The impeachment drama has cast new light on how the Washington establishment sees America’s relationship with Ukraine. Their thinking is eerily reminiscent of the Cold War mindset.
During President Trump’s Senate trial, this perspective blurred crucial distinctions regarding the allegations. Instead of leveling an essentially nonpolitical charge against the president that he bent American foreign relations to his personal benefit, some of the president’s critics added another dimension to their accusation: They contended it was wrong for Trump to delay aid to Ukraine not only because doing so was an abuse of power, but also because aid to Ukraine is vital to U.S. national security.
This rhetoric implied (or outright stated) that a policy of opposition to Russia is de facto good for the United States, and, furthermore, that we should confront Moscow in Eastern Europe and beyond. Whatever one’s view of Trump’s actions and impeachment, this reckless perspective must not become a new norm in our foreign policy. It relies on a mistaken understanding of Russian power and a delusional conception of U.S. interests. Indefensibly, it risks open conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
Framing Russia as the U.S.’s enemy, rather than a rival or competitor, is a difficult habit to break, but we cannot have a prudent foreign policy until it is broken. Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is far weaker, and its foreign policy aims are much more focused on dominance in its part of the world than the global ideological influence project of the Soviet era.
While it is true the Russian capability for nuclear warfare remains formidable, “Russia is best understood as a great power in decline, struggling to preserve a modicum of security, capability, prestige, and autonomy on an ever shrinking resource base,” as MIT’s Barry Posen has explained. “The Russian economy is small relative to its European neighbors—not even as large as that of France alone,” Posen adds.
France and Germany together outspend Russia militarily, and they do so with a much smaller portion of their economic output. That means they can more easily ramp up military spending as needed without hobbling their economies. So, far from being a peer threat to the U.S., Russia is no match for the European wing of NATO alone. Moscow knows this.
Thirty years ago this very week, then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not push farther east. After fighting alongside the Soviets in World War II, we “managed this peace poorly, which led to the Cold War,” Baker said, according to documents declassified in 2017.
But now, he continued, with Gorbachev’s reforms underway, “[w]e understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that … not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” It “goes without saying that a broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable,” Gorbachev replied, and Baker assented.
In the years since, of course, NATO did expand east, precisely as Baker said it wouldn’t.
Analysts including Dartmouth’s Joshua Shifrinson have dubbed this a broken promise, and it isn’t difficult to see why. This repeated expansion resulted in aggression from Moscow, eager to prove it would not be cowed by NATO’s growth, while undermining the security of the U.S.
Few states in NATO’s present-day membership, a roster roughly doubled since that Baker-Gorbachev conversation, meet the defense obligations of the alliance, nor would they be capable of providing meaningful mutual defense to the U.S. in the event of war. (Trump often complains about this, but he has also increased U.S. military commitments to Europe, hampering any chance of burden-shifting to our allies.)
Expanding NATO eastward and beating back the Russian expansion that growth has unintentionally incited feeds a vicious cycle which sets back U.S. interests. It needlessly provokes a nation which, though declining and far from a friend, should not be treated as our Cold War enemy. Russia’s nuclear weapons remain “fearsome though somewhat ‘creaky,’” in Posen’s words, which is to say it is wildly irresponsible to court open war via proxy fights such as the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria.
In the long-term, the renewed Cold War approach to U.S.-Russia relations, which Trump’s impeachment trial highlighted, is dangerous to our security. So is a hawkish Russia policy that confuses Ukrainian security and lethal aid with U.S. security, allegations of abuse of presidential power notwithstanding.
Moving forward, the U.S. should end its military involvement in Ukraine, adopt a policy of neutrality, and support efforts at achieving peace at the negotiating table. Moscow and Washington need not be friendly, and likely never will be. However, U.S. national security and realistic diplomacy, not anachronistic antagonism, should always be the centerpiece of Washington’s Russia policy.
Bonnie Kristian (@bonniekristian) is a fellow at Defense Priorities and contributing editor at the Week. She is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
