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MARCH 31, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Whose Bright Idea Was It to Extend NATO Membership to Ukraine?

That master of foreign and military policy, George W. Bush

Let me state at the outset that I don't think the absurd invitation
that NATO made to Ukraine in 2008 was the proximate, or even
unproximate, cause of Vladimir Putin's decision to invade that
country. Given Putin's commitment to creating a neo-czarist Greater
Russia, I think the invasion would have taken place in any case. If
anything, Ukraine's more credible campaign to join the European Union,
which would likely push Ukraine toward becoming a more liberal state,
posed the greater threat in Putin's mind, since a thriving liberalism
on Russia's border would make right-wing autocracy harder to sustain
in Russia itself. Encirclement by NATO, which clearly wasn't going to
happen in any case, wasn't a serious threat. Encirclement by Europe,
with its less macho and more liberal culture, was.

But the specter, however far-fetched, of NATO encirclement did offer
Putin a pretext for invasion-more credible, at least, than the claim
that Ukraine was a Nazi regime. But blaming NATO for forcing Putin to
bombard Ukraine's civilian population is a little like blaming
Hitler's decision to make war on Europe, Russia, and the U.S. on the
Treaty of Versailles, which, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1920,
levied ruinous reparations on Germany. Yes, the treaty was a bad idea
that helped the Nazis come to power, just as the 2008 invitation that
NATO extended to Ukraine and Georgia was a bad idea, too, one which, as
George Kennan noted at the time, was an act of first-rate geopolitical
stupidity, a gratuitous insult to Russia.

And whence that insult? From none other than George W. Bush, who forced
it on a reluctant NATO because he wanted to "lay down a marker" for his
legacy before his term in office ran out, as

**The New York Times**, quoting one Bush counselor,

****reported
at the
time. At NATO's 2008 conference in Bucharest, Germany, France, Italy,
Belgium, and the Netherlands strenuously objected to inviting those two
nations to join, as neither seemed remotely ready for the task and as
Russia-with or without Putin-would clearly view the invitation as an
affront. According to the

**Times**, "Germany and France have said they believe that since neither
Ukraine nor Georgia is stable enough to enter the program now, a
membership plan would be an unnecessary offense to Russia, which firmly
opposes the move." Among Europe's major nations, only the U.K., under
the Blairite Gordon Brown, stuck with Bush on this, as it had on the
Iraq War.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly upset that Bush,
straying from the agreed-upon agenda, insisted on raising the topic and
effectively demanding that NATO extend that invitation. Which, against
the better judgment of Europe's leading powers, it did. The official
communiqué
that NATO
issued at the close of that meeting contained numerous commitments to
try to draw Russia closer to Europe, and one commitment (point 23) to
invite in Georgia and Ukraine-as if Putin would be soothed by all
those friendly bullet points and Bush quieted down by bullet point 23.

Despite point 23's pledge that NATO would work with Ukraine and
Georgia to prepare them to enter the alliance, in fact no such work was
ever done. The European side of the North Atlantic never showed any real
interest in bringing in Ukraine and Georgia, for the same reasons that
they had opposed the idea in the first place.

Nonetheless, point 23 saddled Bush's three successors-Obama, Trump,
and Biden-with Bush's dubious "legacy." Despite their considerable
differences, none of them thought it worth the trouble either to seek to
repeal point 23 or to act on it. So there it remained-like the
disastrous messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, one more Bush brainstorm that
ended up backfiring on its progenitors and bringing woe to the wider
world-even though it only provided a pretext for the woe Putin is now
inflicting on Ukraine.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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