The Ukrainian Crisis

By Michael F. Duggan

The current Ukrainian crisis appears to be driven by four dynamics.  The first is the sphere of influence muscle-flexing by the Russians in response to the generation-long eastward expansion of NATO, and, in a more proximate sense, Western support for the anti-Russian fores in Ukraine.  As Ambassador Kennan observed in 1997: “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian border is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period,” and “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”1  The Russian military buildup on its border with Ukraine and naval maneuvers off of Ireland are meant to tell the West: see, this is how it feels.   

As a friend of mine recently observed, the second dynamic is the Biden administration’s desire to look tough in foreign affairs in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.  This has led them to overreact to the Russian military buildup, thus setting up a situation that feels like the Cuban Missile Crisis.  If things go well, Biden becomes JFK and the prospects for the 2022 midterms will be better for the Democrats and by extension the president’s domestic agenda.  

The third dynamic is the strongly pro-Ukrainian stance of the United States which has been further bolstered by lobbying.2 American support for Ukraine is also a means of opposing Russia on the assumption that any nation that rejects economic globalization with the U.S. as its guardian hegemon must be actively opposed.  All of this is made worse by a Secretary of State who appears to be committed to the conventionalist clichés of the foreign policy Blob and a desire to humble Russia.

The fourth and overarching dynamic is the implications of Russian gas and petroleum sales to Western Europe and its increasing economic dependence on Russia and China generally (these observations take some of the wind out of the sails out of the argument that Putin is a would-be Hitlerian maniac bent on invading Europe). Thus, as one observer has noted, tough actions by the U.S. might be aimed more at keeping Europe in the Western sphere rather than keeping Russia and China out of it. 3    

It is difficult to understand why Americans and Europeans just don’t get it: as long as there are large nations, there will be spheres of interest in which the security concerns of the local hegemon trump those of outsiders. Russia has been invaded a number of times from the west.  In essence a large land empire, it is preoccupied with protecting its borders with buffer zones—a sphere of influence that has been reduced to virtually nothing since the end of the Cold War.  If you search “NATO enlargement” online and look at the map of its expansion since 1990, you will quickly understand why Russians feel as if their Cold War rivals are encroaching upon them.   

To understand Russia’s concerns over the expansion of NATO, one need only reverse the situation.  Suppose that the Soviet Union had triumphed in the Cold War and that a revitalized Warsaw Pact was now in Canada or backing anti-U.S. forces in a civil war there after supporting the overthrow of a democratically-elected, pro-U.S. government.  How would the United States feel about having a hostile pact on its northern border?  How would it react?  This characterization is a close equal-but-opposite scenario to the situation in Eastern Europe in recent years and the prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO.  As the Quincy Institute has suggested, some strategic empathy on the part of Western policymakers would serve them well.4

Those who think that the Russians are intent on invading and occupying Ukraine would do well to ask what would be the benefit of such an ill-considered action. With a landmass greater than either France, Germany, or Spain, Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe after Russia. How would Russia, or any nation, invade, conquer, and occupy a hostile country of more than 44 million people—many of them strongly anti-Russian—with a force of fewer than 150,000 troops? If invasion is their true intention, it could be to secure the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Although the U.S. and NATO member states appear to be acting in a well-choreographed way, the situation is dangerous: a tense standoff between nuclear powers in which a hot-headed lieutenant or some extremists on either side could spark a wider conflict.  Given this, the overall situation may not be as well in hand as we would like to think.  As JFK famously observed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, “There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.” It is the chaos of these S.O.B.s that could thwart the efforts of those seeking to control events.

The other danger is one well-known to anyone who has studied the Cold War: that of a rapidly-evolving crisis in which ratcheting-up tensions may result in a situation that may not be so easily ratcheted-down again.  If this high-stakes game of chicken reaches a point where one side or the other cannot deescalate without losing face, then war becomes a possibility.  Biden must not paint himself into a corner or force the Russians into one.

Diplomacy at this point should be dedicated entirely to the lessening of tensions (in contrast to the shrill whipping-up of the crisis by American and British media over the past month).  In October 1962, President Kennedy knew that he had to give Khrushchev something that he could show his team.  It is a fundamental rule of great powers crisis management: unless war is your goal, you must allow your opponent cover to save face.  This is not appeasement—nations with thousands of nuclear warheads can bargain from a position of strength until the nukes themselves become the enemy—it is crisis diplomacy.5  

The media must take the pressure off of Biden to act tough by giving him credit for a good first year.  In addition to returning balance and sanity to the presidency, he got 200 million shots in American arms in his first 100 days, as promised.6  In spite of uniform opposition by the GOP he passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and, with modest Republican cooperation, the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.  These are monumental accomplishments. He has also nominated candidates to fill 82 federal judgeships, 46 of whom have been confirmed.7  

Critics say that President Biden has not brought unity to the government and the country.  To these people, I would ask: how do you make amends with an opposition party openly flirting with fascism and, with a handful of exceptions, is rigidly against you?  On a related note, the Build Back Better Bill was not “stalled” in the Senate; it was obstructed by an entire party, an in-house representative of Big Coal, and a baffling turncoat from Arizona.

Biden’s first year was one of impressive domestic achievements.  If the Build Back Better Bill and the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill have to wait, so be it.  They represent issues that the Democrats can run on in the 2022 midterm races while standing on solid accomplishments.  Biden also got the U.S. out of the fruitless twenty-year war in Afghanistan.  Simply put, there was no graceful way to do it, so he did it decisively, which shows that he has more guts than all of this three predecessors.  He needs no vindication, and pundits who had forgotten about the war years ago need to put down their false indignation now that it is over.  They should be ashamed of themselves for this and for their hysterical lockstep reporting of a dangerously escalating situation in Eastern Europe.  If the corporate media recognizes President Biden’s important achievements, perhaps his administration will not feel the need to embrace brinksmanship in foreign policy.

In the meantime, President Biden should give Mr. Putin a private assurance that the U.S. will halt NATO expansion at its current limits on the condition of an immediate and permanent de-escalation of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. He should also offer to initiate talks about ending the civil war in Ukraine. The Western media and U.S. officials should immediately tone down their provocative rhetoric and start talking in terms of resolving the long term and proximate causes of this crisis.  

Notes

  1. See George Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, Frank Costigiola, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) 656 and John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, an American Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) 681.
  2. https://theintercept.com/2022/02/11/ukraine-lobby-congress-russia/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR0JBQsduhhFXed83ojznFn6L_HTvOho-hjHwfNe1hW-avXgEy36lHqTD0M
  3. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/11/americas-real-adversaries-are-its-european-and-other-allies/
  4. https://quincyinst.org/event/u-s-russia-relations-can-strategic-empathy-be-a-way-forward/
  5. Andrew Bacevich has called Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis “‘Appeasement’ by almost any definition of the term,” but he agrees that it was successful.  I prefer to think of Kennedy’s handling as crisis diplomacy against a strongly ideological, but ultimately rational counterpart.  See Bacevich, The Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010) 87.
  6. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/21/us-vaccinations-200m-100-days-biden
  7. https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_judges_nominated_by_Joe_Biden