Despite the groundswell of support in the West to contrast Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there remains a narrow but steady undercurrent that blames the United States for the war. This stream exists both in Europe and in the U.S. (witness the arguments of University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer). According to this thesis, the Americans obliged the Russians to invade Ukraine because they extended NATO so far to the East that the Western alliance pushed up against Russia’s borders, hence compelling Putin to invade Ukraine to defend Russia.
As often happens in history, this is a false parallel and owes much to the loss of historical memory. Unfortunately, the capacity to remember is quickly lost with the passage of even relatively short amount of time. New generations are frequently incapable of making parallels and seem anxious to repeat the mistakes of the past. As the famed economic historian Carlo Cipolla mused: “Persons who consider themselves, or want to seem, learned and wise often repeat that history is the teacher of life and that man learns much from experience! I am a professional historian, but more than forty years of research and historical investigations have convinced me that this ingenuous conviction does not hold water and that man does not learn a damned thing either from his personal experience, or from the common or individual experience of his peers. Instead, he continues to repeat with boring obstinacy the same errors and the same misdeeds, with deleterious consequences for human progress.”
Let’s examine some of the elements that underpin the criticism made by proponents of the “geopolitical” argument that when the spheres of influence of great powers border each other, the aggrieved party has the right to invade a weaker country in order to—what? Not to create a “buffer state,” because the invading power will now dominate or annex the weaker one, ironically creating a common frontier with the opposing camp where only the threat of one existed before. So, the domination of Ukraine by Russia will not separate the Russian and the Western camps, the alleged reason for the invasion, but bring them physically closer, arguably increasing the odds for a future incident. Can we imagine that a subjugated Ukraine will be more content with being ruled by Russia through imposition of a puppet government, occupation, or annexation than it would be as a member of the EU and NATO, losing even the freedom to criticize their “overlord” as the French, the Germans, and the Italians do?
Let’s look at the argument that the Americans arbitrarily extended the borders of NATO, perversely provoking the Russians. Except this time, we can go back before 2004 (when NATO moved eastwards) to see if we can find any patterns.
Already in the 18th century, Russia was considered by Westerners as an expansionist power that threatened all of Europe. Aside from the idyll with Catherine the Great, a German beloved of French philosophes who admired “Enlightened” despots, Europeans feared the Russian colossus’s drive westward. In fact, aggressive action and expansionist wars with Turkey accompanied Tsarist Russia’s push into Eastern Europe during modern times, and both continued into the 20th century. In the late 18th century, it participated in the partitions of Poland between itself, Prussia, and Austria and after the Napoleonic period, it went on to possess the largest slice of that country. The Poles remained under harsh Tsarist domination until the end of World War I, producing revolutions against its rule in 1830-31 (when Frédéric Chopin fled to France) and 1863-64.
Following Napoleon’s downfall, the West struggled to ensure that Russian control would not replace French domination of the continent. In January 1815 Austria’s Metternich engineered an unlikely alliance with Great Britain and defeated France to counter the threat of Russian domination in concert with its subservient ally Prussia. Throughout the 19th century, Russian empire-building constantly worried the Western powers, which then acted to limit Russian influence on many occasions: the Crimean War (1854-1856), fought by Britain and France to stem Russian expansionism; the Congress of Berlin (1878), which forced Russia to relinquish outsize European gains made in a war against Turkey; and the continuous efforts made by the Western powers to block Russian efforts to secure passage of its fleet into the Mediterranean, the heart of Europe, by gaining control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits (resolved by the convention of Montreaux, 1936, still in effect, and relevant for the current Ukrainian crisis). Russian desire for hegemony in the East—instead of Austro-German—has been cited as the major cause of World War I (Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, Belknap Press-Harvard, 2011).
This brings us to World War II and the Cold War. Germany, Russia’s major opponent in Eastern Europe, emerged defeated from the conflict. Russian armies occupied Eastern Europe, and the USSR took advantage to dominate the entire area. At first it attempted to do so using “democratic” popular front tactics. When the people of the Eastern states did not fall for this ruse, it used force. Russia pushed the borders of its sphere of influence up to the limits of Western-dominated Europe, exactly the tactics Russia accuses the West of following, and now claims forced it to start the Ukrainian war.
The key incident during the post-World War II era regarding Eastern Europe was the takeover of Czechoslovakia by Moscow-dominated Communists in 1948. If the U.S. had used the same reasoning Putin has cited for invading Ukraine, the Americans would have invaded Czechoslovakia because the Communist coup pushed the borders of the Communist world up against the Western “sphere” (West Germany). However, the U.S. did not surround and invade Czechoslovakia; it did not start a brutal war. It turned to other, non-military means of to resist Russian imperialism. It created a defensive alliance (NATO) that would react only if the Russians invaded Western Europe; it adopted the Truman Doctrine to support governments defending themselves against Russian-inspired Communist revolutions; and it supported political parties that threatened to take over Italy and France, sometimes, following the Soviet example, with illegal funds. There were no offensive military measures, alla Ukraine invasion. In short, reaction to the Soviets pushing the borders of their sphere up against the Western sphere did not produce an American-led war. This was true despite the clear violation of human rights practiced by the USSR and the constant unrest in the Soviet sphere of influence—in East Germany and Poland in particular—and military suppression of Hungarian and Czechoslovak reform movements in 1956 and 1968.
With the fall of the USSR, the East European countries formerly dominated by Russia demonstrated that they had learned from their history. Poland had suffered from almost two centuries of Russian domination, enduring intense “Russification” including the banning of the Polish language from important areas of official and educational interaction. Reasoning from their history, East Europeans concluded that Russia would not always remain a weak power and would threaten them in the future. Accordingly, they favored entrance into NATO so they would have allies when Russian revival came and the Russians would again follow their traditional policy of imposing domination in the entire area. Poland, for example, turned into a greater champion of NATO than large Western European states. In contrast, history does not recall any clamoring in Germany, France, Italy, or the UK for joining the Warsaw Pact.
Several conclusions can be drawn from this rapid overview. First, Russia has considered Eastern Europe to be its exclusive “sphere of influence,” or province, for the last two centuries. That includes both Tsarist and Soviet Russia, which weaponized its sophisticated ideology. Putin’s past in the KGB, his prominent display of the Tsarist flag, and the pronouncements of Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow, and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, acting together, are a perfect blend of the history of Russian imperialism. Second, the argument that the Russians were compelled to invade Ukraine because the westernization of that country, voluntarily undertaken, threatened Russia, and because Ukraine wished to join NATO, and therefore menaced Russia, is bogus. This is not the first time that Western and Russian spheres have shared borders, but it is the first time such a flimsy reason has been cited to start a war; the U.S. may have many flaws, but it did not fire a shot when Russia pushed the borders of its sphere of influence westward and pressed on the borders of the Western sphere. There was no unprovoked attack on Czechoslovakia in 1948 to establish a “buffer state.” Third, the eastward movement of NATO would not have been possible if the countries of the area, had history not taught them to anticipate a revival of Russian expansionism that threatened their independence. Note the reports that, as a reaction to the Ukraine invasion, there was possible Finnish and Swedish interest in joining the Western alliance. In short, the Eastern “newcomers” to NATO desired and welcomed membership as protection against the specter of a revived Russia following the pattern of dominating them. The invasion of Ukraine proves that that they were right.
Finally, there is no God-given right for any country to re-establish their influence in areas that they once controlled, as Putin has reportedly dreamed of doing. Such aspirations are the stuff of Mussolinis and Hitlers.