Dana H Allin. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Volume 64, Issue 2, 2022.
Like the international struggle against Hitler-led fascism in the last century, the broad and cohesive mobilisation against Vladimir Putin’s Russia following his brutal invasion of Ukraine is based not only on realpolitik but also on a visceral recognition of a grave threat to the values and institutions of Western civilisation. While NATO enlargement inevitably discomfited Russian leaders, it was largely driven by the demands of former Soviet republics or bloc countries that sensibly and presciently feared Russian revanchism. In any case, Putin’s primary concern about Ukraine appears to have been not Kyiv’s NATO aspirations so much as its increasing Western orientation and democratic development. War has come to Europe mainly because Putin decided that an independent Ukraine was intolerable. A stable and secure neutrality along Finnish or Austrian lines might be viable only because Ukraine has shown its determination and capability to defend itself.
I
In The Age of Extremes, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm reflected on the ‘exceptional and comparatively short-lived’ anti-fascist alliance of roughly 1933 to 1947. Its unity was manifest in an early product of the young American sample-survey industry. In January 1939, a Gallup poll found that, in the then still hypothetical event of war between the Soviet Union and Germany, 83% of Americans favoured a Soviet victory—a result that ‘would have amazed all US presidents before Franklin D. Roosevelt, and will amaze all readers who have grown up since the Second World War’.
America and Soviet Russia were, after all, avatars of capitalism and communism, respectively. These two ideologies had riven the Western world of the early twentieth century even without factoring in that ‘Stalinist tyranny was at that time, by general recognition, at its worst’. And the counter-intuitive American embrace of Russia as a natural ally could not really be explained, Hobsbawm argued, by the ‘range of international relations or power politics’. This was, rather, an ‘international ideological civil war’, and one in which, ‘as it turned out, the crucial lines … were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand, the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously, the Russian revolution; on the other, its opponents’.
The ideological family fighting fascism was broad. It stretched from the British conservative Winston Churchill and French Catholic conservative Charles de Gaulle, through Roosevelt and his social-democratic kin in Europe, to the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti and, most awkwardly but also importantly, to Josef Stalin himself. It encompassed openly racist white GIs from Alabama and underground communist resistance fighters in France.
Ideological consciousness in this global coalition varied, of course, approaching zero for most of the millions of fighting men and women. Hobsbawm’s true insight, however, was that the global, international civil war was waged not—or not only—on the basis of realpolitik, but also because governments and nation-states, trade unions and businesses, politicians and political parties, artists and intellectuals, church leaders and generals could unite around a visceral recognition that they were fighting an axis of powers led by a ‘Hitler Germany [that] was both more ruthlessly and manifestly committed to the destruction of the values and institutions of the “Western civilisation” of the Age of Revolution, and capable of carrying out its barbaric project’.
Almost a century later, it appears that a similarly visceral recognition has galvanised Western populations who are, broadly speaking, descendants of the Enlightenment. It is a shock of recognition. To wake up on the morning of 24 February 2022 was to feel, moreover, on top of shock, a degree of foolishness. One felt foolish for being shocked. After all, the Biden administration had been saying for weeks that the best US intelligence indicated that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There were almost 200,000 Russian troops mobilised on Ukraine’s borders. What was anyone expecting?
The answer is that many still imagined that Russian President Vladimir Putin would make decisions on the basis of a rational, if not reasonable, assessment of actual Russian interest. He might have made some gains with continued threats and more limited incursions. NATO leaders were ready to talk and, in fact, travelled to Moscow and Geneva to do so. Turning the NATO clock back to 1997 was not going to happen, but acceptable accommodations to defensible Russian concerns were in the realm of possibility. Instead, Putin plunged his country into a war of incomprehensible nihilism, into dramatic international isolation, and into what looks to be a gut-wrenching economic depression. His delusions about Ukraine have been shattered, if not abandoned. Russia can destroy its neighbour, but it cannot subjugate it.
The West, meanwhile, has surprised itself in unity and purposeful outrage. What neither side can know, of course, is how this might end.
II
When the Cold War began, the alliance against fascism ended, or at least fractured. Yet a kind of shell and even some spirit of the original alliance survived. It was embodied in the United Nations, which did function, after a fashion, even with an often-paralysed Security Council. It was embodied in the early detente promoted by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev after near catastrophes over Berlin and Cuba, and expressed in classic Enlightenment language in Kennedy’s American University oration of coexistence. The alliance survived in the parallel dimension of Rooseveltian realpolitik: where Roosevelt had imagined shifting combinations of his ‘Four Policemen’ (Britain, China, Russia and the United States) ganging up on one another to keep the peace, Richard Nixon refined the art of triangular diplomacy with rival communist powers.
The Enlightenment coalition either survived or was reborn in the late 1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, accommodations to the West and palpably sincere visions of a ‘Common European Home’. In 1987 Gorbachev signed with Ronald Reagan the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to eliminate a whole class of ballistic and cruise missiles from their respective arsenals. In 1988, Gorbachev unilaterally withdrew thousands of troops and many tank divisions from Central Europe. In 1989 Moscow made clear to its Warsaw Pact satellites that it would not support the violent suppression of peaceful revolutions, or punitive action to stop the haemorrhage of East Germans to the west. Out of these decisions the breach and destruction of the Berlin Wall ensued, perhaps inevitably, at the end of that year. In 1990 Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, agreed to the reunification of Germany.
The 1990 negotiations about reunification entailed questions about the future of NATO. These questions would trouble relations between Russia and the West for the next three decades. At the outset the Soviets received mixed messages about NATO not moving east, though they certainly got no promises in writing and possibly heard in those messages only what they wanted to hear, especially as Moscow was now desperate for financial aid as part of the overall package from West Germany. Thereafter, as the idea of NATO enlargement took hold in the Clinton administration, it produced not only Russian anger but also a spirited debate in the West and especially in the United States. Since there have been vestiges of that debate in the run-up to Putin’s 2022 invasion, it is advisable to understand the spirit of the 1990s arguments.
In part the opponents were arguing in the spirit of structural realism which, to their pro-enlargement critics, is detached from considerations of right and wrong. A prominent realist opponent of enlargement was the elder diplomat, strategist and historian George F. Kennan, who warned that it would be ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. Kennan first became famous as an anti-Soviet hawk who worried about the illusions of higher-level Roosevelt—and then Truman—administration officials regarding the possibilities of post-war cooperation with Moscow. His 1946 ‘Long Telegram’, sent from the embassy in Moscow where he was chargé d’affaires, helped to dispel those illusions. Some seven years later, however, back in Moscow as US ambassador, Kennan sent another long telegram to Washington, this one concerning the Atlantic Alliance. He wrote:
Surely as one moves one’s bases and military facilities towards the Soviet frontiers there comes a point where they tend to create the very thing they were designed to avoid. It is not for us to assume that there are no limits to Soviet patience in the face of encirclement by American bases. Quite aside from political considerations, no great country, peaceful or aggressive, rational or irrational, could sit by and witness with indifference the progressive studding of its own frontiers with the military installations of a great-power competitor. Here again, a compromise must be struck, and one which will inevitably fall somewhat short of the military ideal. This compromise must be struck with a view to the peculiarities of the Russian mentality and tradition.
Realism in these terms suggests some need for the accommodation of genuine monsters, for Kennan was writing about and insisting on a kind of strategic empathy, for Stalin’s Soviet Union no less, and it would be historically impossible to accuse Kennan of illusions about Stalin or his regime.
Yet it was not monsters that American opponents of NATO enlargement wanted to accommodate in the 1990s, and their opposition had more than structural realism at heart. The collapse of the Soviet Union, when it happened, was not the defeat of Stalinists. It was the failure of men of evident goodwill—such as Gorbachev and Shevardnadze—to effectively reform communism. Historians such as Kennan and John Lewis Gaddis had a humanist, Enlightenment appreciation of the historical moment. Gaddis argued (in one of the first Survival articles I edited) that enlargement violated ‘principles of strategy … so basic that when stated they sound like platitudes’, starting with ‘the magnanimous treatment of defeated adversaries’.
This, to put it mildly, was not the view from Budapest or Prague or Warsaw or other European capitals that had been recently released from Soviet domination. The former Warsaw Pact members wanted NATO membership for a clear and obvious reason: whatever the sincerity and current intentions of the Gorbachev and then Yeltsin governments, they feared Russia and wanted to be protected against it. Enlargement was in large measure demand driven.
Historically, both sides of this debate may claim vindication. It is true, in somewhat tautological terms, that NATO and the West failed to create a post-Cold War security architecture that accommodated Russia. It remains arguable that the principle of an open alliance to include, in theory, every country on Russia’s border—a principle regrettably reiterated in NATO’s Bucharest Declaration of 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine ‘will be’ members of NATO—was maximally provocative to Russia and minimally reassuring to Ukraine, and thereby more destabilising than stabilising. Pointing to Putin’s depravities as refutation of the realist critics is no more dispositive than pointing to Adolf Hitler’s evil as invalidating John Maynard Keynes’s critique of the punitive consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.
That does not mean, by any measure, that the ongoing war is NATO’s or the West’s fault. They may have failed to accommodate Russia simply because the task was impossible. And certainly those former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states that achieved NATO membership must now feel vindicated in their determination to push for it. They can point, moreover, to considerable evidence accumulated since more or less the beginning of this century that Putin’s main concern about Ukraine wasn’t Kyiv’s NATO aspirations so much as its increasing Western orientation and even democratic development.
Both narratives can be true at the same time. This is the tragedy of the security dilemma. The overriding moral fact is that war has come to Europe because the Russian state, led by and largely embodied in Vladimir Putin, decided that an independent Ukraine was intolerable.
III
The axis around which these narratives now revolve is the courage and determination of Ukraine. It is by fighting and, to the world’s astonishment, winning—to the extent of inflicting massive Russian casualties and stopping Russian advances—that Ukrainians have both forged their nation and defined the world’s stake in its success.
Ukraine has made itself a kind of analogue to the Spain of 1936–39, but with two key differences. The Spanish Civil War was a precursor battle against fascism, but while the Soviet Union supported the Spanish Republic, the Western powers did not. Ukraine has not been so abandoned; on the contrary, Western military aid has been steady and decisive, while the economic punishment of Russia is devastating.
The second difference is countervailing. While the Spanish Republic was defeated, and Czechoslovakia dismembered, the Western powers of France, Britain and America did eventually enter and win a cataclysmic war with Germany and its allies. This will not happen—at least will not happen intentionally—unless Russia attacks a NATO ally. President Joe Biden made this clear before the war. My colleague John Raine has rightly called this an ‘escalation trap’ that gives Russia huge room for horrifying destruction and argued that NATO should find a way to escape it. Yet escaping it at acceptable risk may be impossible. The US and its treaty allies probably cannot directly fight Russians for Ukraine because Russia has nuclear weapons.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish former comic actor whom Putin grotesquely accuses of heading a ‘Nazi’ government, has eloquently challenged those limits. But he has also understood them—and signalled a willingness to negotiate with Russia on the question of NATO membership. As this issue of Survival went to press, talks were ongoing, with reports of an Austrian or Finnish model of armed neutrality being on the table. It was impossible at this juncture to say whether Putin would relent at anything short of annihilation. After his enraged assault on Russia’s neighbour, however, one thing is clear: a stable and secure neutrality might be viable only because Ukraine has shown its determination and capability to defend itself.
The NATO states, with the support of much though by no means all of the rest of the world, have also demonstrated unity and determination. Given the abysmal performance of the Russian army against Ukraine, a Russian attack against a NATO country would appear manifestly foolish and therefore highly unlikely. We must concede, however, that stable expectations of what is likely or rational have come unmoored. This issue contains articles by John L. Harper and Lawrence Freedman that recall the Nixon diplomacy of half a century ago that produced, respectively, the opening to China and the SALT agreement with the Soviet Union. It occurred during the height of the war in Vietnam, as American soldiers were dying at the hands of a Soviet-armed enemy. Yet diplomacy could be conducted on the assumption of bounded rationality. Now, Putin appears to have escaped those bounds.
Also in this issue, my colleague Nigel Gould-Davies assesses Putin’s war as a strategic failure that will damage him immensely. This seems right. Less clear is how this defeat will be translated into a Western success. ‘But if one does not make war, one must sooner or later make peace’, wrote de Gaulle in the last volume of his memoirs on the necessity of detente with the Soviets. This must also be true, sooner or later, of twenty-first-century Russia. But we do not know how, for there is no Stunde Null and no clear path back to the world we have lost.