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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