Alexei Alexandrov/AP Photo
A serviceman walks down a road at the line of separation near Sentianivka, Luhansk region, controlled by Russia-backed separatists, in eastern Ukraine, December 9, 2021.
In addition to Donald Trump’s other legacies, Trump’s disastrous foreign policies have left President Biden with three tough foreign-policy challenges—Iran, China, and Russia—that could all turn into full-blown crises in an election year. Of these, Russia is the most vexing. For four years, Trump made a close alliance with Vladimir Putin and signaled that the Kremlin was free to do pretty much what it wanted.
Putin has always been obsessed with control of what’s called Russia’s near abroad, and the catastrophe from his perspective of the dissolution of the USSR’s satellite empire. The loss of Eastern Europe and the Baltics was humiliating enough, but the independence of states that were long part of Russia proper is totally unacceptable.
Russia de facto controls Belarus through a ham-handed Kremlin stooge and local dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. The problem is Ukraine, where Putin is doubly humiliated by the government’s respect for democratic norms and the popular desire for closer economic and military integration with the West.
Putin seems to be gambling that if push comes to shove, the U.S. will not risk World War III over Ukraine. He has massed an estimated 175,000 troops along Ukraine’s border, along with military equipment necessary to support an invasion. This comes on top of previous steps such as Russia’s annexation by force of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014. Ukraine did manage to take back most of the Donbas territory.
Biden, for his part, has warned Putin of dire repercussions if Russia invades, but has stopped short of extending a full Western security blanket to Ukraine. Those consequences could include denying Russia access to the global banking system. On Sunday, the Group of Seven leading industrial democracies issued a joint statement warning Putin of “massive consequences” and “severe cost” if Russia invades Ukraine.
Here is the broader problem. The West’s own hands are far from clean.
Putin seems to be gambling that if push comes to shove, the U.S. will not risk World War III over Ukraine.
I wrote an extensive investigative piece in 2020 titled “Was Putin Inevitable?” Conducting upwards of 50 interviews, I found that the Clinton administration was substantially culpable in wrecking what was then a fragile Russian democracy and an emerging mixed economy.
On one flank, the ultra-free-marketeers, led by Larry Summers—another of Summers’s enduring gifts to posterity!—pressed the Russians to privatize state economic assets long before Russia had a stable capitalist infrastructure. Summers, as Treasury undersecretary for international economic affairs, was the U.S. liaison with the International Monetary Fund. Summers, with no expertise on Russia or its economy, used that leverage to make sure that Russia’s desperately needed IMF aid would be held in abeyance unless Russia rapidly privatized state assets.
This policy led to a fire sale of assets, and the origin of Russia’s current kleptocracy. That disastrous course, coupled with premature liberalization of the ruble, led to speculation, hyperinflation, and an economic near-collapse. Popular Russian support for Western democracy and capitalism collapsed. Meanwhile, Clinton’s national-security hawks reversed the U.S. pledge to Gorbachev and Yeltsin not to expand NATO. So wounded national pride combined with pocketbook distress, and Putin picked up the pieces.
Here is part of what I wrote:
Russia was not just floundering economically but attempting a transition from dictatorship to democracy and the rule of law, as well as from communism to capitalism—goals that are by no means synonymous. The abrupt imposition of marketization, full price decontrol, and crony privatization on an unprepared Russia, as a condition of desperately needed goodwill and aid from the West (little of which materialized), drove Russia in the 1990s into two cycles of hyperinflation, austerity, depression, unemployment, corruption, and then ultranationalist reaction. Approval of the U.S. in Russian opinion polls peaked at 80 percent in 1990. By 1999, it was around 32 percent.
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sought to annex the former DDR, he needed and obtained the USSR’s formal approval. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev was a full party to the agreement. Secretary of State James Baker personally assured Gorbachev that no NATO troops would be stationed in eastern Germany, and promised no further expansion of NATO eastward (“not one inch” according to the official transcript). There was even serious talk of inviting Russia to become a NATO member.
But the backpedaling from Baker’s pledge began almost immediately. By the late 1990s, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were in NATO, with the three Baltic nations soon to follow. After Putin succeeded an ailing and politically discredited Yeltsin in 2000, the George W. Bush administration added insult to injury by proposing NATO membership not just for all of Eastern Europe but for the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, prompting a much more bellicose policy by Putin with respect to both.
All that said, however, the logical conclusion is not that the U.S. should simply let Putin have his way with Ukraine. The terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 were also a travesty that needlessly pushed Germany into depression and hyperinflation. But that history hardly excuses Hitler.
The current brinkmanship between Moscow and Washington is reminiscent of innumerable close-call incidents during the Cold War. The most dire of these was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That crisis was resolved when Nikita Khrushchev, facing a U.S. naval blockade, turned around ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba. In return, President Kennedy made a secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.
The analogy is some kind of deal in which Russia stands down from its threat to invade Ukraine, and in return the U.S. quietly rescinds its offer to bring Ukraine into NATO. The sticking point is that as long as Ukraine is a democracy, it is an acute affront to Putin’s dictatorship.
The other problem is that U.S. hawks are spoiling for a more direct confrontation with Putin. Alexander Vindman, the former director of European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council, who heroically broke with Trump and his policies on Russia and Ukraine, recently wrote an op-ed titled “How the United States Can Break Putin’s Hold on Ukraine,” calling for a much harder U.S. line, and imagining that a prosperous and democratic Ukraine could lead the Russian people “to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition.” That, of course, is just what worries Putin, and this kind of saber-rattling is not helpful.
Ukraine raises the old tension between U.S. support for fledgling democracies attempting to practice the democratic ideals that America espouses, and U.S. appreciation of realpolitik. Putin, having watched Biden abandon Afghanistan, is calculating that at the end of the day, he cares a lot more about Ukraine than Biden does.
There is a very narrow path to a mutual stand-down, and it may well lead through Brussels or Berlin. That would also be good for the Biden project of improving relations with Europe.
The Europeans, even more than the U.S., need to avert the twin perils of either a capitulation to Putin or a shooting war over Ukraine. Angela Merkel, who speaks fluent Russian, has a good diplomatic relationship with Putin. She is recently unemployed. Merkel for special envoy?
The best case, also reminiscent of the Cold War, is crisis averted, but long-term Russian pressure on Ukraine and Western pushback continues. If Biden can pull that off, it will be another policy success—that an ungrateful public will probably dismiss as insufficient.
