If we hope to avoid the worst possible outcomes in this crisis, we must start by recognizing the historical and geopolitical complexities that underpin it.
If we hope to avoid the worst possible outcomes in this crisis, we must start by recognizing the historical and geopolitical complexities that underpin it.
B eing human, we often fall prey to clichés. We use recent experience, or the memories and concepts that are at hand, to inform and shape our thinking about novel situations. And the way that social media encourage people to converge quickly on a set of boldly stated and barely informed — but legible — opinions has probably made understanding such situations more difficult.
With that in mind, I’d like to unpack three common misconceptions about the Russia–Ukraine crisis that I’ve seen pop up over and over again on op-ed pages and social media.
Vladimir Putin plays a bad hand well.
I may have made this argument in the past, and if I did, I cannot remember why. Nor can I figure out why anyone else does. Is it because scores of American media hysterics convinced themselves that a handful of underperforming Facebook memes planted by Russian troll farms meant that Putin had push-button control of Donald Trump? The truth is that Putin doesn’t always have a bad hand, and he doesn’t always play his hands, whether they’re good or bad, well.
The Second Chechen War, which kicked off Putin’s premiership, has come to be understood in the West as the moment at which he and his cohort were able to transform the Russian state, particularly by squelching its free-wheeling media. That is true enough. But the number of casualties endured by Russia in that conflict spooked the Russian public and hastened Putin’s retreat. The result was that the unrest in Chechnya was never quite settled, with a Putin-backed local regime left to maintain the uneasy status quo. After many ructions, Chechnya was essentially placed under the rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, a strange, flashy former warlord addicted to Instagram and his collection of luxury cars. Notably, while the war was still ongoing, Putin failed to secure better relations with the United States, despite the two countries’ mutual interest in eliminating a transnational Sunni-Islamist threat.
The drift of Ukraine to the West is also a slow-motion failure for Russia, one it has not yet found a way to manage — from bribes to interference in Ukrainian domestic politics to offers of discounted energy to, finally, military intervention, nothing has worked. In fact, Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his sponsorship of separatist militias in Donetsk have altered Ukrainian identity, uniting what remains of Ukraine around a sense that he has injured the nation. With the influence of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians waning, nationalists have been able to consolidate their grip on the sentiments and politics of the Duma in Kiev. Putin’s encirclement of Ukraine is in some ways an acknowledgement of his own vulnerable position — a gamble intended to cover the losses he incurred on another gamble. Even without joining NATO, Ukraine has enjoyed the West’s blandishments, favor, and massive funding of its military in the seven years since Crimea was annexed.
Putin knows his public well — even his domestic liberal opponents hate the idea of Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO. And that is what makes him a fiery presence at security conferences. Being outside of the American-led order, he speaks an entirely different geopolitical language than we are used to hearing.
This is just like Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland. Putin’s territorial ambitions are limitless.
It is often written that once Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop; he’ll move on to the Baltic states that are members of NATO. On one level, there is a certain logic to this. Putin annexed Crimea, and clearly he sees use in continuing to up the pressure on NATO.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple. I don’t know how many pictures of Neville Chamberlain I’ve seen used on social media over the past week to taunt people who don’t think that Putin poses a Hitler-like threat to Western Europe. But even one is too many, because Hitler’s territorial ambitions were unique, and only made sense when joined to his plans of extermination and enslavement.
Russia no longer is possessed by a universal, totalizing ideology of domination. Nations do not, as a rule, gather only strength and momentum from taking on new territories by force; they also take on liabilities, costs, and the possibility of new security threats. It is possible that Putin’s present campaign is aimed at Germany and France, who he hopes will pressure Ukraine into abiding by the Minsk framework — that he’s really mounting a backdoor attempt to end the conflict that began in 2014 on terms that would forbid Ukraine from ever joining NATO. It is also possible that he will invade Ukraine.
Either way, he’s not a Hitler-like madman hell-bent on ruling all of Europe.
A sovereign Ukraine should be absolutely free to pursue whatever foreign policy it wishes.
We in the United States of America tend to think of sovereignty as total independence: Whatever the people and their government decide foreign policy should be, we will make it so. But smaller nations have often found that they do not have the full freedom to choose their own alliances.
Almost exactly a century ago, the revolutionary-cum-statesman Eamon de Valera was obsessed with asserting Ireland’s sovereignty, its independence from the United Kingdom. But as early as 1920, when passions around the Anglo–Irish war ran hot, de Valera realized that an independent Ireland, if it wished to remain independent, would have to accept that there were limits to the foreign-policy moves it could make. According to historian Ronan Fanning:
De Valera realised that an independent Ireland would be free to formulate an independent foreign policy — which, in the Irish situation, effectively meant a foreign policy independent of British foreign policy — only insofar as that policy did not represent a threat to Britain’s vital strategic interests. The fact of Irish independence would not redress the unequal balance of power between the two islands and a putative alliance between a free Ireland and an enemy of Britain might only provoke the British once more to threaten Irish freedom.
Elsewhere, Switzerland originally settled on a policy of neutrality as a means of protecting itself from its much stronger neighbors, and Finland and Austria used a neutral foreign policy to preserve their political independence during the Cold War. Even the exceptions tend to prove the rule: Korea is split in two, with China-friendly North Korea sitting directly adjacent to China, U.S.-friendly South Korea below it, and the two sides separated by the most militarized border on Earth.
Canada would not be “free” to enjoy the sponsorship that came with joining a Chinese security pact that Americans considered a threat. In such a situation, all talk of Canada’s sacred sovereignty in the United States would immediately be replaced by the language of realpolitik.
Ukraine’s neutrality is written into its constitution. Different portions of the Ukrainian population lean toward the West or lean toward Russia, in part because Ukraine is an amalgamation of what was Ruthenia (a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and lands that were historically part of the Russian empire. Given those fissures, it would take extremely competent statesmanship to make Ukraine’s neutral stance effective and practical — and Ukraine has not been blessed with such leadership.
Ukraine has not sought just to escape Russian domination; it has also sought Western sponsorship, including association agreements with the European Union and the promise of entrance into NATO. Ukraine’s armed forces are an American-funded project now. In 2014, Ukraine informed the United States that it had just 6,000 combat-ready soldiers. Now it claims to have over 200,000 active-duty personnel.
Putin’s interventions in Ukraine have led to the physical and political removal of many Ukrainian residents and citizens whose sentiments kept the nation at least partly tied to Russia. That exodus has in turn left behind a Ukraine that wants to move toward the West, sometimes literally — millions of Ukrainians from the western part of the country have emigrated to Poland in recent years. Part of the tragedy we are witnessing is this mismatch between the deeply felt ambitions of a renewed Ukrainian nationalism and the realities imposed upon Ukraine by its place on the map.
With America and NATO having signaled that they will not use military force to save Ukraine if Russia invades, it is vitally important to Ukraine — and perhaps to the global economy — that the diplomatic efforts aimed at de-escalation be free of cant, cliché, and lazy thinking. If we hope to avoid the worst possible outcomes in this crisis, we must start by recognizing the historical and geopolitical complexities that underpin it, and proceeding with the appropriate caution.
Pretending that every conflict is black and white — that every conflict has a Hitler and a Churchill — is a great way to feel morally superior to one’s adversaries. But it’s a terrible way to conduct foreign policy when real human lives are at stake.