The Best-Laid Plans for Deterring Russia

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

 

Not just predictable, but predicted. Twenty-five years ago, not long before his death, the man who pioneered the policy of containing the USSR throughout the Cold War emerged from his retirement as a cragged old man with a warning:

 

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

 

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

 

He would predict to Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, “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 and men like Defense Secretary William Perry lost that debate to a new generation of foreign-policy thinkers — like Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and others — who had inherited Kennan’s success in Europe and sought to do something constructive with it. Talbott explained that NATO expansion was not about moving the Iron Curtain eastward. But various attempts to mollify Russian concerns about NATO expansion, including the Partnership for Peace, failed.

 

As NATO expanded, not even Russian liberals could quite comprehend what was happening. In 2014, Canadian diplomat Chris Westdal recalled a talk he had with Yegor Gaidar, the reformist minister under Boris Yeltsin’s government. Gaidar said NATO expansion would “bring out the worst of Russian instincts.” The introduction of the Baltic states merely worried him, but something else bothered him much more.

 

The notion of Ukraine in NATO, he suggested, was worse than preposterous — it was insulting. It was evidence, if more was needed, that the West would not take Russia seriously, that it would not concede that Russia had legitimate security interests it was bound as a major power to protect.

 

Gaidar’s pleas fell on deaf ears, of course.

 

Foreign policy has always divided the American Right, as it divides the American Left. America is torn by different impulses that spring from deep within our culture. We sometimes loathe and fear European entanglements, precisely those Washington warned us against. We often want to seek simple small-r republican contentment here at home, like Jefferson, but also like him (when suddenly in a position to purchase half of a continent), we hesitate to refuse a major opportunity to expand our power and glory in the world when it falls to us. Like all democracies, we are capable of a roaring ferocity in war, one that almost always endangers our liberties at home and which we feel chastened about with time.

 

For the better part of two decades and across four presidencies, I’ve been aligned with those on the right arguing that we should not poke the bear, that we are not “all Georgians now” as John McCain ludicrously claimed in 2008, that we should not add countries like North Macedonia to the NATO alliance — these nations brought problems and liabilities with them, and no significant military assets. I’ve argued that NATO was being poorly used as a “finishing school” for the liberal world order — as if a military alliance were just preparatory work before joining the European Union or other transnational projects. I’ve argued over and over again that we should not arm Ukraine, that ultimately it was too remote from our interests, and too dear to Russia’s.

 

My side has lost every single one of these debates. At every turn, our opponents — some of them our friends — in the foreign-policy establishment got what they wanted. Haven’t you noticed Americans sleeping better at night knowing that Montenegro is pledged to assist us when we are attacked? Ukraine went from having 6,000 combat-ready troops, according to its own reports in 2014, to being proclaimed as having the “largest armed forces in Europe.”

 

I think this explains why, presently, the winners of those debates are now engaged in a concerted and embarrassing effort to ignore the last 15 years of history, dozens of speeches at security conferences, half the speech Vladimir Putin gave earlier this week, and the content of his demands aimed at NATO and Ukraine for normalization. We are told to ignore the very timing of his attacks on Ukraine — after the failure of Putin’s attempts at conciliation with Ukraine’s president in 2019 and 2020, and after his deterrent actions against NATO cooperation with Ukraine also failed, resulting in the U.K. sailing into the Black Sea, and Ukraine beginning military collaborations with Turkey. We are told by our grandees to ignore all this, as they repeat that Putin’s aggression has nothing to do with NATO.

 

Putin is course primarily responsible for his own actions. ISIS was responsible for their atrocities, but the prospect of a difficult radical Sunni insurgency was also predictable and predicted. Foreign actors do get a vote in the events of the world. That’s rather the point we’ve been trying and apparently failing to make.

 

The debates that mattered over NATO and Russia were concluded years ago. And to the victors go the spoils: Russian foreign policy moving in a direction decidedly not to our liking. Putin has shifted his strategy of trying to deter NATO and Ukraine to one of compulsion. Our friends — the ones who won those debates — now search for a sanctions regime that would make their unworkable plans finally fit together with reality.

 

They made their bed with Ukraine and NATO, and now must lie in it with Vladimir.