The complexities of the Russia-Ukraine war

An article in last month's issue of Harper's Magazine reviewed two newly-published books examining the history of the current war between Russia and Ukraine.

Jonathan Haslam, a historian of Soviet foreign policy and the author of the new book Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, has a rather different analysis. He starts his story a quarter century earlier, in 1989—two years before Ukraine achieved independence. As for who started it: as the title of the book suggests, Ukraine has less of a role to play in his account than the United States does.

Some tens of thousands of Ukrainians have perished over the past three years, including more than ten thousand civilians; their country lies in ruins. At least one hundred thousand Russian soldiers have died, too. Yet an honest reckoning with the root causes of this death and destruction has largely eluded political leaders, who have instead been guided by demands for moral clarity—the expectation that they oppose the illegal act of invading another country without either U.N. authority or any credible argument for self-defense. In this sense, Putin’s invasion has been treated in much the way many liberals have treated Trump’s rise—as an unprovoked aberration, an alien force from nowhere.

A lone gunman theory has its comforts: if Putin is just an evil man, nothing needs to change except opposing his crimes and follies. If the truth is even a little more complex, however—and Hubris proves that it is complex indeed—focusing blame on Putin alone launders the complicity of a far wider range of participants, and of the long-term policy they helped make. At stake is not only the path to peace in Eastern Europe but the future and purpose of American power in the world...

Like his fellow realist John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, Haslam identifies NATO’s expansion eastward as a wound to Russia’s pride. This isn’t to say that he accepts Russia’s nonsensical rationale for the invasion as “self-defense.” But, as he argues, Russia’s leaders and population had been humiliated, and the country found itself increasingly isolated—things American politicians did nothing to counteract and occasionally celebrated. This didn’t guarantee, let alone justify, a war. But it did set up the conditions for one...

Bush continued NATO’s expansion, pushing the alliance into seven new nations, including the Baltic countries sharing a border with Russia, thus raising Russian hackles further. After all, the arrival of NATO in places that had been part of the Soviet Union itself was far less a response to Russian military threats than it was a ratification and recognition of the West’s superior economic and political power. But America’s support for the “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003–04 as well as Ukraine in 2004–05—coinciding with Bush’s Iraq War—pushed things too far. “The United States,” Haslam explains, “had become accustomed to looking down on Russia as a defeated power of little or no account,” asserting the power to occupy other countries while highlighting the diminution of Russian power. The double standard was glaring, even as the consequence of the Bush years was to normalize illegal invasions—and to destabilize the Middle East, awakening Putin’s interest in the great game of European imperial designs there.

More at the link, which I won't try to summarize or excerpt further.  I will, however, express my dismay at the choices of the color palette for the embedded map of NATO encroachment on Russia.