The United States will not go to war against Russia to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine. This much is certain. But short of war, what can the U.S. do to defend the principle of sovereignty among nations?
It’s been suggested that the U.S. should take the issue to the United Nations and lead an effort to shame and sanction Russian President Vladimir Putin for his transgressions. That will probably work about as well as it did with Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader shrugged off the sanctions, didn’t care about the shaming, and only left Kuwait, the nation he invaded when he was physically ejected by the United States and a few Arab nations.
It’s also been suggested that roundtable negotiations involving the U.S., NATO, the elected government of Ukraine, the insurgency, and Russia be convened to reach some sort of “grand bargain” that would address Russian and Western security concerns.
It’s a great idea — if Putin’s goal is negotiations. It’s not. As Russia expert and former national security council member Fiona Hill points out in an op-ed in the New York Times, Putin’s goals are far more sinister.
As I have seen over two decades of observing Mr. Putin, and analyzing his moves, his actions are purposeful and his choice of this moment to throw down the gauntlet in Ukraine and Europe is very intentional. He has a personal obsession with history and anniversaries. December 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Russia lost its dominant position in Europe. Mr. Putin wants to give the United States a taste of the same bitter medicine Russia had to swallow in the 1990s. He believes that the United States is currently in the same predicament as Russia was after the Soviet collapse: grievously weakened at home and in retreat abroad. He also thinks NATO is nothing more than an extension of the United States. Russian officials and commentators routinely deny any agency or independent strategic thought to other NATO members. So, when it comes to the alliance, all of Moscow’s moves are directed against Washington.
Putin is seething with resentment and thoughts of revenge. Much like Adolf Hitler and his obsession with Germany’s loss in World War I, Putin, the former proud KGB officer, hates America as much as his predecessors who worked for the old Soviet Union did. He will do anything short of war to humiliate the United States.
In the 1990s, the United States and NATO forced Russia to withdraw the remnants of the Soviet military from their bases in Eastern Europe, Germany and the Baltic States. Mr. Putin wants the United States to suffer in a similar way. From Russia’s perspective, America’s domestic travails after four years of Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency, as well as the rifts he created with U.S. allies and then America’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, signal weakness. If Russia presses hard enough, Mr. Putin hopes he can strike a new security deal with NATO and Europe to avoid an open-ended conflict, and then it will be America’s turn to leave, taking its troops and missiles with it.
The “American Century” is over. But that doesn’t mean the United States should abandon its historic responsibilities. Ukraine is a terribly flawed democracy, but as Francis Fukuyama points out, it’s a damn sight better than Putin’s Russia and deserves to be defended.
Related: Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Believes There’s a ’50 Percent Chance’ of War in Europe
There is one fundamental reason why the United States and the rest of the democratic world should support Ukraine in its current fight with Putin’s Russia: Ukraine is a real, but struggling, liberal democracy. People are free in Ukraine in a way they are not in Russia: they can protest, criticize, mobilize, and vote. In 2017 they voted for a complete outsider to be president, and turned over a majority of their parliament. On two occasions, during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, Ukrainian civil society came into the streets in massive numbers to protest corrupt and unrepresentative governments.
Fukuyama believes that Putin is terrified of Ukraine’s fledgling democracy, seeing it as a disease that could infect Russia.
This is the real reason that Vladimir Putin is preparing to further invade Ukraine. He sees Ukraine as an integral part of a greater Russia, as he indicated in a long article last summer. But the deeper problem for him is Ukrainian democracy. He is heavily invested in the idea that Slavic peoples are culturally attuned to authoritarian government, and the idea that another Slavic state could successfully transition to democracy undermines his own claims for ruling Russia. Ukraine presents zero military threat to Moscow; it does, however, pose an alternative ideological model that erodes Putin’s own legitimacy.
What can the United States do to head off Russia and prevent Putin from seizing more territory? Joe Biden has promised to heavily sanction Russia if Putin invades. Why wait? Why not impose the sanctions now in a proactive move to stop Putin dead in his tracks?
Hawks tell NatSec Daily that the White House should hit Putin now with a mix of sanctions, export controls or leaks of embarrassing information. Only a firm hit on the nose will make Putin crawl away in shame, they say.
Arguing hard against this approach are top Biden administration officials and most Democrats on Capitol Hill. “The purpose of those sanctions is to deter Russian aggression. And so, if they’re triggered now, you lose the deterrent effect,” Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN told CNN’s DANA BASH Sunday on “State of the Union.” Lining up the sanctions alongside European allies, and not deploying them right this second, “is designed to factor into President Putin’s calculus.”
The imposition of sanctions now is not about deterring Putin or punishing him. The impact would be wholly psychological. Striking the first blow would send Putin off balance for the first time in this crisis — the first time in many years. It would almost certainly make Putin stop and think before his next move.
But it would take courage and a belief in the superiority of what you’re fighting for. And sadly, that doesn’t exist to any great extent in the U.S. or Europe.
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