Invite Ukraine into NATO, defeat Russia and restore the world order
This article was published on November 30 on my Substack platform: https://iuliahuiu.substack.com/p/the-winnable-war
Telling a country and its people they should just accept the “reality” of being occupied by a foreign aggressor and concede a part of the territory because there are no prospects of getting it back is not foreign policy realism. Coming from a small country, Romania, whose people lived for decades behind the Iron Curtain, under the fear of Soviet interference, and were never under the illusion Putin’s Russia abandoned its imperialist ambitions, I find the idea of a so-called “cease-fire” with Russia in Ukraine disconcerting and politically flawed – to say the least. Moreover, it is detrimental to US national security interests and contrary to what America stands for.
Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan argued recently in a Foreign Affairs article that US should “begin consultations with Ukraine and its European partners on a strategy centered on Ukraine’s readiness to negotiate a cease-fire with Russia”. This is not the first attempt to plead for sitting down at the table with Putin, an equivalent of an appeasement under the presumption that the war would be “unwinnable” for Ukraine.
Their approach has been vigorously rebutted since, including by President Biden himself, who said in an op-ed published in Washington Post:
“Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.”
2024 may not be the year the war ends, but it can sure be a critical milestone inside of a long-term strategy and future of success for Ukraine.
Stop doing the same things expecting a different outcome
An attempt of cease-fire with Russia means doing the same things over and over again hoping for a different result, which is the very definition of “crazy”.
How many times does history need to repeat itself for everyone to understand Putin would not stop? A “cease-fire” is not peace, but extra time for Putin to rearm and start again even more forcefully in pursuit of his initial objective of annihilating Ukraine as a sovereign nation, and even going beyond Ukrainian borders.
The West has underestimated Russia and Putin so many times before. In 2008, Putin invaded a sovereign country Georgia, and managed to get away with it while blaming Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and pretending to conduct a “peace enforcement operation” to “defend” the Russian speaking population. Sounds familiar? The Bush administration reacted cautiously, while the French president Nicolas Sarkozy helped broker a peace agreement favorable to Russia.
Then the Obama administration underestimated Putin’s world view and treated Russia as a reasonable actor with whom there were areas of cooperation and areas of disagreement. Instead, Putin viewed the US as an enemy, the enemy, as an obstacle against Russia’s great power ambitions, who allegedly did not respect Russia’s interests in the near abroad and was to blame for everything that was happening within the so-called post-Soviet space.
While the principles of “the Reset” (Obama’s policy towards Russia) were well intended within a liberal framework, the policy underestimated how far Putin was willing to go and how deep his grievances against the US and against the West were. Not even after Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 was the Obama administration decisive enough in its actions, not only in its rhetoric.
George W. Bush did not want to send defensive weapons to Georgia, Barack Obama did not want to send weapons to Ukraine. This is history, we cannot change anything about what happened. But we must be informed by the past, and not repeat the same mistakes.
And then came Donald Trump, the biggest gift Putin could get – an American president who declared he believed Putin instead of his own intelligence services. For four years not just the US but all US allies in the world lived with the scare that Donald Trump would one day “tweet” America out of NATO, while they were sleeping. This was particularly alarming for the Central and Eastern European countries, unnerved by the increasing Russian aggressiveness and by the complacency in some Western capitals in regards to Russia.
Donald Trump tried to use the military aid to blackmail Ukraine and asked President Zelenskyy to announced fake investigations into Joe Biden in return for the much-needed funding to fight against Russia. He couldn’t go all the way with this because some brave government officials reported his infamous July 25, 2019 call with President Zelenskyy and he got impeached for it.
We got all these lessons to learn from, it is time to come up with a breakthrough courageous thinking in regards to Ukraine. To remind us what is at stake, this is a quote from an article Timothy Snyder published a year ago in Foreign Affairs.
“This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.”
Long-term objective
Ukraine has always been clear on its objective and on its own definition of victory. We have to be clear on ours. Before considering “how” to accomplish it, we need to be clear and aligned on what exactly we are committed to accomplish.
Our long-term objective should be a lasting peace and security in Ukraine and the region, a restored international order and accountability so this never repeats again.
Peace – not as the absence of shelling and fighting, but peace as the absence of fear that a Russian invasion could happen again to Ukraine or to any other neighboring country.
This means for starters defeating Russia in Ukraine and inviting Ukraine into NATO.
I noticed the reluctance in using the word “defeat” in order not to upset Russia. Earlier in the war US and European officials seemed cautious even in using the milder expression “strategic defeat” not to offend Russian sensibilities or fuel Putin’s propaganda that the West was out to “humiliate” Russia. The bad news is this has been a favorite Kremlin narrative for a long time no matter what the West said or did.
We are not in a war with Putin’s Russia, but he is with the West. Not the conventional war with boots on the ground, but, metaphorically speaking, Putin declared war to the West a long time ago. While US administrations repeatedly tried to reengage with Russia and warm up the relations, Putin kept interpreting global and regional events through his preestablished anti-Western beliefs. Whatever linguistic cautiousness we maintain, while Russia keeps shelling Ukrainian cities and killing children, it doesn’t make any sense.
Defeating Russia in Ukraine, restoring the international legal system and putting in place structures for this to never happen again is possible.
Nothing else would guarantee Ukraine’s independence more than NATO membership. Even if full membership will come after the war, an official invitation to join NATO can come in 2024 at the next NATO summit in Washington DC.
Any other noncommittal formulas or half measures would be another instance of doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result.
After the fall of USSR, Ukraine was given guarantees in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons, and we see the result. The 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest promised Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership, but things deteriorated rapidly and the Russian invasions in Georgia and then Crimea put an end to that conversation. As the Russian aggression extended in Eastern Ukraine, in Donbas, European powers tried to mediate a “cease-fire”. Again, it sounds very familiar. France and Germany sat down with Russia and Ukraine under the so-called Normandy Format and came up with the first Minsk Agreement. It didn’t work, so they came up with Minsk II, which was also ineffective.
Once and for all, we have to break out of this ineffective pattern. It doesn’t work, not with Putin’s Russia.
