How Years of American Policy Bumbling Boosted Putin
Alexander Vindman argues that U.S. missteps and naïveté created the conditions for Russian imperialism’s return.
The Folly of Realism
How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine
by Alexander Vindman
PublicAffairs, 304 pp., $30
JUST OVER THREE DECADES AGO, American policymakers faced a dilemma. A pair of new states, emerging from decades of Soviet rule, possessed massive nuclear arsenals. As American policymakers saw it, only one of these states should retain its nuclear arsenal—all the better, Washington thought, to prevent “loose nuclear weapons” from spilling outward. One of the states was busy consolidating a new nation, clearly angling for membership in multiple Western bodies. The other, however, had already exhibited shocking instability: ruling officials had ordered their military to shell opposing parliamentarians; other officials were prepping to launch a devastating war against a separate nation that had declared independence; some officials even floated the use of force to change borders across the entire region if neighboring nations didn’t do their bidding.
For anyone even tangentially familiar with the news over the past few years, the identities of these two nations are obvious. The latter—the one whose ruling government had, by the mid-1990s, already come within a hair’s breadth of civil war, already begun slaughtering Chechens who had the temerity to try to declare independence, and already declared its neo-imperial right to dominate the entire post-Soviet region—was Russia. The former—the one that Moscow had already begun threatening, openly musing about what it would take to forcibly change its borders, regardless of what populations on the ground wanted—was Ukraine.
For Washington, all of these factors were immaterial. All that mattered was succoring the Kremlin, ignoring the revanchism already boiling within Moscow, and forcing Ukraine (as well as Belarus and Kazakhstan) to divest its nuclear arsenal—all in return for little more than empty promises, easily broken.
It is an era that Alexander Vindman deftly details in his new book The Folly of Realism. And it is a decision that has not only come back to haunt Americans and Ukrainians alike, but that sums up so much of the American policy priorities in the region overall, both then and now. Over multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican, American policymakers have done everything they can to prioritize Moscow’s needs over any other nations in the region—even, as we’ve seen, to the point of degrading American interests and leaving places like Ukraine vulnerable to Russian aggression.
Vindman traces this “Russia-centric approach” to the waning days of the Soviet Union itself, when American officials finally realized that the Soviet splinter was not a matter of if, but when. The George H.W. Bush administration gathered a small group of experts—so off-the-books that it was dubbed the “Ungroup”—to try to chart out American policy within the shattered superpower. The Ungroup came to a quick conclusion: The primary thing that mattered was preventing the USSR’s nuclear arsenal from falling into the wrong—or even numerous—hands. Things like Russian nationalism, Russian imperialism, or Russian revanchism were hardly concerns; the thought that Russia could ever one day be a threat to the West, let alone to Moscow’s neighbors, was laughable.
As such, with fifteen new states emerging from the Soviet rubble in the early 1990s, American policy was simple: corral the nukes, regardless of the cost. And if that meant forcing Ukraine to hand over to Russia the Soviet nuclear arsenal on Ukrainian territory—gutting Ukrainian national security and strengthening the Kremlin in the process—so be it.
The number of Soviet nukes that were stationed outside Russia was enormous—especially the arsenal that ended up in Ukraine. Vindman cites a declassified September 1991 intelligence estimate finding that Ukraine hosted about 20 percent of the former USSR’s ICBM warheads, 40 percent of its heavy bomber warheads, and 20 percent of its medium bomber warheads, totaling some 4,500 nuclear weapons. The government in Kyiv never controlled these weapons, just as the governments in Minsk and Almaty didn’t control the arsenals on Belarusian and Kazakh soil. After all, as Vindman notes, “The Ukrainian state began with no defense or security or foreign-policy structures. . . . Retaining nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Russian irredentism and aggression was not a workable policy in practice even if it guaranteed greater security in theory.” For American policymakers at the time, the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands seemed significant and alarming—and “the wrong hands” quickly became synonymous with “anyone’s but Moscow’s.”
The Ungroup’s “central conclusion, which became U.S. policy under the president, was to do everything we could to maintain a strong central government in Moscow, because that was essential to maintaining control of the nuclear weapons,” then-CIA Director Robert Gates later told Vindman. “And therefore, it was important to do everything we could, once the collapse took place, to have Russia itself retain its territorial integrity, but further to be as strong a government as possible in Moscow in order to have command and control over the nuclear weapons.”
It was a decision that set the tone not only for the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, but for three decades of American policy—and toward not just Moscow, but toward Kyiv and the entire range of former Soviet states that finally broke free of the Kremlin’s control. When it came to crafting regional policy, Russia became, as it were, a first among supposed equals—and places like Ukraine became little more than nuisances for a Russo-American partnership that is, under Trump’s second administration, now showing signs of coming to fruition.
AT THE RISK OF STATING THE OBVIOUS: It’s not as if American policymakers’ overweening focus on Russian interests and on the potential for nuclear disaster didn’t have a logic. The H.W. Bush administration was “heavily influenced by the recent and ongoing example of Yugoslavia,” Vindman writes. But Bush, as well as his successor, Bill Clinton, seemed impervious to any signs that Moscow’s gestures at democracy, or even at being a potential partner of the West, might be disingenuous, masking a far deeper rot of revanchism that has now burst forth under Vladimir Putin.
The signs were all there for American policymakers to see, if only they had wanted to look. Long before Putin ever ascended to the Russian presidency, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was writing a neo-imperial playbook that his successor would later expand upon. There was Yeltsin threatening to forcibly redraw Ukraine’s borders if Kyiv insisted on independence from Moscow. There was Yeltsin, a few years later, unleashing military forces on opposition politicians—a “landmark turning point in Russia’s failure to develop democracy,” said one analysis. There was Yeltsin, shortly thereafter, siccing his military on Chechnya, after Chechens voted for independence from Russia—all while Yeltsin refused to remove troops from Moldova, launched armed interference efforts in northern Georgia, and backed genocidaires in Serbia.
None of it seemed to matter to the Americans, whether in the Bush or Clinton administrations. All the American lecturing, all the American condescension, all the precious American lines about the sanctity of democracy and civil rights and basic freedoms—all of it applied to other Soviet republics, but never to Russia.
“The U.S. set Western standards of conduct only for the non-Russian former Soviet republics,” Vindman writes.
Russia got a pass on using force to crush political dissenters because they were communists, waging a violent war to suppress separatists in [Chechnya], and supporting the Serbian regime’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Russia was thus permitted by the sole superpower to conduct its own fitful transformation, without sufficient criticism or conditioning of aid, engagement, support, and inclusion in reform-minded Western institutions. U.S. policymakers continued to fear that criticism would roil Russian elites or give Russian nationalist reactionaries ammunition for further retrenchment.
All of this—this soft-glove treatment of Russia, this willingness to parrot Russian pressures on places like Ukraine, this refusal to see the region as anything but Russia’s playground—culminated in a confused, historically ignorant policy regarding Ukraine, regarding Russia, regarding everything that Moscow now threatens. It is, as Vindman correctly argues, a throughline tethering every American administration from H.W. Bush through Joe Biden. Donald Trump may have swung more in favor of Moscow than any previous administration, but many of the elements—not least a refusal to listen to Ukrainians, or any of the other former nations once dominated by Moscow—were present in previous administrations.
It is a series of policies that have clearly failed—and now, unsurprisingly, risk the kind of disaster previous administrations long claimed to want to avoid. Indeed, you could argue that the seeds of the ongoing Russian devastation of Ukraine—and the fact that Moscow has now pushed the world closer to the nuclear brink than it has been since the early 1960s—were the direct outgrowth not just of Russian revanchism, and Russians’ inability to come to terms with their imperial identity, but of Americans’ inability to foresee the kinds of effects their actions would take. Ukraine, in surrendering the nuclear weapons on its soil—with lots of American encouragement—also gave up its best chances of maintaining its distance from Moscow, all in return for paper promises, shredded the second Russian troops began ransacking Ukraine.
In the long run, the American focus on nonproliferation in the 1990s—to the exclusion of Russian political currents—all but guaranteed a new chapter of nuclear proliferation. It will forever be a bitter irony that a figure like Barack Obama, who swept to power publicly claiming a desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons, did breathtakingly little when Russia first barreled into Ukraine in 2014—that is, when a nuclear power invaded one of the few countries to have actually removed its nuclear weapons. Obama’s recalcitrance effectively guaranteed that no nation would ever get rid of its own nuclear weapons ever again—and that, if anything, states would now view nuclear weapons as the sole guarantor of stability, sovereignty, and safety moving forward.
Incredibly, Obama later indicated that backing Ukraine was not a “core interest” for the United States—completely missing that he set the stage for the new burst of nuclear proliferation that now appears in the wings. “Because this escalation-averse, risk-sensitive approach is inspired by the existence of the nuclear arsenal that distinguishes Russia from non-nuclear authoritarian aggressors, the West has encouraged the idea that a nuclear arsenal is the ultimate security guarantee,” Vindman writes. “Among vulnerable borderline democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, the denuclearization of Ukraine, permitting Russian aggression and making the West a victim of nuclear extortion, has only increased the desire to establish nuclear weapons programs, eroding Western nonproliferation efforts.” Small wonder that most Ukrainians regret giving up their nukes—and now want them back.
ALL OF WHICH RAISES THE QUESTION: What now? Here, Vindman shines. He doesn’t simply dispense with the Russocentric visions of previous administrations, but he eviscerates the schools of thought undergirding the “realism” motivating Bush, the idealism motivating Obama, and the kleptocratic rapaciousness motivating Trump. (It’s worth recalling that Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, played a key role in exposing the corrupt nexus at the heart of Trump’s first impeachment, which led to his firing—as well as his first book.) All of these schools have not only overweighted the importance of Moscow’s interests, but have undervalued America’s own interests. They have all been, as the book’s title indicates, follies of their own.
There is, however, a potential solution at hand: neo-idealism. A term first coined by analyst Benjamin Tallis, this new school of strategy marries value-based judgments with resource-based decisions. As Tallis has described it, neo-idealism
is a morally-based approach to geopolitics, grounded in the power of values conceived as ideals to strive for: human rights and fundamental freedoms, social and cultural liberalism, democratic governance; self-determination for democratic societies; and perhaps most importantly, the right of citizens in those societies to a hopeful future. Crucially, its proponents see the struggle for these ideals, and making progress toward them, not as luxuries to be set aside when hard-nosed interests are at stake. For the Neo-Idealists, our values are our interests.
It is an emerging school that Vindman not only backs, but applies to ongoing American support for places like Ukraine. “More consonant with American values than realism, and more literally realistic about achieving long-term stability and securing vital American interests, neo-idealism is emerging as a new way of thinking about foreign relations,” Vindman writes. It is a matching of force and rhetoric, of realistic assessments of American interests hewed to the best elements of American values. It’s a flexible pairing, one that brings the airy, Obama-era paeans to a more grounded level—all while leaving the cynicism, and even nihilism, buttressing realism in the gutter. It is something that takes the world as it is, while never sacrificing the best that America can be—or forgetting what American interests are.
It is an idea, as Vindman writes, whose time has come. Policies grounded in “realism” have failed spectacularly, in the United States and Ukraine alike. And as neo-imperialism rears its head once more in Ukraine—and in Taiwan, Guyana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and anywhere elsewhere suddenly watching the wolves circle—the best antidote is the neo-idealism that Vindman describes, if only we give it a chance.
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