Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne in a recent article posed the question, “Why Are We in Ukraine?”1
The title could be a play on the title of a 1967 Norman Mailer novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?
President Lyndon Johnson gave a speech in 1965 on this topic. I can’t say his description of the Lessons Of History there has held up particularly well. That doesn’t stop politicians, pundits, and Presidents from using it to this day:
We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in Southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.”2 [my emphasis]
That Lesson Of History was known back then as the “domino theory,” i.e., if one domino falls it knocks all the rest over.
We hear the very same argument being used today about Western support of Ukraine.
Yes, kids, it may look like Russia is having a very hard time conquering the eastern part of Ukraine. But they could seize all of Ukraine before you know it! And after that they’ll snatch Moldova and Rumania; then Bulgaria and Belarus; then Poland and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, then on to Finland, Georgia (the European one!) and Armenia and Azerbaijan; then several of the ‘Stans after that!
It’s inevitable! It’s one of the Lessons Of History, for Pete’s sake!!
Just to be clear: the security concerns of European nations and their NATO allies across the Atlantic are more substantially based than those based on the domino theory assumed that the Vietnamese Communists ever were. But no one should take the current Ukraine-domino theory at face value, either. Facts do matter. Substituting analogies for facts is risky. Sometimes extremely risky.
Schwarz and Layne warn that conventional assumptions by American policymakers and many others are already excessively influenced by ideological and conventional prejudices. Including the eternal Munich Analogy:
To most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits - liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans - the reasons for this perilous situation are clear. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin; an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy. To the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin's paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War. Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational - someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest. Although the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power. To try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to "appease" Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after "every good-faith effort" by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue. [my emphasis]
The Other Side ever since 1945 becomes “Hitler.” Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein - they all morph into “Hitler.” And that produces chronic threat inflation by American policymakers and becomes an excuse for lazy thinking.
The nuclear arms-race issue
Schwarz and Layne discuss Ukraine and the events leading up to the current war in the context of nuclear deterrence. The US, especially during the Bush-Cheney Administration, shifted its nuclear configuration in significant ways. “To Russian strategists, Washington's pursuit of nuclear primacy was presumably still further evidence of America's effort to force Russia to accede to the U.S.-led global order.”
What needs to happen with nuclear weapons, especially between the US and Russia, is to promote strategic stability, i.e., the “mutually assured destruction” idea whose history and function they summarize, and to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on all sides.
The US punditry on the Russia-Ukraine War is chronically short on including the role of nuclear war risks. Schwarz and Layne do a good job of describing its key importance. They also have some relevant observations on the Cuban Missile Crisis that are far more relevant than the mano-a-mano faceoff it is often presumed to have been.
The NATO expansion story
The story of NATO expansion and its effect on Russian policy has at least been widely discussed. Though the conventional New Cold War (Cold War 2.0?) narrative around the current situation denounces the very idea that NATO expansion could have had any imaginable influence on Russia’s action in Ukraine. But Schwarz and Layne describe the actual role it played once again. The idea that any government in Russia would have been completely indifferent to the idea that Ukraine would become part of NATO is so silly that even with our American foreign policy establishment’s track record, it’s still amazing that they keep up just that pretense. In the real world:
Western experts have long acknowledged the unanimity and intensity of Russians' fear of Ukraine joining NATO. In his 1995 study of Russian views on NATO expansion-which surveyed elite and popular opinion and incorporated off-the-record interviews with political, military, and diplomatic figures from across the political spectrum - Anatol Lievcn, the Russia scholar and then Moscow correspondent for the Times of London, concluded that "moves toward NATO membership for Ukraine would trigger a really ferocious Russian response," and that "NATO membership for Ukraine would be regarded by Russians as a catastrophe of epochal proportions." Quoting a Russian naval officer, he noted that preventing NATO's expansion into Ukraine and its consequent control of Crimea was "something for which Russians will fight."
Given these views, Russia's ground rules for Ukraine - the epitome of realpolitik -were plain. As Yeltsin's 1999 diktat to Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma spelled out, Kyiv was not to enter into cooperative arrangements with, let alone join, NATO. Nor could Kyiv orient its foreign and economic relations toward the West in ways that disfavored Moscow. Yeltsin didn't require Kyiv to orient its foreign or defense policies toward Moscow either. Understanding that NATO expansion couldn't be reversed, Moscow's vision of a lasting European security arrangement might have entailed varying degrees of arms limitations in the countries on NATO's eastern glacis and a permanently neutral, eastern- and western-oriented status for Ukraine (somewhat like Austria's Cold War status), including an agreement ruling out NATO membership. [my emphasis]
While those events are now water under the bridge, they are a reminder of how seriously Russia takes the stakes in the current war and determined they are likely to be to leave maximum damage in Ukraine behind once the shooting stops. Whenever that may be, and it probably will not be any time very soon.
They conclude their article as follows:
The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United Stares and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous. [my emphasis]
The Spectator’s Freddy Gray interviews Schwarz and Layne on the article in a podcast3, in which they discuss its content. Schwarz in the podcast talks about the problem with America’s “crusader state” self-image.
Gray in the podcast describes Harper’s as a “left” magazine. (?!?)
Schwarz, Benjamin & Layne, Christopher (2023): Why Are We in Ukraine? On the Dangers of American Hubris. Harper's June 2023, 23-35. <https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/> (Accessed: 2023-31-05).
Johnson, Lyndon (1965): Document – Lyndon B. Johnson, “Why Americans Fight in Vietnam” (1965). Oxford Learning Link 2023. <httpsna://learninglink.oup.com/access/content/schaller-3e-dashboard-resources/documdent-lyndon-b-johnson-why-americans-fight-in-vietnam-1965> (Accessed: 2023-31-05).
Gray, Freddy (2023): What is America doing in Ukraine? Part II. The Spectator 05/29/2023. <https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/what-is-america-doing-in-ukraine-part-ii/> (Accessed: 2023-31-05).