Yes to US Security, No to Russian Security?

Political leaders present their publics with narratives, which justify what they are doing or intend to do. A crucial decision in constructing such narratives is the starting point, when to start the clock. In conflict situations, each side normally starts the clock with the enemy making an unprovoked attack. Each side claims to be innocent and starts the clock at a time when the enemy can be shown as the unprovoked aggressor.

In the case of Russia’s invasion first of Crimea in 2014 and then much of eastern Ukraine in 2022, the standard western narrative – from political leaders and media, such as the Financial Times, the New York Times, the BBC – starts the clock with Russia’s actions, presented as an unprovoked attack on innocent and unified Ukraine, which was exercising its sovereign right to forge a stable and West-leaning democracy on Russia’s doorstep, including to join both the European Union and NATO. Western democracies, notably the US and the UK, came in strongly to support the government and population seeking to exercise this sovereign right of a flourishing democracy.

The Russian narrative, or rather that of the community of Russians wanting to keep the West at arms’ length, which now controls the Russian state under Putin, starts the clock at least as far back as the Second World War, when Germany and its allies killed some 8-9 million soldiers and another 16-17 million civilians. It remains an issue of deep resentment in the Russian elite to this day that western states and media largely ignore the Russian role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Second World War experience fortified the conviction that Russia must have a buffer zone around its borders, especially its western borders, where Russia has substantial control and potentially hostile states do not, including unimpeded access to Sevastopol in Crimea, Russia’s only ice-free port, a vital security concern.

Russia’s leaders have said repeatedly since the breakup of the Soviet Union that they will resist allowing a rival great power to incorporate a state on their doorstep into a hostile military alliance. They are in effect applying the US’s Monroe Doctrine to their own “near-abroad.” The US would not tolerate Mexico or Canada making a military alliance with China or Russia. Russia’s resistance to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO follows the same logic.

In early 2008, US Ambassador to Moscow William Burns sent a cable to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, with the unusual title, “NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT RED LINES”. He explained that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite.” The cable received no reply. Two months later, at their summit in Bucharest, NATO leaders issued a formal declaration, “Georgia and Ukraine will be in NATO” (emphasis added) (1).

Meanwhile, the US foreign policy establishment had long considered Ukraine to be a “geopolitical pivot” in its drive to subordinate Russia and secure US primacy or hegemony over the whole of Eurasia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been President Carter’s national security advisor (born in Warsaw, to a family from a territory incorporated into Ukraine in 1945), said in his 1997 book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geopolitical Imperatives”: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia” (emphasis added). He explained that Ukraine integrated into or closely allied to Europe would leave Russia as a “predominantly Asian imperial state,” whereas Ukraine integrated into Russia gave Russia the opening to be (or resume being) “a Eurasian empire” (emphasis added). So, the long-held US aim has been to push Ukraine away from Russia as a major step towards constraining Russian strategy, and more distantly Chinese strategy too, thereby sustaining US primacy across Eurasia. In 2013, Carl Gersham, director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), said: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

Fast forward to February 19, 2022. Ukrainian President Zelensky gave an impassioned speech at the Munich Security Conference. He insisted that Ukraine must have a clear path to join NATO and regretted that Ukraine had given up its nuclear arsenal at the end of the Soviet Union, which was then the world’s third biggest nuclear arsenal. As reported by observers of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), just at this time in February 2022, the Ukrainian military dramatically increased its shelling of the Russian-speaking and Russian Orthodox-believing Donbass region of eastern Ukraine (where referendums in 2014 were claimed to have supported independence from Ukraine). This attack would not have occurred without the blessing of the US and NATO.

The Ukrainian military attack on Donbass gave Putin his casus belli. The Russian military invaded on February 24, on a scale big enough not just to protect the Donbass, but also to replace the Ukrainian government and bring it under closer Russian control, in line with Russia’s larger Eurasian strategy.

This action played into the West’s long-set trap, the strategy for regime change in Moscow. It had three main elements. First, actions by Ukraine, the US and NATO, which prompt the Kremlin to order an invasion. Second, sufficient military and other equipment to Ukraine as to bog the Russian military in a quagmire in Ukraine – akin to the US quagmire in Vietnam and to the Soviet army quagmire in Afghanistan (which in the view of US military leaders had contributed substantially to the implosion of the Soviet Union). Third, severe, far-reaching sanctions on Russia as to cause major disruption to the Russian elite and severe contraction of living conditions for the Russian middle-class. The strategy should last long enough that Russians rise up to overthrow Putin and install a government more sympathetic to the West. As President Biden declared on March 26, 2022, in Warsaw, “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.” And of course, the West and NATO would not commit troops to the fight. That would be for Ukrainians, till the last Ukrainian. For this plan to go into action, the necessary condition was a casus belli, intended to be Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But the US and NATO objective has been not just to secure a Russian regime respectful of US and NATO primacy. It is also to keep Russia as an external enemy, so as to provide glue for cooperation between the West’s often fractious member states under US leadership. To justify US leadership, to present a unitary front in NATO, and to justify big increases in western military budgets, Russia must be presented as the common enemy, which will sweep across the rest of eastern Europe after victory in Ukraine. Western military firms need the West to believe it faces existential enemies in the form of major states – not just slippery “terrorists” or “a bunch of midgets,” as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey labelled the Islamic State. The share prices of the major US arms manufacturers shot up as the Russian invasion looked likely.

The key point was made by Georgi Arbatov, a political scientist and advisor to Gorbachev and other secretaries of the Communist Party, and founder and director of the Institute for US and Canada at the Russian Academy of Science. He said to a group of senior US officials in 1987: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you, we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”

This is how one can understand the West’s persistent rebuff to efforts of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and early Putin to establish non-adversarial relations with Western states. The West needs Russia as an enemy to provide internal unity. On the other hand, it also needs Russia to be a cooperative partner showing suitable deference to the West, especially over the next decades as China grows stronger. The last thing it wants is a China-Russia axis. Yet ironically, this has been the result so far (2). Russia now fills China’s strategic gaps in food, energy, strategic raw materials. It makes China stronger, which accelerates the end of American primacy over Eurasia. Meanwhile, the war has strengthened US primacy over Western Europe, as seen in NATO’s dependence on American armaments and in American fossil fuel companies’ profits from the cut-off of Russian oil to Europe.

The war endgame has somehow to resolve Ukraine’s existential need not to face again the situation where its population is fighting by itself if Russia invades. And resolve Russia’s existential need not to face a hostile western military alliance and western troops right on its border. As though this is not difficult enough, the endgame must also build Ukrainian constitutional protections to the large minority of the population who before 2014 were Russian speaking and Russian-Orthodox believing and who since 2014 have been systematically discriminated against (Wade 2015).

(1) Binney, William, 2014, “Ex-NSA and intelligence veterans warn Merkel on U.S. lies concerning Russian invasion of Ukraine.” http://www.sott.net/article/284924-Ex-NSA-and- intelligence-veterans-warn-Merkel-on-US-lies-concerning-Russian-invasion-of- Ukraine

(2) Wade, Robert H., 2003, “The invisible hand of the American empire,” Ethics and International Affairs, 17

Wade, Robert H., 2013, “Protecting power: western states in global organizations,” in David Held and Charles Roger (eds), Global Governance at Risk, Polity

Wade, Robert H., 2015, “Reinterpreting the Ukraine conflict: the drive for ethnic subordination and existential enemies,” Challenge, July/August 2015

Wade, Robert H. 2022a, “Why the Kremlin has long wanted to annex Ukraine, and why the US has long wanted to get Russia trapped in a Ukraine quagmire,” Global Policy, https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/30/03/2022/why-us-and-nato-have-long-wanted-russia-attack-ukraine

Wade, Robert H., 2022b, “A ‘diplomatic solution’ to the Ukraine crisis,” Global Policy, March 2, 2022, https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/01/03/2022/diplomatic-solution-ukraine-crisis