May 1, 2023

The Endgame With Ukraine And Russia

Foreign Affairs

The key to the situation is to ask what any reasonable Russian government, tsarist, democratic, communist, or authoritarian would want.

Many of the usual suspects who upheld America’s unwise wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and its ill-considered interventions in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya, with their destabilizing refugee flows—are predictably upholding Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s pre-Russian-invasion intransigence with regard to possible NATO membership for Ukraine. Blinken, as well as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, are devoted Clintonistas who fully bought into the NATO expansion project opposed by George Kennan, William Perry, Jack Matlock and others.

This intransigence is set against what has long been apparent to me and many others: Post-Khrushchev Ukraine is an artificial construct. Its elections disclosed sharp fissures on regional, ethnic, and religious lines. Crimea, Russian until 1954, was a traditional seat of Russian culture and only 22 percent Ukrainian by 1959. The Donbas was Russia’s Rust Belt. Proceedings in the parliament of the united Ukraine resembled a rugby match more than normal parliamentary deliberations. The regime was at least as corrupt as Russia’s, and the country had a lower economic growth rate. The U.S. was wise not to make a serious issue of the Russian annexation of Crimea.

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