What Is America s Strategic Interest In Ukraine? | Hoover Institution What Is America s Strategic Interest In Ukraine?

As the Ukraine war enters its twelfth month, the military situation remains a stalemate, but a stalemate that gives the political advantage to Russia. If Russia can hold most of the territory in the oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson that it annexed on Sept. 30, 2022, it will claim success for its special military operation. A dismembered Ukraine will be left with a trillion-dollar reconstruction bill on a GDP of barely $100 billion, a resident population of perhaps 25 million with ten million of its citizens living abroad as refugees, and a dim future.

In furtherance of what strategic interests has the United States acted in Ukraine? Is Ukraine s NATO membership an American raison d état? Did American strategists really believe that sanctions would shut down Russia s economy? Did they imagine that the trading patterns of the Asian continent would shift to flow around the sanctions? Did they consider the materiel requirements of a long war that is exhausting American stockpiles? Did they consider what tripwires might elicit the use of nuclear weapons? Or did they sleepwalk into the conflict, as the European powers did in 1914?

Why did Russia invade? Would Russia have invaded Ukraine if the West and the Zelensky government had put Minsk II into effect, with autonomous Russophone regions within a sovereign and neutral Ukraine? Contrafactual history is inherently unprovable, but there are good reasons to believe that this is true. Protecting the rights of Russians separated from the motherland by the breakup of the Soviet Union is a Russian raison d état. After more than 14,000 casualties in fighting between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian separatists in Donbas before the February 24th invasion, it is hard to argue that Russia s concerns were groundless.

In 2008, Russia intervened in Georgia to uphold the principle that anyone who holds a Russian passport Ossetian, Akhbaz, Belorussian, or Ukrainian is a Russian. Russia s survival depends neither on its birth rate, nor on immigration, nor even on prospective annexation, but on the survival of the principle by which Russia was built in the first place. That is why Putin could not abandon the pockets of Russian passport holders in the Caucasus.

A generation of American diplomats, including Henry Kissinger and former Ambassador to Russia William Burns, warned that expanding NATO to Ukraine was a tripwire for Russia. German documents published by Der Spiegel in February 2022 confirm that Western powers gave Russia written assurance in 1990 against NATO expansion. Russia s prostration after its 1998 debt default, though, allowed NATO to ignore these assurances. Under Clinton, NATO s mission morphed into a nebulous human rights and social welfare agenda. NATO added Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, and another seven former Soviet-zone countries in 2004. Meanwhile the Bundeswehr shrank to five ill-equipped divisions from the twelve combat-ready, heavily armed divisions of 1990. NATO degraded its military function as it padded its membership.

Ukraine is another matter. Russia regards its inclusion in NATO as an existential threat.

via www.hoover.org

David Goldberg, whom I’ve always suspected of being (for want of a better term) soft on China and a fortiori on Russia. But he asks good questions here.