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JANUARY 11, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

How Ukraine Became a Flashpoint

Why the hell did we expand NATO eastward in the 1990s?

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.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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