Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Three considerations tilted the scales in American deliberations and shaped the United States’ general stance toward this part of the world. One, rightly or wrongly, was a guilty conscience over having let down its inhabitants in the past. This sentiment was regularly embodied in historical analogies: to the Munich Agreement of 1938, to the Holocaust, and especially to the Yalta Conference of 1945, where the Big Three (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) decided the fate of post-war Europe over the heads of the countries affected. A second factor was ideological. Clinton, Lake and Holbrooke, as James Goldgeier writes, ‘were intellectual heirs of Woodrow Wilson, believing that the expansion of international institutions and the promotion of freedom in economic and political affairs could increase global peace and prosperity’.[35] The international institutions worthy of this task were those led by or yoked to the US. The third consideration was elementary. A bigger footprint for the Alliance would lock in previous American gains, maximise American power and facilitate American do-gooding.

US policymakers, to quote Stephen Sestanovich, ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union in Clinton’s second term, sought a new world order erected on shared values. ‘But they also sought to preserve and strengthen America’s place in the post-Cold War balance of power. The two goals seemed inseparable. Washington saw no other way to make its hopeful world order a reality. NATO enlargement was part and parcel of this reality.’[36] It exemplified, in other words, geopolitics married to geo-ideas. Justification was found in the principle of freedom of choice, one of the two keystones of the Charter of Paris. Individual countries, and they alone, should decide on what security alignments were to their liking. If any or all of the post-communist nations of East Central Europe threw in their lot with the US-shepherded Euro-Atlantic alliance, no other state – the United States included, ironically – could question that choice.

Not only were there benefits to be reaped, but the costs were largely seen as negligible. Popular interest in the enlargement issue, pro and con, was thin in the US and other NATO member states. ‘Many opponents bemoaned the lack of visible public debate for such a major foreign policy initiative’, writes Goldgeier. ‘But why would the public be interested in what appeared to be a low-cost extension of a defense commitment in a benign strategic environment?’[37] Potential censure from Moscow, the only real obstacle, was deemed surmountable by American and European officials. They reckoned, correctly, that Russia was so enervated by its post-communist transformation that it could not block enlargement, and their Western-leaning counterparts like Kozyrev did not seem overly bothered by it.

Nor were the analytical costs prohibitive. No soul-searching or intellectual heavy lifting was required. German reunification offered a convenient template. Its prefab logic required aspirants to membership of the club to demonstrate a zeal for admission and proof of their credentials under a pre-existing formula. Prefab change by definition did not allow for adjustment of the formula or give-and-take among current and prospective members about its design, thus excluding countries (like Russia) that demanded a say in such matters.

There were no genuine negotiations with Russia on the central issue of the merits of NATO’s extension, let alone the details of the process. Attitudinal openness in Moscow gradually dissipated as awareness dawned that a joint search for a solution was not on the cards. Yeltsin grounded his early receptivity to talking about Russia-in-NATO in indivisibility, the second of the pillars of the Charter of Paris. Russia was comfortable inside a revised security framework only so long as its prerogatives and stature were taken into account, with all that connoted for the US having to share control. Change without Moscow’s participation and consent was doomed to be interpreted as ‘a sign that we were not welcome’, as several former ranking Russian functionaries put it in interviews.

Clinton was agreeable to the theoretical possibility of Russian admission. In his administration, however, it was scripture that entry for Russia could be concretely entertained only after other countries had been dealt with. As Ronald Asmus, who ran enlargement policy in the Department of State in 1997–2000, testified later: