Michael McFaul visits Bizarro World in thinking about what caused the Russia-Ukraine War

In my last post I mentioned some over-the-top New Cold Warrior rhetoric by several panelists at a September conference of the Yalta European Strategy group, in cited US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul’s retrospective thoughts on NATO expansion that he expressed there.

McFaul was responding from one of the panelists that the US was too optimistic in the early 1990s about the possibility of Russia becoming a Western-style liberal democracy:

The mistake we made, in one sentence, was not - you’re right, we made a bet in the 90s, I lived in Russia in the 90s. I was there, part of the National Democratic Institute. Our job was to promote democracy in Moscow, I was there. That was a bet. We failed. But hold on, we failed because of things that we did not control.

And I want to say two things. The mistake we made was that while we were experimenting with that, we didn’t have the Plan B. I agree 100% [that] we didn’t do the Plan B in [the] same time. Some historical data: 1996, we didn’t talk about NATO expansion until the day after Boris Yeltsin was re-elected [as Russian President].¹

And what is McFaul’s retrospective version of the fantasy Plan B?

That was a mistake. We should have moved forward with everything across Europe: with weapons, with NATO expansion, and to hell with whether the Russians cared about it or not. It was a mistake to think, oh my goodness, we’re gonna offend this guy and that guy and Putin.

That was the mistake. We should have done both because when we failed - and we failed - we would have already done all that other stuff. [Former Polish Foreign Minister] Radek [Sikorsky] said it more eloquently than me. That is the long-term history. [my emphasis]

This is, to put it discretely, bonkers. Starting the day Ukraine voted to leave the Soviet Union in late 1991, we should have immediately put countries from Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - heck, maybe Sweden and Finland, too! - into NATO as full allies? Or at least moved American troops and intermediate-range nuclear missiles right up to the newly independent Russia’s borders?

I might enjoy having some of whatever it was McFaul was smoking. But that is pure fantasy. That would not have happened. And the attempt to do it would almost certainly have undermined the then-existing NATO alliance, because the European allies would have seen that as getting ready for immediate war with Russia. As a practical matter, they could not have afforded to see it otherwise. (Nor could Russia, if real-world scenarios are any part of this exercise.)

I realized in thinking about it later that McFaul has conjured up a fantasy that is a weird, Bizarro-like mirror image of the argument he and other New Cold War desperately want to trash, the claim that NATO expansion was a prominent factor, probably the most important factor, that led Russia to decide to invade Ukraine in 2014 and on a much larger scale in 2022. The New Cold Warriors even consider it heresy to suggest that NATO expansion could possibly have played any role whatsoever in provoking a Russian response in Ukraine.

But McFaul’s Bizarro World version of the argument is the one quoted above. Which is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is entirely the fault of the US and NATO because they were not stationing large masses of troops and nuclear missiles right on Russia’s border by January 1992 or so.

Also happening in the 1990s:

McFaul’s sets his fantasy military scramble by NATO to the borders of Russia in the early 1990s. Here are a few of the significant international events happening around that time in the real world.

1990: Iraq invades Kuwait.

1991: Gulf War: the US intervenes to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait under the authority of the United Nations and the approval of the Soviet Union.²

August 1991: A coup attempt led by Soviet Gen. Lavr Kornilov fails to overthrow Mikail Gorbachev’s reform government.³

December 1, 1991: 92% of voters in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic vote to become an independent nation.⁴

December 25, 1991: Gorbachev resigns as President of the Soviet Union, marking the end of the USSR.⁵

1991-1992: The Balkan Wars begin when Slovenia and Croatia secede from Yugoslavia.⁶

1993: The Battle of Mogadishu leads the new Clinton Administration to pull US troops out of Somalia, where the George H.W. Bush Administration decided to send them in 1992 (for reasons that have long disappeared into the clouds of history).⁷

1994-1996: First Chechnya War - inside Russia.⁸

September 2023: Michael McFaul declares, “We should have moved forward with everything across Europe: with weapons, with NATO expansion, and to hell with whether the Russians cared about it or not.” Because, you know, there were no other military challenges facing the US and NATO around that time. McFaul’s audience is left wondering what kind of magic mushrooms might be in play.

1. Has the West Learned from Its Mistakes After Years of Neglecting Ukraine to Cooperate With Russia? Foreign Affairs YouTube channel 09/26/2023. (Accessed: 2023-30-09). The quoted segment begins at 47:50. My transcription.

2. Halliday, Fred (1994): The Gulf War 1990-1991 and the Study of International Relations. Review of International Studies 20: 2, 109-130. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20097363> (Accessed: 2023-30-09).

3. The August Coup. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (Michigan State University), n/d. <https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1991-2/the-august-coup/> (Accessed: 2023-30-09).

4. Ukrainian Independence Referendum. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (Michigan State University), n/d.  <https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1991-2/the-end-of-the-soviet-union/the-end-of-the-soviet-union-texts/ukrainian-independence-declaration/> (Accessed: 2023-30-09).

5. The End of the Soviet Union. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (Michigan State University), n/d.  <https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1991-2/the-end-of-the-soviet-union/> (Accessed: 2023-30-09).

6. Nelson, R. Craig (2003): The State of War: Slovenia and Croatia, 1991-92. In: War in the Balkans, 1991-2002 (08/01/2003), 91-148. US Army Strategic Studies Institute. <https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/101059/War_Balkans.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-30-09).

7. Swift, John (2023):Battle of Mogadishu. Encyclopedia Britannica 26 Sep. 2023. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Battle-of-Mogadishu> (Accessed: 2023-30-08).

8. First Chechnya War - 1994-1996. GlobalSecurity.org n/d. <https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/chechnya1.htm> (Accessed: 2023-30-08).