreign policy has been an area of bipartisan agreement for at least three decades now. It just can’t be expected of a country that can’t commit to respecting the treaties it negotiates and enjoys toppling regimes that peacefully give up their nuclear programmes.
Some people like to argue that Putin’s assertive foreign policy and rightward shift in the 2010s are more or less the result of aggressive American posturing and belittling of Russia. As the story goes, Putin’s independent streak — culturally, geopolitically — is the logical consequence of a United States that did nothing but, via NATO, encroach on Russia’s borders. It is thus that Russia is kicking up a fuss because the US was mean to her, and the only thing that is standing between Russia and the United States becoming partners is that the United States rushed into Eastern Europe in the 90s and 2000s. There is some truth to this story. but it ignores that Russia was always bound to be at least somewhat assertive because, simply put, it is too big, too proud, and too undefeated to become Washington’s satellite — and Washington tolerates very little besides satellites.
Russia as the Weimar Germany of the 2020s
The October “Revolution” was, without a doubt, the worst thing to ever happen to Russia. The Soviet usurpers destroyed, expelled, or sent to Siberia much of Russia’s cognitive elite, ruined an economy that was growing 10% per annum, and, in Putin’s words, “placed a time bomb” under the Russian State. Russia traded permanent superpowerdom for the fleeting loyalty of third rate intellectuals; an empire exchanged for the endorsement of Jean Paul Sartre. That the “Cold War” lasted as much as it did is a small miracle.
That being said, the end of the Soviet Union, per se, was pretty strange. In comes Gorbachev and decides that having an empire is too much trouble, gives up most of it, and then three drunks get together in Belarus to give the Union the boot. In a few years, Russia lost her empire without anyone being much too sure why, exactly. It just so happened that some 15 million ethnic Russians and around 40 million Russian speakers were now scattered over an assortment of fake countries.
Like Germany in World War I, Russia lost, but she lost in a contrived5 enough manner for defeat to feel fundamentally undeserved, for both proles and elites. Fortunately for the United States, Russia did not have a modicum of self respect during most of the 90s, so she lost her empire quietly, but things change. At 146 million people and a GDP of $4.3 trillion (at purchasing power parity [PPP], which is the only measure that matters, especially for a country that sources its weaponry from a domestic military-industrial complex), Russia is, per the Kissingerian dictum, “too big for Europe and too small for the world”. It is only inevitable that she seeks to carve a reasonably indepent existence for herself, which may or may not involve carving up a couple of her neighbors. As anyone who has read Kennan’s “long telegram” can tell you:
At bottom of [the] Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [a] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was [the] insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on [a] vast exposed plain in [a] neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with [the] economically advanced west, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this type of insecurity was one that afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people.
It is senseless to suppose Russia would forever be content with a geopolitical situation as catastrophic and absurd as the one she inherited from the USSR. A world without NATO expansion would still be a world were Russia tries to rebuild her sphere of influence — and Ukraine has always been the biggest prize east of the Oder-Neisse line. The risk of nuclear war would definitely be lower in this universe, though, and actual invasions are much less necessary when the US isn’t directly threatening to park troops in your backyard.
Weimar Germany without the jazz and the whorehouses
Not only is Russia, in its present form, doomed to geopolitical revisionism, it is doomed to being the sort of country the Cathedral loathes. As the West is now learning, the end of the Iron Curtain was not the triumph of the liberal intelligentsia, it was the triumph of nationalists, who tapped into the popular dissatisfactions years of economic mismanagement had created and took advantage of Gorbachev’s indecisiveness. After the wall fell, the immediate priority was managing the desintegration of the economic system and getting the privatizations done. Shock therapy is hard and it monopolizes a country’s attention. Next comes getting rich and embracing whatever seems to be farthest away from the “blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization” that was communism (as Putin so memorably put it). The prestige of NATO and the EU and a latent hatred for Russia, which had enslaved most of Eastern Europe for 45 years, produced an inevitable expansion of these two pillars of American empire.
Soon, however, there is trouble in paradise. It turns out joining the big western family isn’t just sending troops to die in the Iraqi desert. You also need to embrace the secular faith, let “civil society” take the reins, approve gay marriage, and take your fair share of Syrian refugees. And then Hungary and Poland decide that, while the subsidies Brussels provides are surely very agreeable, they are not as thrilled by the rest of the package. Inevitably, these states become the enemies of good liberals; the Soviet Freezer condemns them to being outside the fold. Fortunately for them, the west embraced them quickly enough for their national awakenings to have taken place well after their insertion in the transatlantic system —it is hard to truly fight them now that they are, in many important aspects, part of the machinery. But the conflict exists and will only intensify now that even France and Italy are losing faith in the package.
As you might know, Russia is similar to many countries in Eastern Europe. Hungary has a Trianon sized axe to grind, while Russia has a Belavezha sized one. It is thus that even her most New-York-Times-bestselling, United-States-cheering, pro-democracy politicians have to pay lip service to Russian nationalism or avoid altogether the thorny questions about Putin’s empire-building; they know calling the Crimea annexation illegitimate is nothing short of political suicide. Mercifully, these types won’t inherit Russia, but it is very telling that Navalny first tried to make a name for himself railing against Muslim Gastarbeiters from Central Asia. Orban understands that the State Department hates him for the same reasons it hates Putin, even if Russia is also hated because she aspires to geopolitical independence; this is why Hungary does not antagonize Moscow. Poland, because its identity is aptly described as an assortment of nationalist grievances, is incapable of grasping such a revelation, so it pretends American influence is not a vector for the progressivism its ruling party rejects.6
Full Circle
It is worth comparing NATO expansion into Eastern Europe with the latest adventures of American imperialism, Iraq and Afghanistan. The US spent twenty years and a couple trillion dollars bombing desert huts and setting up Gender Studies programs in Herat in exchange for… well, nothing. Afghanistan is back at square one, but it’s now friendlier towards China and Russia. Iraq balkanized, but Iran got the best slice of the cake. The United States didn’t even get the oil. Sad! These invasions massively lowered American prestige and antagonized much of the Islamic world, while their obvious failure will tie the hands of American neocons and liberal interventionists for at least a decade (I’d like to see them try selling the defense of Taiwan after the utter collapse of Ghani’s government). The benefits of Bush’s foreign policy have been literally nonexistent, while entire academic departments dedicate themselves to studying the costs.
NATO expansion, on the other hand, has saddled Russia with a war that, while the lesser evil, is still inconvenient. It has disrupted her relationship with Europe, who was supposed to simply import Siberian fossil fuels and build Mercedes-Benz assembly lines in Voronezh. Russia was always going to try build a sphere of influence for herself, but now its going to be a lot harder.7 The United States has chosen the battlefield: Poland, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, and the Baltics are, for all intents and purposes, gone. Over at Foreign Affairs, some are even arguing to give up the fight with China to focus on Russia, which, considering how utterly pointless it is to try and attempt to stop the rise of China, would be an extremely smart thing to do; the benefits of taking Gorbachev for a fool in the 90s are yet to be properly appreciated.
By alienating Russia in the medium to long-term, the United States has lost optionality. This is certainly not nothing: optionality is what Bismarck, the greatest statesman of the last 200 years, valued most. But think of what sort of man values optionality and what sort of man is inclined to be a liberal interventionist. While the Bismarckian system worked fantastically, it could only function as long as someone with Bismarck’s brains was at the helm. It took very little time for an idiot to take over and the entire thing to collapse. Treating Russia sensibly in the 90s would have simply postponed the conflict until the inevitable Holbrooke or Albright or McCain or Clinton decided that another nuclear power having a sphere of influence was completely unacceptable and beyond the pale. What can be most credibly argued is that Washington’s diplomatic moves in the region have increased the likelihood of hot wars, which is both true and irrelevant, at least as far as the conflict stays conventional and relatively small. Many Ukrainians will pay the ultimate price as a result of NGOs taking over their country, but this is perfectly acceptable for Washington, who simply sacrificed a little pawn in its irrational and unavoidable battle with Russia.
Addendum: On Having Russia join NATO
Putin and a number of other commentators have said that Russia wanted to join NATO early on. This potentially invalidates the postulates of this essay, since it suggests conflict with Russia was not actually inevitable. Unfortunately, what is known about this bit of historical trivia ultimately validates my thinking:
The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000. “Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
Western intransigence in the face of Russian demands to be taken seriously, and Russia adamant to be taken seriously and treated as a great power. Here is, according to Putin, what happened when the possibility was floated with President Clinton:
"During the meeting I said, 'We would consider an option that Russia might join NATO,'" Putin says. "Clinton answered, 'I have no objection.' But the entire U.S. delegation got very nervous."
The entire delegation got very nervous, naturally. That Russia never seriously considered joining (no formal process was initiated) is all the more telling.
In other words, Russia would have had to bend over backwards to get the US to ally with her, which probably sounded absurd to the leaders of a country that controlled a third of the planet only forty years ago and whose country’s relevance, despite the breathless essays published in The Atlantic, has never diminished as much as the foreign policy Blob would like. The US would have had to seriously negotiate to even get them on the table; good luck with that.
This essay was finally published on February 22, date by which the Russian invasion is a matter of when, not if.
If it comes down to a ground war in Europe, Russia and NATO are probably at something close to parity in conventional terms, at least excluding air forces, while Russia has a slight advantage in terms of nukes and the United States would inquestionably control the seas.
The leverage Russia enjoys over a number of America’s European satellites is watered down by the fact that pushing too hard makes a transatlantic common front easier. If Russia decides on a strategy of maximum pain for, say, Germany and France, she will suffer significant economic blowback and guarantee that Berlin and Paris nod along the next time Washington suggests kicking Russia out of SWIFT.
This is not to be taken as an endorsement of of the stab-in-the-back legend, which is completely falsified by the failure of the Kaiserschlacht and the collapse of the Central Power’s southern flank in Macedonia.
They might not be altogether wrong, actually. The United States tolerates the “backwardness” of the Saudi State because Saudi Arabia happens to pump twelve million barrels of oil a day. If Russia persists as a serious headache, Poland might become important enough for a similar arrangement. I highly doubt it, however.
That being said, it might become easier after the Ukraine business is finished; that’s the sort of thing enforcing red lines gets you.
I have just read this and I enjoyed the experience immensely, thank you very much. A pity you don't write more often.