Yesterday’s
meeting between Russia’s deputy foreign minister and our deputy
secretary of state did nothing to break the impasse on the question of
expanding NATO to include Ukraine.
The
question puts the Biden administration in a box that is only partly of
its own making. The precipitous manner of its withdrawal from
Afghanistan opened the floodgates to a range of criticisms, the most
predictable and politically perilous of which is the Republicans’ charge
that Biden’s foreign policy is one of retreat from challenges (never
mind Trump’s agreement with the Taliban that called for such a
withdrawal even earlier). The knee-jerk Democratic response to such
charges is to stand tough, or at least appear to stand tough, when
confronted with the next challenge, which has turned out to be Russia’s
threat to Ukraine.
But
Biden—like his immediate three presidential predecessors—has come into
office saddled with one of the most questionable foreign-policy
decisions of Bill Clinton’s presidency: that of expanding NATO to every
former Soviet-bloc nation except Russia. Originally conceived as a way
to counter Stalin’s creation of the Warsaw bloc (the USSR plus all the
Eastern European nations that Soviet troops occupied as they advanced on
Nazi Germany in 1944 and ’45), NATO’s purpose, once the bloc dissolved
and Soviet communism disappeared, was, to state this gently, unclear.
Clinton sought to clarify it by signing up all the Warsavians save only
Russia. It proved to be one of the more confusing clarifications of
modern history, and one that many Russians (not just the paranoids)
viewed as both a slap and a
threat.
Initially
conceived as an alliance of Western democracies, NATO today has an
almost undecipherable ideological profile. Among its members are Poland
and Hungary, whose descents into authoritarianism have finally prompted
the European Union to begin withholding aid to Hungary and to issue
warnings to Poland’s regime. Trump supporters, most prominently Tucker
Carlson, cite Hungary’s "illiberal democracy" as a model the U.S. should
adopt. By that standard, Hungary has become more of a threat to
American democracy than Putin’s Russia, whose kleptocratic system may in
fact be a
model for Trumpians but not one they can audibly affirm.
It’s
hard to find a Western government that’s keen to actually welcome
Ukraine into NATO’s ill-defined family, fearing as they do that it could
become a longtime and costly burden. But the legacy of American
conservatives’ rhetoric of expansion, combined with Putin’s
determination to keep NATO out of Ukraine and the justifiable revulsion
of small-d democrats and liberals at Putin’s autocratic and repressive
regime, and now, their fear that he might seek to expand it into
Ukraine, have created a standoff that shouldn’t be
happening but for our misguided policies at the end of the Cold War. If
this seems the resurrection of the Cold War’s brinkmanship, one of those
historic events that’s happening, as it were, twice, as Marx put it, we
must hope that it ends more farcically than tragically.
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