Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
President George W. Bush, right, talks with Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, April 3, 2008.
Let me state at the outset that I don’t think the absurd invitation that NATO made to Ukraine in 2008 was the proximate, or even unproximate, cause of Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade that country. Given Putin’s commitment to creating a neo-czarist Greater Russia, I think the invasion would have taken place in any case. If anything, Ukraine’s more credible campaign to join the European Union, which would likely push Ukraine toward becoming a more liberal state, posed the greater threat in Putin’s mind, since a thriving liberalism on Russia’s border would make right-wing autocracy harder to sustain in Russia itself. Encirclement by NATO, which clearly wasn’t going to happen in any case, wasn’t a serious threat. Encirclement by Europe, with its less macho and more liberal culture, was.
But the specter, however far-fetched, of NATO encirclement did offer Putin a pretext for invasion—more credible, at least, than the claim that Ukraine was a Nazi regime. But blaming NATO for forcing Putin to bombard Ukraine’s civilian population is a little like blaming Hitler’s decision to make war on Europe, Russia, and the U.S. on the Treaty of Versailles, which, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1920, levied ruinous reparations on Germany. Yes, the treaty was a bad idea that helped the Nazis come to power, just as the 2008 invitation that NATO extended to Ukraine and Georgia was a bad idea, too, one which, as George Kennan noted about NATO’s eastward expansion, was an act of first-rate geopolitical stupidity, a gratuitous insult to Russia.
And whence that insult? From none other than George W. Bush, who forced it on a reluctant NATO because he wanted to “lay down a marker” for his legacy before his term in office ran out, as The New York Times, quoting one Bush counselor, reported at the time. At NATO’s 2008 conference in Bucharest, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands strenuously objected to inviting those two nations to join, as neither seemed remotely ready for the task and as Russia—with or without Putin—would clearly view the invitation as an affront. According to the Times, “Germany and France have said they believe that since neither Ukraine nor Georgia is stable enough to enter the program now, a membership plan would be an unnecessary offense to Russia, which firmly opposes the move.” Among Europe’s major nations, only the U.K., under the Blairite Gordon Brown, stuck with Bush on this, as it had on the Iraq War.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly upset that Bush, straying from the agreed-upon agenda, insisted on raising the topic and effectively demanding that NATO extend that invitation. Which, against the better judgment of Europe’s leading powers, it did. The official communiqué that NATO issued at the close of that meeting contained numerous commitments to try to draw Russia closer to Europe, and one commitment (point 23) to invite in Georgia and Ukraine—as if Putin would be soothed by all those friendly bullet points and Bush quieted down by bullet point 23.
Despite point 23’s pledge that NATO would work with Ukraine and Georgia to prepare them to enter the alliance, in fact no such work was ever done. The European side of the North Atlantic never showed any real interest in bringing in Ukraine and Georgia, for the same reasons that they had opposed the idea in the first place.
Nonetheless, point 23 saddled Bush’s three successors—Obama, Trump, and Biden—with Bush’s dubious “legacy.” Despite their considerable differences, none of them thought it worth the trouble either to seek to repeal point 23 or to act on it. So there it remained—like the disastrous messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, one more Bush brainstorm that ended up backfiring on its progenitors and bringing woe to the wider world—even though it only provided a pretext for the woe Putin is now inflicting on Ukraine.
