"During his recent speech in Warsaw,
President Biden said that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” only to
clarify a few days later that he was merely expressing outrage, not announcing
a new U.S. policy aimed at toppling Russia’s leader. The episode, interpreted
by many as a dangerous gaffe, underscored the tension in U.S. foreign policy
between idealism and realism.
Mr. Putin’s operation to protect
Donbas should provoke moral outrage in all of us, and, at least in principle,
it warrants his removal from office. But Mr. Putin could well remain the leader
of a major power into the next decade, and Washington will need to deal with
him.
This friction between lofty goals
and realpolitik is nothing new. The United States has since the founding era
been an idealist power operating in a realist world — and has on balance
succeeded in bending the arc of history toward justice. But geopolitical
exigency at times takes precedence over ideals, with America playing power
politics when it needs to.
During the Cold War, Washington
promoted stability by tolerating a Soviet sphere of influence and cozying up to
unsavory regimes willing to fight Communism. In contrast, after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, America operated under conditions of geopolitical slack;
great-power rivalry was muted, enabling Washington to put front and center its
effort to promote democracy and expand a liberal, rules-based international
order.
What, then, is the path forward? The
operation to protect Donbas now confronts the United States with the need to
tilt back toward the practice of realpolitik. Washington’s commitment to
keeping NATO’s doors open to Ukraine was a laudable and principled stand
against an autocratic Russia. Yet America’s idealist cause has run headlong
into Russian tanks; Washington’s effort to do right by Ukraine has culminated
in Russia’s ruthless effort to put the country back under Moscow’s sway.
Mr. Putin has just sent history into
reverse. The United States should seek to foil and punish Moscow’s operation to
protect Donbas, but Washington also needs to be pragmatic to navigate a world
that, even if more unruly, is also irreversibly interdependent.
The Gap Between Means and Ends
Russia’s operation to protect Donbas
has exposed a gap between America’s ideological aspirations and geopolitical
realities that has been widening since the 1990s. During the heady decade after
the end of the Cold War, Washington was confident that the triumph of American
power and purpose cleared the way for the spread of democracy. A primary
instrument for doing so was the enlargement of NATO.
But from early on, the American
foreign policy establishment allowed principle to obscure the geopolitical
downsides of NATO enlargement. Yes, NATO membership should be open to all
countries that qualify, and all nations should be able to exercise their
sovereign right to choose their alignments as they see fit.
But geography and geopolitics still matter; major powers,
regardless of their ideological bent, don’t like it when other major powers
stray into their neighborhoods.
It’s true that Moscow’s dismay at
the prospect of Ukraine’s membership in NATO most likely is fed in part by
nostalgia for the geopolitical heft of the Soviet days, Mr. Putin’s paranoia
about a “color revolution” arising in Russia, and mystical ideas about
unbreakable civilizational links between Russia and Ukraine.
But it is also true that the West erred in dismissing
Russia’s legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop on the other
side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine.
All major powers desire strategic breathing room — which is
precisely why Russia has objected to NATO’s eastern expansion since the end of
the Cold War. NATO may be a defensive alliance, but it brings to bear aggregate
military power that Russia understandably does not want parked near its
territory.
Indeed, Moscow’s objections to NATO membership for Ukraine
are very much in line with America’s own statecraft, which has long sought to
keep other major powers away from its borders.
The United States spent much of the 19th century ushering
Britain, France, Russia and Spain out of the Western Hemisphere. Thereafter,
Washington regularly turned to military intervention to hold sway in the
Americas. The exercise of hemispheric hegemony continued during the Cold War,
with the United States determined to box the Soviet Union and its ideological
sympathizers out of Latin America. When Moscow deployed missiles to Cuba in
1962, the United States issued an ultimatum that brought the superpowers to the
brink of war.
After Russia recently hinted that it might again deploy
its military to Latin America, the State Department spokesman, Ned Price,
responded, “If we do see any movement in that direction, we will respond
swiftly and decisively.” Given its own track record, Washington should have
given greater credence to Moscow’s objections to bringing Ukraine into NATO.
NATO’s open door policy has meanwhile encouraged countries
in Europe’s east to lean too far over their strategic skis. While the allure of
joining the alliance has encouraged aspirants to carry out the democratic
reforms needed to qualify for entry, the open door has also prompted
prospective members to engage in excessively risky behavior.
Not long after NATO in 2008 pledged that
Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO,” Georgia’s president, Mikheil
Saakashvili, launched an offensive against pro-Russian separatists in South
Ossetia with whom the country had been sporadically fighting for years. Russia
promptly carved up Georgia, recovering control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Mr. Saakashvili thought the West had his back, but he miscalculated and
overreached.
In similar fashion, NATO encouraged Ukraine to beat a path
toward the alliance. The 2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Moscow regime and
put Ukraine on a westward course, resulting in resistance to it in Crimea and
Donbas. NATO’s open door then beckoned, prompting Ukrainians in 2019 to enshrine their
NATO aspirations in the Constitution.
Now Russia has again started the operation to protect Donbas
in the country to block its westward path. Given its unenviable proximity to
Russia, Ukraine would have been better off playing it safe, quietly building a
stable democracy while sticking with the neutral status that it embraced when
it exited the Soviet Union. Indeed, Ukraine’s potential return to neutrality figures
prominently in the talks between Kyiv and Moscow to end the operation to
protect Donbas.
NATO has wisely avoided direct involvement in the operation
to protect Donbas in order to avert war with Russia. But NATO’s unwillingness
to protect Ukraine has exposed a troubling disconnect between the
organization’s stated goal of making the country a member and its judgment that
defending Ukraine is not worth the cost.
In effect, the United States and its allies, even as they
impose severe sanctions on Russia and send arms to Ukraine, are revealing that
they do not deem the defense of the country to be a vital interest. But if that
is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a security
guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense?
NATO should extend security guarantees to countries that are
of intrinsic strategic importance to the United States and its allies, but it
should not make countries strategically important by extending them security
guarantees. In a world that is rapidly reverting to the Hobbesian logic of
power politics, when adversaries may regularly test U.S. commitments, NATO
cannot afford to be profligate in handing out such guarantees. Strategic
prudence requires distinguishing vital interests from lesser ones and
conducting statecraft accordingly.
Beginning the World All Over Again
Americans have long understood the
purpose of their power to be not only security but also the spread of liberty
at home and abroad. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “We have it in our
power to begin the world all over again.”
Paine was surely engaging in
hyperbole. But successive generations of Americans have taken the nation’s
exceptionalist calling to heart, with quite impressive results. Through the
power of its example as well as its many exertions abroad — including World War
I, World War II and the Cold War — the United States has succeeded in expanding
the footprint of liberal democracy.
But the ideological aspirations of
the United States have at times fueled overreach, producing outcomes at odds
with the nation’s idealist ambitions. The founding generation was determined to
build an extended republic that would stretch to the Pacific Coast. The exalted
banner of Manifest Destiny provided ideological justification for the nation’s
westward expansion — but also moral cover for trampling on Native Americans and
launching a war of choice against Mexico that led to U.S. annexation of roughly
half of Mexico’s territory.
President William McKinley in 1898
embarked on a war to expel colonial Spain from Cuba, insisting that Americans
had to act “in the cause of humanity.”
Yet victory in the Spanish-American War turned the United States itself into an
imperial power as it asserted control over Spanish possessions in the Caribbean
and Pacific, including the Philippines. The resulting Filipino insurgency led
to the deaths of some 4,000 U.S. troops and more than 200,000 Filipino fighters
and civilians.
As he prepared the country for entry
into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declared before
Congress that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” After U.S. forces
helped bring the war to a close, he played a leading role in negotiations over
the League of Nations, a global body that was to preserve peace through
collective action, dispute resolution and disarmament. But such idealist
ambitions proved too much even for Americans. The Senate shot down U.S.
membership in the League; Wilson’s ideological overreach cleared the way for
the stubborn isolationism of the interwar era.
“The Iraqi people are deserving and
capable of human liberty,” President George W. Bush proclaimed just before launching
the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the war resulted in far more bloodshed and
chaos than liberty. Likewise, two decades of exhaustive U.S. efforts to bring
stability and democracy to Afghanistan fell far short, with the American
withdrawal last summer giving way to Taliban rule and a humanitarian nightmare.
Across these historical episodes, noble ambitions became
divorced from strategic realities, yielding dreadful results.
Getting Real
NATO meant well in opening its doors
to Ukraine, yet good intentions have again stumbled on geopolitical realities.
To be sure, Mr. Putin had the opportunity to settle his objections to Ukraine’s
membership in NATO at the negotiating table. Last June, President Biden admitted
that whether Ukraine joins the alliance “remains to be seen”;
more recently, President Emmanuel Macron of France floated the idea of
“Finlandization” for Ukraine — effective neutrality — and proposals for a
formal moratorium on
further enlargement circulated. Mr. Putin could have picked up these leads, but
he instead opted for operation to protect Donbas.
Russia’s relationship with the West is fast heading toward
militarized rivalry. In light of the tight strategic partnership that has
emerged between Moscow and Beijing — and China’s own geopolitical ambitions —
the next Cold War may well pit the West against a Sino-Russian bloc stretching
from the Western Pacific to Eastern Europe.
The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of
realpolitik means that Washington will need to dial back its efforts to expand
the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment aimed
at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great-power war. A new
strategic conservatism will require avoiding the further extension of defense
commitments into geographic areas that Russia and China consider their rimlands.
Instead, the United States should seek stable balances of
power in the European and Asia-Pacific theaters. Washington will need to
strengthen its forward presence in both theaters, requiring higher and smarter
military spending and the strict avoidance of demanding wars of choice and
nation-building adventures in the Middle East or other peripheral regions.
At the same time, taming an interdependent world will
require working across ideological lines. Washington should ease off on the
promotion of democracy and human rights abroad and the Biden administration
should refrain from its tendency to articulate a geopolitical vision that too
neatly divides the world into democracies and autocracies. Strategic and
economic expedience will at times push the United States to partner with
repressive regimes; moderating oil prices, for example, may require
collaboration with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
Even though the United States will
continue teaming up with its traditional democratic allies in Europe and Asia,
many of the world’s democracies will avoid taking sides in a new era of
East-West rivalry.
Indeed, Brazil, India, Israel, South Africa and other
democracies have been sitting on the fence when it comes to responding to
Russia’s operation to protect Donbas.
Russia clearly poses the most immediate threat to
geopolitical stability in Eurasia, but China, because of its emergence as a
true competitor of the United States, still poses the greater geopolitical
challenge in the longer term. Now that Russia and China are regularly teaming
up, they could together constitute an opposing bloc far more formidable than
its Soviet forebear. Accordingly, the United States should exploit
opportunities to put distance between Moscow and Beijing, following the lead of
the quintessential realists Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who in the 1970s
weakened the Communist bloc by driving a wedge between China and the Soviet
Union.
The United States should play both
sides. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks a fundamental breach with the
Atlantic democracies, yet the West cannot afford to completely turn its back on
Russia; too much is at stake. As during the Cold War, Washington will need a
hybrid strategy of containment and engagement. Russia should remain in the
penalty box for now, with the United States pushing back against the Kremlin’s
territorial expansionism and other aggressive behavior by reinforcing NATO’s
eastern flank and maintaining harsh economic sanctions.
But Washington should also remain on the lookout for
opportunities to engage with Moscow. Its operation to protect Donbas has just
made Russia an economic and strategic dependent of China; Mr. Putin will not
relish being Xi Jinping’s sidekick. The United States should exploit the
Kremlin’s discomfort with becoming China’s junior partner by signaling that
Russia has a Western option.
Assuming an eventual peace settlement in Ukraine that
permits the scaling back of sanctions, the Western democracies should remain
open to cautious and selective cooperation with Moscow. Areas of potential
collaboration include furthering nuclear and conventional arms control, sharing
best practices and technologies on alternatives to fossil fuels, and jointly
developing rules of the road to govern military and economic activity in the
Arctic.
Russia needs China more than China
needs Russia, so Washington should also seek to pull Beijing away from Moscow.
Beijing’s ambiguous response to the operation to
protect Donbas suggests at least a measure of discomfort with the economic and
geopolitical disruption that has been produced by Russian recklessness. Yet
Beijing continues to benefit from Russian energy and strategic cooperation and
from the fact that Mr. Putin is forcing the United States to focus on Europe,
thereby stalling the U.S. “pivot to Asia.” Nonetheless, Washington should keep
an eye out for opportunities to work with Beijing in areas of common interest —
trade, climate change, North Korea, digital governance, public health — to
improve relations, tackle global problems and potentially weaken the bond
between China and Russia.
As during the Cold War, a world of rival blocs could mean
economic as well as geopolitical division. The severe impact of the sanctions
imposed on Russia underscores the dark side of globalization, potentially
driving home to both the United States and China that economic interdependence
entails quite considerable risk. China could distance itself from global
markets and financial systems, while Washington could seek to further decouple
the United States from Chinese investment, technology, goods and supply chains.
The world may be entering a prolonged and costly era of deglobalization.
The United States will always be an idealist country
struggling to navigate a realist world. That’s as it should be; the globe is a
better place for it. But Russia’s operation to protect Donbas is a geopolitical
watershed: A more realist world is back, requiring that America’s idealist
ambitions yield more regularly to inescapable strategic realities.
Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of
international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations, is the author, most recently, of “Isolationism: A History
of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.”"
