US Hubris Caused the Ukraine WarA conversation with Professor Jonathan Haslam on Hubris: The Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine
The war in Ukraine did not begin because nobody saw it coming. It began because too many people in Washington decided the warnings did not matter. That is the argument of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s book, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine. After reading it, and after talking to him at length, I think the title is earned. Not because Russia bears no responsibility for launching a war. It does. But because the road to that war was paved, over three decades, by American policy after the Cold War — and by a Western inability to understand responses from Moscow that were, in fact, highly predictable. The Peacemonger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Haslam did not set out to write a book about Ukraine. His publisher asked a simpler question: why, after the end of the Cold War, did things not get better? The answer he found in the archives was not a mystery of Putin’s psychology. It was a record of American decisions. Fear of being pushed out of Europe The United States did not greet the Soviet collapse as an unalloyed gift. George H. W. Bush and his advisers feared that the rationale for American power in Europe would disappear with the enemy. NATO had been the instrument that kept Washington in the European security order. If that order no longer needed an American security umbrella, the United States might be edged out of a market and a political theatre it considered essential. Haslam’s point is not that Europeans were clamouring to evict America. They were not. It is that Washington acted as if they might — and concluded that NATO had to be preserved, then enlarged, then given a purpose beyond the defence of Western Europe. When Bush floated the idea of expanding NATO’s remit globally, François Mitterrand’s reaction was blistering. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Why expand the alliance’s mission across the planet? Bush retreated. Then he lost the election. Bill Clinton inherited the problem, and with it a political opportunity. Clinton, votes and the louder voices Clinton was not a foreign-policy president. He was a politician who wanted to be re-elected. NATO expansion appealed to migrant communities in the United States whose families had suffered under Soviet domination. It also appealed to a bureaucracy that, Haslam argues, had learned to need enemies. Russia was down. The assumption was that it would not get up in time to matter. The people who did know Russia were cut out. George Kennan — the architect of containment, no romantic about Moscow — opposed enlargement as a provocation that would end in confrontation. Analysts at RAND said the same. Sam Nunn said the same. Paul Nitze said the same. Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s own point man on the former Soviet Union, wrote that putting Ukraine on a NATO membership list was dangerous and would lead to conflict. Haslam found that memorandum in the files. Read it now and the hair goes up on the back of the neck. Almost everything Talbott feared came true. Clinton took no notice. The louder voices inside the system won. That is not a uniquely American story. It is what happens when policy is made by people who know how to dominate a meeting, not by people who know the other side. Ukraine was the object, not the subject One of the most important features of Haslam’s book is also the most easily missed. When he first submitted the manuscript, his publisher said there was nothing about Ukraine in it! Haslam’s reply was that that was the point. Ukraine was the object of American and Russian policy. It was not the subject. It was not, in origin, the cause. The cause was American policy. From the mid-1990s, Washington was already contemplating Ukraine as a future NATO member, even while selling Moscow the Partnership for Peace as something other than enlargement by another name. The Russians noticed the gap between the language of partnership and the practice of expansion. They were meant to. Or rather, they were not meant to be taken seriously when they did. To Russian military planners, Ukraine and Crimea were not sentimental extras. They were part of the southern strategic depth of the state — as Canada or Mexico are to American security thinking, as Cuba was in 1962. Lose that space and the old American war plans through the Black Sea look different. You do not have to accept Moscow’s claims to understand why Russian officials treated this as a red line. You only have to accept that they would. Haslam asked the recently recalled Russian ambassador in London, Andrei Keilin, when Putin decided he would probably have to go to war over Ukraine. Haslam expected 2020 or 2021. Keilin said 2004: the year the Baltic states entered NATO, and the point at which Putin concluded that George W. Bush would push enlargement to the limit. A predictable response, treated as unthinkable The West’s failure was not only strategic. It was imaginative. Diplomats who do not know Russia still talk to Russians as if they were dealing with a slightly awkward version of themselves. Irony is taken literally. Newspaper swagger is treated as government policy. Old suspicions, some of them ugly, some of them earned, are dismissed as propaganda until they become operational. The bombing of Belgrade in 1999 mattered here more than many in London or Washington still admit. It was NATO’s first war, undeclared, without a UN mandate. In Russia it was watched on television for seventy-eight days. Elite opinion and ordinary opinion moved together. After that, the hardliners were much harder to displace. Haslam is clear that the way the war was fought taught Moscow a lesson about what NATO had become: not a status-quo defensive alliance, but an instrument that could be used out of area. From there the pattern repeated. Rapprochement in public. Enlargement in private. Warnings filed. Red lines tested. When Russia was weak, the conclusion in Washington was that Russia could do nothing. It could. It did. What follows None of this is an argument for Russian victory, or for pretending the invasion of 2022 was a policing action. It is an argument for ending the habit of describing a war as unprovoked while refusing to study the provocations that were obvious to every serious Russia specialist from Kennan onwards. Haslam’s conclusion is the one many officials still cannot say in public: the United States did not start the fighting. It started the reasons for the fighting. If that is even half right, then more weapons and more slogans will not substitute for a settlement. They will only prolong the economic cost and the human misery. I have spent enough years on the Russia account, including in Moscow, to know how unpopular that message is in Whitehall. It remains no less true. Policy built on the assumption that the other side will not respond is not moral clarity. It is negligence with a press office. Haslam’s book is the archival case for that view. Our conversation just scratches the surface of what is a meticulously researched work that should be essential reading for politicians, policy makers and pundits in the west. Read Hubris. Then ask why the people who were right in the 1990s were treated as old men who did not understand the new world — a world that has since delivered exactly the confrontation they described. You can watch conversation here:
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