In the months leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, there was a great deal of hyperventilation in Europe among top political figures and journalists over the prospect of Donald Trump storming back into power. There was great concern, among other things, over the future of NATO and US commitment to support Ukraine if Trump emerged triumphant in the election. Many worried that Trump would exert pressure on Ukraine to compel it to agree to a peace deal with Russia that would be favorable for Moscow. It was feared that such a peace deal would include substantial territorial concessions and a promise of Ukrainian neutrality (i.e. no NATO membership). Indeed, during the first few months of Trump’s second term, both he and the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have indicated that Ukraine’s admission into NATO is an unrealistic prospect. This stance may dismay Europeans and American liberals, but it is perfectly reasonable and rational. Most of Trump’s foreign policy is morally grotesque (his recent authorization for Israel to restart its destruction of Gaza being one of the most obvious examples), but his attempts to facilitate a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and his rejection of NATO membership for Ukraine constitute a sensible approach to the war. In fact, declaration of Ukrainian neutrality has been the key for ending the conflict all along, and it might have even averted the whole war before a single shot was fired. The inadvisability of Ukraine’s admission into NATO was also understood perfectly well by France and Germany in 2008, when they vetoed renowned foreign policy genius George W. Bush’s invitation for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO’s ranks.
Nevertheless, Ukraine’s right to join NATO is upheld as sacred by many Europeans and American liberals. As good an example as any was provided last fall by Finnish President Alexander Stubb while meeting with representatives of the Association of Finnish Foreign Affairs Journalists. Commenting on reports that some of the advisers to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had been advocating for the “Finnish model” (i.e. neutrality) for a way to achieve peace in Ukraine, Stubb dismissed the idea with three arguments. First, it calls into question the contemporary European security architecture; second, it doesn’t support countries’ right to freely determine their own defense and security policies; and third, it promotes thinking based on spheres of influence (the concern here is that Ukrainian neutrality would cause it to drift to the Russian sphere of influence, away from the Western orbit). The journalists gathered at this event were too overcome with reverential awe for the President to question the logic of these grand proclamations, but since they encapsulate the sentiments of pro-NATO warriors who are opposed to Ukrainian neutrality as a way to achieve peace, let us briefly scrutinize them here.
The contemporary European security architecture, as Stubb called it, is a grave historical error that should be called into question. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, several different visions for Europe’s future were presented. One of them was that of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who proposed a “Common European Home”, in which both NATO and the Warsaw Pact would disappear in favor of a pan-European security system with no military alliances. The details of this plan were vague, and Gorbachev himself did not promote it with sufficient vigor, but further development and implementation of this model might have prevented the intensification of tensions in the continent which eventually culminated in the Ukraine-Russia war. Instead of pursuing Gorbachev’s vision, short-sighted decisions were made in the triumphalist, “end of history” euphoria to expand NATO to the east, perpetuating Cold War era tensions into the 21st century. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, recently pompously declared that there is no alternative to NATO. It is undoubtedly true that people like Rutte cannot envision a Europe without an anachronistic military alliance that needlessly maintains tensions, but there certainly have been alternatives to NATO, as just briefly reviewed. Its expansion may have been an irreversible process, but there is no reason to escalate tensions even further by admitting Ukraine.
The foolishness of NATO’s eastward expansion has been understood for a long time by well-informed and prominent observers, even notable US policymakers and diplomatic figures. Former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had long warned about the dangers posed by NATO’s enlargement, especially if Ukraine were admitted. George Kennan, one of the most influential Cold War era US policy architects, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 1997, in which he expressed his view that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era”. None of this offers any justification for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war, but NATO’s eastward expansion significantly contributed to the current crisis. The tragic consequences of yesteryear’s errors reverberate into the present, compounded by the foolishness of today.
Returning to Stubb’s comments, he also argued that Ukrainian neutrality would contravene the principle that countries should be free to determine their own defense and security policies. Therefore, they should have the right to join any military alliance of their choosing. This is, to be sure, a most admirable sentiment. One could easily ascertain its sincerity by asking the advocates of this view whether they would also passionately support Mexico’s inviolable right to join a Russian-dominated military alliance that sought to place “defensive” weapons at the US-Mexican border. US
Senator Bernie Sanders once remarked on the floor of the US Senate that “Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico or Cuba or any country in Central or Latin America were to form an alliance with a U.S. adversary? Do you think members of Congress would stand up and say, well, you know, Mexico is an independent country and they have the right to do anything they want. I doubt that very much”. Another US Senator, Rand Paul, criticized the Biden administration for inflaming tensions in a Senate hearing of former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in April 2022, stating that the administration “was beating the drums to admit Ukraine to NATO”, even though it was something Russia “absolutely hated and said was a red line”. All of this would be more obvious if the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis had not faded into oblivion long ago. Furthermore, in May 1990, Gorbachev inquired if the Soviet Union could be admitted into NATO, but he was rebuffed by the George H.W. Bush administration. Surely his request should have been honored, given the NATO supporters’ adamant view that anybody who wishes to join the alliance should be allowed to do so (especially since it was publicly claimed at the time that NATO was no longer directed against the Soviet Union).
Stubb also bemoaned the idea that Ukrainian neutrality would promote thinking based on spheres of influence. In Western discourse, of course, only official villains like Russia are capable of having spheres of influence, and it is probably incomprehensible for people like Stubb that the ever-expanding NATO could be perceived as part of an American sphere of influence. Whether that perception is accurate or not, it is certainly how the Russians see it, and they are understandably not excited about having NATO weapons systems near their borders. Furthermore, as explained above, there was an opportunity after the collapse of the Berlin Wall to ensure that there would be no spheres of influence or military alliances in Europe at all. If NATO had been consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs (next to the rubble of the Berlin Wall), the current tensions could have been avoided, and they certainly will not be alleviated by having Ukraine join NATO today. We can either keep NATO’s door open for Ukraine due to our passionate opposition to spheres of influence (of official villains), or we can have peace.
One can justifiably criticize Moscow for an insufficient commitment to diplomatic efforts to end the war, but it is also true that the Biden administration actively sought to sabotage diplomacy for its own reasons. Joe Biden is an old school proponent of US hegemony and NATO, an alliance whose purpose, despite all the lofty and self-satisfied rhetoric, has always been to guarantee US pre-eminence in Europe. Therefore, it was more important for Biden to ensure that Ukraine would remain a US ally and a de facto (if not an official) member of NATO than to pursue peace, which almost inevitably would include a promise of Ukrainian neutrality (thus removing Ukraine from the US orbit).
The most dramatic illustration of this was the peace talks conducted between Moscow and Kyiv in February-April 2022. As a New York Times article from June 2024 (which published a trove of documents from those talks) shows, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators made considerable progress towards peace in the early phases of the war. These talks eventually culminated in an April 15 draft treaty, where both sides agreed that “Ukraine would declare itself permanently neutral, though it would be allowed to join the European Union”. Russia was to withdraw its armed forces from all of Ukrainian territory, with the exception of Crimea and other occupied parts of Ukraine, whose status would have been addressed in later talks. Ukraine, however, objected to Article 5 of the draft treaty, which stipulated that in the event of another armed attack on Ukraine, the “guarantor states” (the UK, the US, China, Russia and France) would come to Ukraine’s aid – but only on the condition of unanimous approval for this course of action. This article was seen as Russia creating a veto for itself for any response to a future invasion of Ukraine, meaning it could attack Ukraine and then block any action from being taken to counter its aggression. The talks then collapsed, allegedly because of this clause and the revelations of the atrocities in Bucha (although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued to stress the importance of negotiations even after the Bucha revelations).
However, Article 2 of the draft treaty states that the guarantor states and other states that are parties to the treaty undertake to “refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine, its sovereignty and independence, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”. It is, of course, perfectly sensible to doubt the sincerity of any government, including Russia’s, but if we reject diplomacy because we fear that one party to a treaty will eventually violate it, we might as well abandon the whole concept of diplomacy. Furthermore, Ukraine would naturally no longer be obligated to abide by a treaty once it has been violated by Russia.
As mentioned above, Russia’s conduct in the negotiations with Ukraine warrants legitimate criticism. However, the main reason for the collapse of the February-April 2022 negotiations was recently clarified by the former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under the Biden administration, Victoria Nuland, confirming disclosures by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and others close to the negotiations. In an interview with Mikhail Zygar, Nuland essentially admitted that the US and the UK advised (or more realistically, pressured) Ukraine to not make peace, since the proposed treaty would have imposed limits on the kinds of weapons systems Ukraine would be permitted to have, while not imposing similar restraints on Russia (therefore “neutering” Ukraine, as Nuland put it). This illustrates the Biden administration’s priorities in the conflict. Washington’s inability to host advanced weapons systems on Ukrainian territory would have interfered with its long-standing designs to integrate Ukraine into the US-NATO system and to reinforce its status as a de facto NATO member. Therefore, it was considered imperative to have Ukraine reject the treaty, whose core element of neutrality was accepted at the time by Ukrainian negotiators.
Donald Trump, who represents a deviation from traditional bipartisan US foreign policy orthodoxy in some respects, is not ideologically committed to NATO or supporting Ukraine. Trump and his inner circle also have unconcealed contempt for Europe in general. While Trump’s policies may be legitimately criticized in most areas, his ambivalent attitude towards NATO and his openness to facilitate a negotiated settlement with Russia may provide the key for ending the war in Ukraine. The settlement reached would undoubtedly be ugly in many ways, but unfortunately the options in the present juncture are Ukraine accepting unpleasant peace terms or the continuation of death and devastation in Ukraine. Do we really need another three years of carnage to demonstrate that Ukraine cannot win this war on the battlefield?
There are also issues of species survival at stake in the conflict. European leaders are currently quivering with fear due to a threat posed to the continent by a country that is so militarily weak or incompetent that it cannot even conquer Ukraine. There are, however, actual existential threats that we should be addressing, namely climate change and the possibility of nuclear war. Isolating and punishing Russia may be applauded by many people in the West, but we cannot adequately deal with these existential threats unless all the countries in the world, especially the most powerful ones, commit to alleviating them. The current situation does not inspire much optimism. The Trump administration is waging a war on the environment, and the nuclear arms control framework has significantly deteriorated in the last few decades. The US and Russia have withdrawn from several important arms control treaties in recent years, increasing the likelihood of unimaginable destruction. Efforts should be made to save the nuclear arms control framework from the brink of total collapse, an objective which cannot be achieved while Russia is being isolated. Russia should not have refused to deal with the US because it committed one of the worst crimes of the post-World War II era, the invasion of Iraq, and the US and the West should not refuse to deal with Russia today.
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