Whose Bright Idea Was It To Extend NATO Membership To Ukraine?

Let me state at the outset that I don’t think the absurd invitation that NATO made to Ukraine in 2008 was the proximate, or even unproximate, cause of Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade that country. Given Putin’s commitment to creating a neo-czarist Greater Russia, I think the invasion would have taken place in any case. If anything, Ukraine’s more credible campaign to join the European Union, which would likely push Ukraine toward becoming a more liberal state, posed the greater threat in Putin’s mind, since a thriving liberalism on Russia’s border would make right-wing autocracy harder to sustain in Russia itself. Encirclement by NATO, which clearly wasn’t going to happen in any case, wasn’t a serious threat. Encirclement by Europe, with its less macho and more liberal culture, was.

But the specter, however far-fetched, of NATO encirclement did offer Putin a pretext for invasion—more credible, at least, than the claim that Ukraine was a Nazi regime. But blaming NATO for forcing Putin to bombard Ukraine’s civilian population is a little like blaming Hitler’s decision to make war on Europe, Russia, and the U.S. on the Treaty of Versailles, which, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1920, levied ruinous reparations on Germany.

Yes, the treaty was a bad idea that helped the Nazis come to power, just as the 2008 invitation that NATO extended to Ukraine and Georgia was a bad idea, too, one which, as George Kennan noted about NATO’s eastward expansion, was an act of first-rate geopolitical stupidity, a gratuitous insult to Russia.