The Endgame With Ukraine and Russia

Many of the usual suspects who upheld America’s unwise wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and its ill-considered interventions in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya, with their destabilizing refugee flows—are predictably upholding Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s pre-Russian-invasion intransigence with regard to possible NATO membership for Ukraine. Blinken, as well as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, are devoted Clintonistas who fully bought into the NATO expansion project opposed by George Kennan, William Perry, Jack Matlock and others.

This intransigence is set against what has long been apparent to me and many others: Post-Khrushchev Ukraine is an artificial construct. Its elections disclosed sharp fissures on regional, ethnic, and religious lines. Crimea, Russian until 1954, was a traditional seat of Russian culture and only 22 percent Ukrainian by 1959. The Donbas was Russia’s Rust Belt. Proceedings in the parliament of the united Ukraine resembled a rugby match more than normal parliamentary deliberations. The regime was at least as corrupt as Russia’s, and the country had a lower economic growth rate. The U.S. was wise not to make a serious issue of the Russian annexation of Crimea.

Putin’s further aggressions were obviously undertaken in the hope of precipitating a swift collapse of Ukraine and immediate union with Russia. That did not happen. But if Russia is to extract itself from his adventure, some incentives to do so are needed.

The Reasonable Russian Government

The key to the situation is to ask what any reasonable Russian government, tsarist, democratic, communist, or authoritarian would want. The answer is that it would want what the Soviet Union was effectively promised at Yalta and San Francisco: a role as one of the world’s Five Policemen. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, recently said as much, though no one was listening.

The post-war settlement originating at Tehran and Yalta contemplated a Holy Alliance of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, not a world government founded on the equality of states, like the League of Nations. Such an arrangement, followed by the Concert of Europe and the conference system, produced a hundred years free of major wars. The U.N. was a focus of Roosevelt’s at both Tehran and Yalta, as shown in Robert Divine’s Roosevelt and World War II (1969) and Frank Costigliola’s Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances (2011).

Roosevelt’s concessions to Stalin at Yalta over such things as the Kuril Islands and Kaliningrad were justified as inducements for Soviet participation in the San Francisco Conference establishing the U.N., regarded by Roosevelt and his secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, as a great diplomatic victory. Subsequent Soviet and Russian foreign ministers, as well as Soviet President Gorbachev, urged the activation of the U.N.’s Military Committee as a peace-keeping device, as well as periodic conferences of the Big Five powers as contemplated by the U.N. Charter. President Nixon in one of his post-presidential books urged periodic great-power summit meetings on the Franco-German model instituted by De Gaulle and Adenauer.

At the least, institutionalizing those practices would be a face-saving gesture to the Russians, as would dedicating the several billion dollars of Russian assets seized by Western countries to compensate the families of the Russian and Ukrainian war dead. Instead, the State Department’s sanctions tsar gleefully celebrates the depletion-through-war of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, as if an impoverished Russia would be a bastion of peace, rather than of anarchy. Any settlement should contemplate the abandonment of sanctions respecting all imports save military ones. The inefficacy of sanctions to induce peace has been demonstrated for forty-five years with Iran, sixty years with Cuba, and seventy years with North Korea.

A Renewed Interdependence

While Ukraine has a legitimate interest in joining the E.U., it should do so on terms limiting the E.U. external tariffs on Russia–Ukraine trade. The E.U.’s relationship with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries of Norway and Switzerland may provide an example here. Ukraine’s continued membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States should be not nominal, but real. In the Soviet era, the economies of Russia and the Ukraine were seriously interdependent. Russia understandably does not want a balkanization of the Soviet economy similar to the proliferation of tariff barriers that had a devastating effect on the successor states of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires between the wars.

While Western military aid of a largely unrestricted character should continue to be available to Ukraine owing to its recent experience, no Russian government would want full Ukranian membership in NATO, and even Norwegian and Danish membership is qualified by the limited presence of foreign military bases and troops on those countries’ soil. Germany and France have in the past forestalled Ukraine’s membership and no doubt will continue to do so. This does not seem to be a sticking point.

The leaders of both nations are entitled to assurance that they will not be extradited to the Hague or elsewhere. As the veteran Italian Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza pointed out, dictators are reluctant to dismount the tiger if they are going to wind up inside. The 19th century usage did not contemplate execution of defeated heads of state: Napoleon was packed off to Elba and then St. Helena; Emperors Wilhelm II of Germany, Karl of Austria-Hungary, and the last Sultan of Turkey were allowed to die abroad, and the leaders of the Communist states who voluntarily relinquished power in 1989 (the intransigent Ceausescu being an exception) were allowed to die peacefully in their own countries.

The only war crimes trials should be of leaders by their own nationals. It is sheer hypocrisy for a country, the U.S., that has not joined the International Criminal Court to demand or assist extraditions to it, lest its officials cast themselves as successors to the murderers of the tsar and his family at Ekaterinburg.

Whatever chance there was of a complete “velvet divorce” of Russia and