A Failure of DeterrenceBy Brian Stewart
17 Mar 2022
According to foreign policy “realists,” the tale we are being told about Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine is a fiction. Realists like to be known for their clear-eyed appreciation of the realities of global power, and in their telling, responsibility for the war does not lie chiefly with Putin and his longstanding determination to resuscitate the Russian empire. “The taproot of the trouble,” insists John Mearsheimer, was a Western strategy to peel Ukraine away from Russia and integrate it into the institutions and alliances of the West. This, apparently, was the fuel thrown onto “a fire waiting to ignite.”
There is something bizarre about affixing primary blame for an imperial invasion to a party that had no hand in launching it. There is also something perverse in the effort to excuse the motives of the party who did embark on this squalid enterprise. The overwhelming share of guilt for this unfolding horror rests with the Russian tyrant, tout court. It is Putin who ordered Russian forces to lay waste to an independent state. It is Putin who has issued brazen threats of nuclear warfare. It is Putin who seeks to govern at home and abroad on the basis of brute power rather than consent.
Nevertheless, the war still might not have broken out but for decades of delusional Western foreign policy. That Putin had the confidence to launch this invasion at all marks a failure of deterrence that warrants a serious accounting in every Western capital, and in Washington most of all. The necessary preconditions for this conflict were a combination of the Russian autocrat’s ambition and the West’s evasion of responsibility.
For years, it has been clear to anyone who wished to see it that the Russian regime is ardently revisionist, irredentist, and when the mood took it, ferociously bellicose. It has long had its sights on Ukraine, the dearest part of its near abroad in the national imagination. Ukraine and the West therefore faced an agonizing choice. This vast state on the eastern edge of Europe might have taken refuge in official neutrality to placate the Kremlin. Otherwise, the Russian challenge had to be met with credible deterrent power.
In 2014, arch-realist Henry Kissinger recommended that Ukraine and the West pursue the former course. With Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces agitating against the central government, Kissinger argued that Kyiv could never expect a quiet life if it entered the West’s orbit. This meant that, in effect, Ukraine would have to foreclose the possibility of joining NATO. If Ukraine refused, Kissinger implied that the Western powers needed to do so on its behalf, in violation of the alliance’s “open door” policy. Only after this act of submission would a neutral Ukraine be permitted by Moscow to choose its political and economic character as a state and a society.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/17/a-failure-of-deterrence/
