In the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became unclear. Having been created in 1949 at the outset of the Cold War, the organization’s continued presence after the end of the Cold War was difficult to justify. NATO had existed, after all, to protect the West against the Soviet hordes menacing Western civilization. Without any looming Soviet hordes, what was NATO for? Clinton-era State Department official Strobe Talbott notes that at the time “many commentators and some political leaders were asking whether NATO, having served its original purpose, should go into honorable retirement.”[1]
Instead, NATO’s mission changed. It became a U.S.-run intervention force with a worldwide mandate to secure the West’s strategic interests. Part of its mission was to maintain control of the international energy system. NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer instructed a NATO meeting in June 2007 that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. NATO therefore laid claim to a worldwide jurisdiction.[2]
At one time, there was a somewhat vigorous debate in the United States over whether NATO’s role in the post–Cold War world was constructive, or whether expanding the organization would be perceived as a hostile attempt to exert power and keep Russia in check. George Kennan, the architect of containment, warned that expanding NATO was a “tragic mistake” that would spark “a new cold war.” At a time when “no one was threatening anyone else,” continuing to add countries to NATO would needlessly make Russia feel menaced, and it would “react quite adversely.” Kennan predicted that when that Russian reaction came, those who supported NATO expansion would point to the response as proof of a Russian threat, even if it was a predictable consequence of NATO expansion itself. (Indeed, political scientist Richard Sakwa argued that in our time “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”)[3]
Kennan was far from the only one issuing the warning. In 1994, Charles Kupchan, who had served on Clinton’s National Security Council, similarly argued that “an expanded NATO would lead Russia to reassert control over its former republics and to remilitarize.” Kupchan was unequivocal: expanding NATO would mean the “chance to build a European security community that included Russia would be lost.” In 1995, political scientist Michael Mandelbaum, writing in Foreign Affairs, said that the pivotal question in determining whether NATO expansion was positive was “its effect on the peaceful coexistence of Ukraine and Russia.” Reviewing the record, Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute wrote that “analysts committed to a U.S. foreign policy of realism and restraint have warned for more than a quarter-century that continuing to expand the most powerful military alliance in history closer and closer to another major power would not end well.”[4]
As predicted, the relationship between NATO and Russia has grown more contentious as NATO has continued to expand, despite periods of cooperation. By 2022, NATO was fighting what even some U.S. officials called a “proxy war” with Russia in Ukraine. Mainstream commentators have even argued that the United States faces the serious prospect of a “third world war” with Russia. Today, NATO weapons are pouring into Ukraine, raising the possibility of escalation into nuclear war between great powers.[5]
NATO’s new role was demonstrated in 1999, with its bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war. The attacks have been widely presented as a successful example of “humanitarian intervention,” in which the United States acted on a “moral imperative” to stop an atrocity.[6]
The Kosovo bombing is worth examining more closely, however, because it was both a serious breach of international law and a major contributor to the deterioration of relations between Russia and the United States. It is also consistently misunderstood and misrepresented as a great humanitarian triumph, one of the clearest demonstrations of the American willingness to use violence for altruistic purposes. The editors of The New York Times concluded that “the West can be proud of its role in ending terror and mass expulsions from Kosovo,” while former NATO secretary-general Javier Solana described the success as unqualified: “With no casualties of its own, NATO had prevailed. A humanitarian disaster had been averted. About one million refugees could now return to safety. Ethnic cleansing had been reversed.” Samantha Power claims that “the United States and its allies likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”[7]
The truth is somewhat different. In a Foreign Affairs review of NATO’s actions, Michael Mandelbaum describes the intervention as a “perfect failure” insofar as the goal was a humanitarian one. “Western political leaders declared they were fighting for the sake of the people of the Balkans,” but the population “emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before,” Mandelbaum comments. NATO’s bombing campaign was ostensibly intended to stop Serbian abuses of Kosovar Albanians. But the veracity of many reported abuses from before the bombings was later called into question, and the worst crimes were conducted in reaction to the bombings. The intervention made the situation far worse than it had been, with NATO triggering Serbian reprisals against the Albanians the operation was supposed to protect.[8]
As summarized by Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz in The Washington Post, “The U.S.-led NATO bombing precipitated the very humanitarian crisis the administration claimed it was intervening to stop.” Power herself conceded that “from the moment NATO began bombing, Serbian regular military units teamed up with police and militia to do something unprecedented and unexpected: They expelled virtually the entire Albanian population at gunpoint.” Power says that the U.S. “miscalculated” what the Serbian reaction would be, and “allied planners failed to predict that Milošević would respond to bombing by retaliating so violently and audaciously against the Albanian population in Kosovo.”[9]
But Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO operation, said that Serbian retaliatory atrocities were “entirely predictable” and “fully anticipated.” He had told the White House before the operation that if NATO attacked, “almost certainly [Serbia] will attack the civilian population.” In early March, Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema had warned Bill Clinton of the huge refugee flow that would follow the bombing; Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger responded that in that case “NATO will keep bombing,” with still more horrific results. U.S. intelligence also warned that there would be “a virtual explosion of refugees” and a campaign of ethnic cleansing, reiterating earlier predictions of European monitors. The bombings themselves were also often indiscriminate, and resulted in approximately five hundred civilian deaths. NATO bombed houses, a refugee column, a refugee camp, a passenger train, a bus, and the Chinese embassy. The latter incident killed three Chinese nationals, sparked massive protests in China, and seriously damaged U.S.-Chinese relations. As with our destruction of the Iranian airliner and the saturation bombing of North Korea, Americans retain little awareness of incidents that fuel other countries’ resentment of us.[10]
The bombing campaign fulfilled the crazed fantasies of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who openly encouraged war crimes in the pages of the paper of record:
Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘‘cleansing’’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.[11]
In multiple instances, according to Amnesty International, “NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians.” Human Rights Watch documented ninety separate incidents involving civilian deaths over the course of the seventy-eight-day bombing campaign, including multiple incidents where bombings targeted illegitimate civilian infrastructure like bridges and a heating plant. NATO committed one major war crime by deliberately targeting a television station, killing journalists and a makeup artist. Tony Blair justified targeting the television station, saying that it was part of the “apparatus of dictatorship,” and NATO’s military spokesman said the station had “filled the airwaves with hate and with lies.”[12]
Human Rights Watch documented NATO’s uses of cluster bombs in populated civilian areas, and was particularly critical of NATO for lying about its actions, with its public deceptions “suggest[ing] a resistance to acknowledging the actual civilian effects and an indifference to evaluating their causes.” In 2009, Amnesty’s Balkans expert was scathing about NATO’s conduct, noting that “civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced during the conflict if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war,” and pointing out that “ten years on, no public investigation has ever been conducted by NATO or its member states into these incidents,” and nobody had been held to account for obvious crimes.[13]
In addition to killing innocent people and worsening the humanitarian crisis, the bombings were indisputably illegal under international law. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in self-defense, or as approved by the UN Security Council. NATO’s actions had not been endorsed by the UN Security Council and were not in self-defense, thus they violated the UN Charter. (Arguably, they also violated NATO’s own charter, which commits it to following international law and using force defensively.) Those who advocated the intervention did not invoke credible legal justifications, instead suggesting that force was so morally necessary that international law could be disregarded. Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times, responding to the argument that there was no right to invade a sovereign state, asked: “Are national borders, which have been altered so many times in the last hundred years, really to be the ultimate criterion?” President Clinton, in his memoirs, does not attempt to supply any legal justification for the attacks, instead simply explaining why he felt they were necessary. The Independent International Commission for Kosovo used the remarkable phrase “illegal but legitimate” to describe the attack.[14]
But many around the world did take international law seriously. As international relations specialist Michael MccGwire summarized, “The world at large saw a political-military alliance that took unto itself the role of judge, jury and executioner…[which] claimed to be acting on behalf of the international community and was ready to slight the UN and skirt international law in order to enforce its collective judgment.” Indeed, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said that NATO’s decision to bomb without UN approval constituted a threat to the “very core of the international security system.” India’s prime minister demanded a halt to the air strikes and asked: “Is NATO’s work to prevent war or to fuel one?” The Washington Post reported during the campaign that all around the world, especially in developing countries, the Kosovo campaign was creating large-scale resentment of the United States over its assumption of a right to drop bombs wherever it deemed necessary. Nelson Mandela said in 2000 that it was deeply wrong for the U.S. and Britain to assume they could be “policemen of the world” without obtaining the consent of others. Kosovo and the 1998 Iraq bombings, Mandela said, were threatening to shatter the entire foundation of international law. “They’re introducing chaos into international affairs,” Mandela warned, giving other countries license to do whatever they want.[15]
Even though the bombings were inhumane, worsened the crisis, and ran roughshod over the basic principles of international law, one might still argue that they were done out of benevolent humanitarian motives. One could contend that international law is meaningless and can be ignored when there are significant moral imperatives requiring the use of military force. We know, of course, that the United States actively aids atrocities when they serve “vital interests.” At the very same time that NATO was violating international law for moral reasons in Kosovo, it was assisting the atrocities of member state Turkey against the Kurds. But even Power concedes that NATO’s decision to intervene was “not purely humanitarian” and would likely not have occurred if there weren’t ulterior motives of maintaining “credibility.” She writes that “Operation Allied Force would probably not have been launched without the perceived threat to more traditional U.S. interests.” Milošević had been making Clinton “look silly” and “humiliating” the United States.[16]
The United States, she says, had also spent billions of dollars on the region and didn’t want to “see its neighborhood investment squandered.” John Norris argues that what motivated U.S. policymakers was “not the plight of Kosovar Albanians.” Milošević had proved difficult to control and therefore needed to be kept in line. NATO went to war “because its political and diplomatic leaders had enough of Milošević,” who was imposing “humiliation and frustration” on Western leaders. Madeleine Albright said that Milošević “was jerking us around.” Nobody jerks the Godfather around.[17]
Diplomatic options for averting the need to use force, as usual, were not pursued. Lord Gilbert, Britain’s second most-senior defense minister during the conflict, later said that NATO “forced Slobodan Milošević into a war” by deliberately offering him “absolutely intolerable terms” in negotiations. Gilbert said that “certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time.” MccGwire suggests that one reason they might have been spoiling for a fight was “the importance of demonstrating the continuing relevance of the [NATO] alliance on its fiftieth anniversary, and the opportunity presented by the Kosovo crisis to further the out-of-area issue and to establish NATO’s right to act without specific UN endorsement.”[18]
NATO’s subversion of international law and assumption of a right to bomb without Security Council permission outraged the Russian government. Boris Yeltsin demanded of Clinton: “On what basis does NATO take it upon itself to decide the fates of peoples in sovereign states? Who gave it the right to act in the role of the guardian of order?” John Norris explains that when NATO “made clear that it would use force no matter what Russia thought,” it “fuelled intense public resentment” and hurt the country’s national pride, as well as signaling a possible future willingness “to involve itself in Russia’s internal affairs without a UN mandate.” Yeltsin had previously complained during NATO’s 1995 bombing of Bosnia, warning that it was “the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders…. The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.”[19]
As NATO grew in size and military capability, Russian leaders stated repeatedly that they saw the organization as a security threat to them, and did not understand what purpose the organization could conceivably have beyond creating a security order that excluded Russia. Madeleine Albright, in her memoir, writes that “Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.” Strobe Talbott, a proponent of expansion, nevertheless warned: “Many Russians see NATO as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the West should not do the same.”[20]
Both publicly and privately, Russian leaders have been intensely hostile to the expansion of NATO, especially when NATO declared in 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would ultimately become members. This, Politico’s Europe columnist Paul Taylor writes, “marked the culmination of the ‘unipolar moment,’ when the U.S. believed it could reshape the world along Western lines, ignoring warnings by leaders like former French president Jacques Chirac, that ‘Russia should not be humiliated,’ and German chancellor Angela Merkel, that Moscow’s ‘legitimate security interests’ should be taken into account.” Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that expansion was considered a major issue for Russian security. The U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns, who became Biden’s CIA director, wrote in a 2007 cable that “NATO enlargement and U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe play to the classic Russian fear of encirclement.” (That “classic fear” comes about in part because in the twentieth century, Russia was invaded twice by future NATO member Germany.) Burns later said that Ukraine’s and Georgia’s entry into the alliance would represent “an ‘unthinkable’ predicament for Russia.”[21]
Dimitry Trenin of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace warned in a 2008 cable that “Ukraine was, in the long term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership.” Burns reported being told by Russia’s deputy foreign minister that “Russia’s political elite firmly believes that the accession of Ukraine and Georgia represented a direct security threat to Russia.” Not only that, but Russian leaders saw expansion as a betrayal of the assurances given by the George H. W. Bush administration to Mikhail Gorbachev, when Secretary of State James Baker famously said: “We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, concluded in his memoir that the United States was “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.” Moving to incorporate so many former Soviet states into NATO was a “mistake” that damaged relations with Russia, Gates said, and the attempt to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, he said, was a “monumental provocation.”[22]
One can argue that Russia’s view of NATO was paranoid and delusional, that NATO’s purpose is purely defensive and Russia had no reason to object to expansion. But NATO has engaged repeatedly in illegal and aggressive warfare. We have already reviewed the case of Kosovo, where NATO violated international law, targeted civilian infrastructure, lied about its conduct, and refused to investigate its crimes. In 2001, NATO countries illegally attacked Afghanistan, the disastrous consequences of which have also already been reviewed. Multiple NATO countries illegally invaded Iraq in 2003, of course. Then in 2011, NATO, acting under a UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya, instead launched military operations aimed at outright regime change. The head of the UN’s Support Mission for Libya commented afterward that “it is impossible to believe that there would have been the necessary votes in the Security Council, let alone the withholding of vetoes by Russia and China, if the full extent of the military campaign had been foreseen.” Indeed, Russia and China were scathingly critical of NATO’s broad interpretation of its mandate, though their objections were ignored. The Libya bombing plunged the country into catastrophe, and NATO countries refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for the civilian deaths they caused.[23]
To understand the Russian attitude, it helps to imagine how U.S. policymakers would react if a military alliance led by China began, over the course of decades, slowly admitting the countries of the Western Hemisphere and providing them with weaponry and training. The United States has reacted to fears that countries are slipping out of its control with violence and even outright regime change. There was no reason not to expect a similar response from Russia to what Gates called a “monumental provocation.”
In the case of Ukraine, the West took the worst of all possible courses for Ukrainians. NATO declared that Ukraine would ultimately become a member, infuriating Russia, though it had no intention of actually admitting Ukraine to the alliance. John Mearsheimer, in 2015, declared that the West was “leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” Still, the United States continued along the same course, with the U.S. deepening military cooperation between NATO and Ukraine and signing a new strategic partnership agreement that, as Branko Marcetic notes from the leaked diplomatic cables, was “viewed as an escalation in Moscow.” Putin told Biden directly that “the eastward expansion of the Western alliance was a major factor in his decision to send troops to Ukraine’s border.”[24]
On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced what he called a “special military operation” in Ukraine, a euphemism for a full-scale invasion. In an accompanying speech explaining the justifications for the war, Putin led with, and spent the most time on, what he argued were “fundamental threats” to Russia created by “irresponsible Western politicians.” Putin made clear that he was “referring to the eastward expansion of NATO,” claiming that while he had long been “trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries,” the alliance “continued to expand despite our protests and concerns” and was now “approaching our border,” showing a “contemptuous and disdainful attitude toward our interests and absolutely legitimate demands.”[25]
Putin’s decision to launch a criminal war of aggression against a neighboring state cannot be excused. There is no extenuation, no justification, and there is zero merit to Putin’s argument that U.S. hypocrisy justifies his own criminality. However, U.S. policy toward Russia over the last several decades made this decision more probable. As Thomas Friedman admitted in The New York Times, “If [Russia] had been included rather than excluded from a new European security order [it] might have had much less interest or incentive in menacing its neighbors.” It was an enduring “mystery,” Friedman said, why the United States “would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak.” Could different U.S. policies have prevented the war? It is impossible to know. But we do know that every warning about Russian red lines was disregarded. When Putin had amassed troops along the Ukrainian border and demanded a commitment from Joe Biden that Ukraine would not join NATO, Biden responded, “I don’t accept anybody’s red lines.”[26]
The invasion of Ukraine was the culmination of a long conflict that had been becoming progressively more dangerous for years. In eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists had been at war with the Ukrainian government for eight years. In 2021, international affairs expert Anatol Lieven warned that “the most dangerous problem in the world” was looming in Ukraine. The existing dispute over the status of majority-Russian-speaking eastern parts of Ukraine threatened to spiral out of control, and could, if not resolved, drag the United States and Russia into a ghastly war. Fortunately, Lieven wrote, the underlying conflict, while it was the world’s most dangerous, was also in principle one of the “most easily solved.” But that easy solution, he cautioned, would require the U.S. to change its existing policies toward Ukraine, using skillful diplomacy to bring about a peaceful negotiated solution.[27]
The United States, Lieven argued, needed to push for the implementation of the Minsk II agreement reached in 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. The U.S., Lieven wrote, should drop the goal of NATO membership for Ukraine and pressure the Ukrainian government to agree to autonomy for the Donbas region. A natural settlement for the issue would have declared Ukraine to be a neutral country, without participation in any military alliance. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock similarly concluded that “there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion” of NATO.[28]
The United States, however, declined to push for a settlement. It refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO, even though it was obvious that the commitment was mostly theoretical. In fact, in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate Ukraine. Even as the U.S. warned of an impending invasion, it made no diplomatic efforts to influence Russia’s behavior. A Russia specialist at the RAND Corporation even said in January 2022 that “the louder Moscow protested, the more determined western capitals became to deny Russia what was seen as a veto over alliance decision-making.”[29]
One reason there was little inclination to negotiate was that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be much worse for Russia than the United States. Atlantic Council researcher John Deni wrote in The Wall Street Journal in December 2021 that there were “good strategic reasons for the West to stake out a hard-line approach, giving little ground to Moscow.” Deni wrote that a Russian invasion would ultimately “forge an even stronger anti-Russian consensus across Europe,” “further weaken Russia’s economy,” “sap the strength and morale of Russia’s military,” and “reduc[e] Russia’s soft power globally.” Deni was critical of the West for being in a “reactive mode, hoping to avoid a war in Europe that could result in tens of thousands of casualties.” Instead, “the West ought to stand firm, even if it means another Russian invasion of Ukraine.” There was no incentive for the U.S. to negotiate with Russia when it could “leverage the Kremlin’s mistake” (no incentive, that is, other than avoiding “tens of thousands of casualties”).[30]
There are parallels here with the U.S. attitude toward the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, claimed that CIA aid to the mujahideen began before the Soviet invasion, and that the United States knew that the aid “was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” From the perspective of the U.S., Brzezinski said, a Soviet invasion would be a good thing. “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war,” Brzezinski says he told Carter. Even though the conflict killed up to two million Afghans and produced millions more refugees, Brzezinski later said he had no regrets. “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea.” By “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap…Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime.”[31]
Anatol Lieven recalls a conversation he had with a U.S. diplomat in Islamabad in 1989, at the end of the war, in which the American attitude was made clear. When Lieven asked why we were still funding the extremists of the Afghan mujahideen, the U.S. official replied that “getting the Russians to leave is not enough—we want to inflict the kind of humiliation on them that they inflicted on us in Vietnam.” Lieven was appalled that “there wasn’t a single scrap—not the slightest element—of concern for Afghanistan or the Afghan people,” and it “was totally irrelevant to him how many of the Afghan people died in the process.[32]
Once the war in Ukraine started, the Biden administration took steps that weakened any possibility for a negotiated settlement. Alexander Ward, a national security reporter for Politico, cautioned in March 2022 that the West’s attitude toward Russia was foreclosing all “obvious ways out” and could make “a historically dangerous situation worse.” Because there was no offer to lift sanctions under certain conditions, the sanctions did not create an incentive for Putin to end the war. As Daniel Drezner wrote in The Washington Post, “If the goal is to compel, then the sanctioners need to be explicit about what Russia can do to get the sanctions lifted.” The Biden administration made clear that its goal was not just to push Russia out of Ukraine, but to “weaken” Russia to the point where it was militarily incapable of aggression.[33]
Diplomacy quickly became a forbidden word in U.S. politics and media. When a group of progressive Democrats in Congress released a mild letter encouraging the Biden administration to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire,” they instantly came under a firestorm of criticism, including from fellow Democrats, one of whom said she was “dismayed that some of my [Democratic] colleagues think that we can negotiate with Putin.” The progressives quickly retracted the letter, saying nothing again about a negotiated settlement to end the war. In April 2022, an extraordinary article in The Washington Post reported what it called the “awkward reality” that “for some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.” Headlined NATO says Ukraine to decide on peace deal with Russia—within limits, it noted that NATO countries did not think it was purely up to Ukraine to decide when and how to end the war. It was completely Ukraine’s choice—unless they made the wrong choice.[34]
Opposition to diplomacy was not uniform within the U.S. government. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had internally called for “press[ing] Ukraine to seek a diplomatic end to its war with Russia” and publicly argued that “when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it.” The New York Times reported that Milley’s view was “not shared” by Biden or others on his staff, creating what one U.S. official called “a unique situation where military brass are more fervently pushing for diplomacy than U.S. diplomats.”[35]
When allies hesitated in the pursuit of a military solution, the United States brought pressure to bear. In early 2023, Germany was reluctant to send tanks to Ukraine, because in the words of a German defense policy expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, in the country “there is a big belief that weapons are no solution, you don’t solve conflicts with arms.” As German officials fretted that sending tanks was inconsistent with the country’s post–World War II commitment to stay out of the business of mass killing, and that it could further escalate the war, The Washington Post editorial board was apoplectic: “Biden cannot let this stand,” they wrote. After intense pressure from the U.S. (but not from the German electorate, which was divided on the issue), Germany gave in and agreed to supply tanks.[36]
The war created an ugly domestic atmosphere in the United States, reminiscent of World War I, when sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and orchestras stopped playing Wagner. Former State Department and CIA analyst Graham E. Fuller described a “a virulent anti-Russian propaganda barrage whose likes I have never seen during my Cold Warrior days.” Democratic representative Eric Swalwell even suggested that “kicking every Russian student out of the United States [should] be on the table.” The Ukraine war was covered by the media far more than the U.S. invasion of Iraq, with Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression receiving the kind of sympathetic treatment that Yemeni, Afghan, and Iraqi victims of U.S. aggression never did.[37]
Some could hardly contain their glee at the war’s benefits to the United States. Timothy Ash, in a commentary for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), wrote that “when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, U.S. and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.” Senator Mitt Romney, in an address to Americans explaining the rationale for supporting Ukraine, was clear that a major factor behind U.S. policy is taking advantage of the chance to weaken a rival power. “We are, by virtue of supporting Ukraine in this war, depleting and diminishing the Russian military,” he said, declaring that “weakening Russia is a very good thing.”[38]
Similarly, a RAND Corporation analysis, while ultimately concluding that a long war is ultimately not in the interests of the U.S. (due to the risk of catastrophic nuclear escalation), still notes that “protracted conflict, as perverse as it might seem, has some potential upsides for the United States.” Ash writes excitedly that the war “provides a prime opportunity” for the U.S. to “erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense capability” with “little risk to U.S. lives.” It would be an “absolutely incredible investment” and a “bargain,” because it would be like “Vietnam or Afghanistan” for Russia: “A Russia continually mired in a war it cannot win is a huge strategic win for the U.S. Why would anyone object to that?”[39]
Who could object, other than those who end up dying gruesome deaths in an avoidable war? But as a bonus, Ash wrote, the war would be an economic boon for the United States, “pushing NATO partners to quickly increase [military] spending.” Given the U.S.’s “advantage in defense equipment, a sizable share of this additional military outlay will be spent on U.S. equipment,” making the war highly profitable for U.S. weapons manufacturers. Plus, because “wars are shop windows for defense manufacturers,” “any buyer in their right mind will want the technology made by the winner,” thus “Putin’s misjudgment has merely provided a fantastic marketing opportunity for [Russia’s] Western competitors.” (Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported that BAE Systems was receiving a flood of interest for M777 howitzers after a successful “performance on Ukrainian battlefields revive[d] interest in the weapon,” and The New York Times said in December 2022 that a “new boom for arms makers” had been sparked by the war in Ukraine.) David Ignatius of The Washington Post said in mid-2023 that the West shouldn’t “feel gloomy” about the destruction of Ukraine, because “these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians).” Likewise, a commentary for the Atlantic Council argued that the West was reaping “multiple benefits” from aiding Ukraine, because “the West is able to dramatically reduce Russia’s military potential without committing any of its own troops or sustaining casualties.” The war was a shot in the arm for U.S. power.[40]
Eliot Cohen, a neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor, writing in The Atlantic, said that “spending some tens of billions of dollars to shatter the land and air forces of one of our chief opponents, Russia, is a bargain.” Cohen said that all diplomatic resolutions should be off the table, that we should “stop talking about talks,” and rejected the view “that it is time to think about how to bring the war in Ukraine to a close.” Instead, Cohen said, we should adopt the “Chicago way” used to deal with Al Capone. He quoted The Untouchables: “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” (In other words, be even more ruthless and murderous than the most ruthless and murderous gangster.) Veteran U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman, pointing out that U.S. policy choices were virtually “guarantee[ing] a long war,” noted that a lot of people in the United States seem to think that a long war is “just dandy”: “What’s so terrible about a long war? If you’re not Ukrainian, you probably see some merit in a long war.” Freeman commented acidly that the U.S. stance appeared to be that it would “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.” Indeed, U.S. senator Lindsey Graham commented: “I like the structural path we’re on. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.”[41]
Many Europeans started to grumble, as Politico reported, that “the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.” A diplomat described a growing impression among European countries that “your best ally is actually making huge profits out of your troubles.” Similarly, in many countries of the Global South, there are those who doubt that the U.S. policy toward Ukraine has been made for reasons of principle. Few countries other than Europe, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Japan imposed sanctions on Russia over the war, and only a handful of other countries have offered military aid to Ukraine. This is in part because the war is perceived by many around the world not as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism but as a great-power conflict not worth getting involved in. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East find U.S. rhetoric about resisting aggression to be laughable hypocrisy.[42]
The war in Ukraine has brought the world closer to a catastrophic great-power confrontation than at any time since the Cold War. “It is as if the world has learned nothing from Europe’s terrible twentieth century,” lamented Richard Sakwa in the lead-up to the present conflict. The war has been horrific for Ukrainians, killing tens of thousands of people, physically maiming many more, displacing millions, shattering the economy, and ruining entire cities.[43]
It is right to ask, when an aggressor attacks another country, what we ought to do to help. When Ukrainians ask for assistance in resisting Russian occupation, they should receive it. But we should also critically examine the U.S. role in making war more likely, and ask what ought to be done to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. Taking diplomacy off the table encouraged a long war that will be in nobody’s interest—though it will maintain Ukraine as a “showroom” for U.S. weapons, demonstrating their capacity to kill more and more people.
It has become common to treat criticism of U.S. policy toward Russia as “apologism” for Vladimir Putin’s homicidal insanity, or to argue that a belief in negotiation means Ukraine should “surrender.”[44] Neither argument is valid. Just as it is no defense or rationalization of terror attacks to prove that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars increased the probability of terrorism toward the United States, it is no rationalization of Putin’s war to show that U.S. refusal to take Russia’s stated interests into account made a violent reaction more likely. Putin’s war is Putin’s responsibility, but as always, the question that those in the United States should ask is: How does U.S. policy affect likely outcomes? If Russia had been incorporated into a post–Cold War security order, or if the U.S. had pressured both Russia and Ukraine to adhere to the Minsk II agreement on Ukraine, it is possible that the people of Ukraine could have been spared a hideous war.
In 2023, leading Ukrainian politician David Arakhamia said that at the beginning of the war, Russia had “promised Kyiv peace in exchange for refusing to join NATO” and was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to—as Finland once did—neutrality.” All the talk of “denazification,” he said, was just “seasoning,” the central sticking point being NATO. Russia, too, claims that a peace deal was nearly reached at this point. At that time, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and told the Ukrainians they should refuse any deal, that they should “just fight.” Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett says the U.S. and UK blocked a peace deal. As the war progressed, U.S. media continued to present whatever facts could be twisted to show Putin intended to conquer the world, but ignored Russia’s regular offers to negotiate a ceasefire, with the United States claiming, despite the evidence, that Russia had shown no interest in negotiating. It is impossible to know if diplomacy could have achieved a just peace, because it was never tried.[45]
The Ukrainians took their Western partners’ advice to “just fight.” The resulting war reached five hundred thousand casualties within a year. The Ukrainian population was so decimated that the average age of soldiers was forty-three. A World War I–style stalemate emerged on the front lines, with mounting death tolls for few territorial gains. The entire global food supply was threatened as the resources of the Black Sea region were cut off. The threat of escalation to nuclear war became more severe than at any time since the Cold War, and efforts to address the climate catastrophe were set back dramatically. By 2024, it increasingly looked like Ukraine might eventually have to take an unfavorable peace deal and give up hope of regaining its territory. After proudly waving the Ukrainian flag for a year, the United States began to lose interest in helping Ukraine, its attentions focused elsewhere.[46]
As Ukraine is devastated, some are doing fine. The U.S. military and fossil fuel industries are drowning in profit, with great prospects for many years ahead. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Ukraine war has been good for the U.S. economy, a huge boost to arms manufacturers, with the Biden administration pointing to Ukraine aid’s effect in “building America’s defense industrial base, jump-starting and expanding production lines for weapons and ammunition, and supporting jobs in 40 states.” Plus, for a small fraction of its colossal military budget, the United States is severely degrading the forces of a major military adversary. In the geopolitical dimension, Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression handed the United States its fondest wish: driving Europe deeper into the U.S.-run NATO-based system.[47]
Undermining rival powers is explicitly part of U.S. national policy. James Mattis, in delivering the 2018 National Defense Strategy, stated directly that “Great Power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,” and the Defense Department’s “principal priorities are long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia.” China is undeterred, continuing to expand its loan and development programs through Eurasia, extending to the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America, much to Washington’s discomfiture. Meanwhile, the world outside of the Anglosphere and Western Europe has been unwilling to join what most see as a U.S.-Russia proxy war fought with Ukrainian bodies. The Global South does not admire the nobility of the U.S. defense of Ukraine, seeing the rhetoric as hypocritical and the fight as a contest for dominance between superpowers. New alliances are forming, along with commercial interactions and novel financial arrangements that are not dependent on the United States and its fierce reprisals by sanctions and other means.[48]