What many people believe to be a disastrous presidency is about to come to an end for President Joe Biden. His removal from the White House could have a significant impact on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the three decades of poorly thought-out Western policies that led to Russia’s alienation and the demise of its democratic project. However, Donald Trump’s ability to avoid repeating his predecessors’ mistakes determines that.
Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, made the decision to invade Ukraine in full, but US security forces helped to lay the groundwork for this conflict in the 1990s. Back then, Russia had just emerged from the dissolution of the USSR much weaker and disoriented, while the Russian leadership, idealistic and inept as it was at the time, worked on the assumption that full-blown integration with the West was inevitable.
Decisions made at the time gave rise to a conflict between Russia and the West, which reached its logical conclusion while President Biden was in office.
The issue was never the NATO expansion, a security pact established to confront the Soviet Union and the European Union as a whole, but rather Russia’s exclusion from this process.
Crucially, this approach placed Ukraine in the path of Euro-Atlantic integration, while excluding Russia, thereby causing a conflict between two countries that are historically, economically, and interpersonally linked. Additionally, it caused Russia’s resurgence of democracy under Putin.
It took American securocrats concerted efforts to bring about this outcome, which was never predetermined.
The Partnership for Peace program, which was officially launched by the Clinton administration in 1994, was one of the missed opportunities for a different path. As a major nuclear power and a new democracy with a blatant pro-Western government, it was intended to balance the desire of the former Warsaw Pact nations to join NATO and the crucial objective of keeping Russia on board.
Russia joined it, but as noted by American historian Mary Sarotte in her book, Not One Inch, a small group of securocrats in Washington derail its useful framework at its inception.
She specifically talks about “the pro-expansion troika”, consisting of Daniel Fried, Alexander Vershbow, and Richard Holbrooke, who pushed for an aggressive expansion of NATO, disregarding protests from Moscow.
Sarotte also mentions John Herbst as the author of a later report on unofficial NATO promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which, according to Sarotte, served as the inspiration for the US policy of deflecting Russian complaints about NATO expanding all the way to its borders for decades to come.
Biden, a prominent member of Congress at the time, can be seen in the unreflective arrogance and triumphalism that these securocrats exhibit. In a 1997 video, he mocked Moscow’s protests against NATO expansion by saying that Russia would have to embrace China and Iran if it kept being intransigent. He made clear that the situation was absurd and unrealistic at the time, and he may have thought that Russia had no choice but to remain in the Western orbit. However, it turned out exactly like what he believed to be a clever joke.
Biden found a willing partner in Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, in his hawkish policies against Russia. It is unlikely that Zelenskyy’s significant reversal of relations with Russia began as Biden assumed office.
The Ukrainian president had been chosen with the assurance that he would put an end to the tense conflict that had begun with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. In Paris in December 2019, he and Putin met to agree on a ceasefire in the Donbass region, which both sides had largely adhered to, which reduced the number of fatalities to near zero.
But once Biden set foot in the White House, Zelenskyy ordered a clampdown on Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk, while simultaneously launching loud campaigns for Ukraine’s NATO membership, the return of Crimea, as well as for the derailing of the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.
Two factors may have played into Zelenskyy’s decisions. Azerbaijan’s victory over Russian-backed Armenian forces in the fall of 2020, achieved largely thanks to Turkish Bayraktar drones, gave hopes that high-tech warfare against Russia could be successful. The other factor was that in December 2020, polls showed Medvedchuk’s party ahead of Zelenskyy’s.
Just a few days after Biden’s inauguration, Zelenskyy gave an interview to American outlet Axios in which he famously asked his US counterpart: “Why Ukraine is still not in NATO”? Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister of Ukraine, published an op-ed with the same question in the title that was followed by Atlantic Council, a think tank that receives a lot of its funding from the US government and Pentagon contractors.
Unsurprisingly, some of the same people who influenced US attitudes toward Russia in the 1990s also pleaded with the Biden administration to adopt aggressive measures that made the invasion happen.
In addition to three others, Fried, Vershbow, and Herbst wrote a report for the Biden administration on March 5 that included recommendations for Ukraine and Russia. These culminated in a pressuring Putin, rampant on every front, from derailing Nord Stream 2 to offering an EU membership plan to Ukraine.
Three weeks after that publication, Putin began deploying troops on the Ukrainian border, embarking on 11 months of hair-raising brinkmanship. The US began secret weapons deliveries to Ukraine in September, the British warship HMS Defender entering what Russia had declared its territorial waters off the coast of occupied Crimea in June, and then the US and Ukraine announced a strategic partnership in November, which amounted to casus belli in the eyes of Kremlin hawks.
Prior to the invasion’s eventual demise in February 2022, Putin had begun making serious preparations for it. The resulting war is now approaching its third anniversary.
Ukraine suffered terrible losses and nothing from challenging Putin to a fight, despite the significant support from the West. The war has brought Ukraine to the brink, causing a massive refugee crisis, economic collapse, social disintegration and ever-growing death toll.
If there is peace in Ukraine this year, it will likely follow the Istanbul agreements from 2022, which stipulated a sizeable army in Austria. As retribution for Ukrainian intransigence, Russia will likely insist on retaining a large portion of the territory. Technically speaking, this defeat will technically go against Ukraine, but it will be a win for both the Ukrainian people and the rest of the world, who have suffered the most from this conflict.
The securitized class, which has been pushing for a new standoff with Russia since the Soviet Union collapse, will also suffer a significant blow.
It is obvious that Russia’s aggressive strategy has failed in favor of expansion. Western policymakers should conduct some soul-searching to determine a course of action to slow down and resume a downward trend toward reconciliation with Moscow.
This does not include making Putin’s government accountable for the crimes committed by Russian forces, including war crimes. It’s about putting an end to a conflict that will continue to support Putin’s regime for as long as it lasts, as well as removing the conditions that led to Russia’s militarization.
Source: Aljazeera
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