‘A Bridge Too Far’ | Fred Kaplan à propos de Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate de M.E. Sarotte
▻https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/04/07/a-bridge-too-far-not-one-inch-m-e-sarotte
Christopher mused at a conference of NATO foreign ministers that if the alliance kept up its pace of expansion, it would be “hard to see how #Ukraine can accept being the buffer between NATO, Europe and Russia”—and for that reason he favored slowing the process down. To nearly all the ministers, offering NATO’s Article 5 guarantees to a large country with still-extensive ties to Russia—geographical, historical, cultural, and economic—would be too provocative. Ukraine seemed, in Sarotte’s words, “a bridge too far for membership, and it was thought best to leave it in a separate category for the time being”—though nobody took the trouble to devise a “separate category,” so the issue was kicked, like an explosive can, down the road.
George W. Bush picked up the can in April 2008 at a NATO conference in Bucharest. It was his final year as president. He wanted, as one of his aides put it, “to lay down a marker” for his legacy as an advocate of promoting democracy throughout the world. The invasion of Iraq, which he’d believed would spark a wildfire of freedom across the Middle East, wasn’t working out so well, but he was impressed by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the country’s election of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko as president. NATO was already set to announce Albania and Croatia as new members at the summit. In a surprise move, Bush urged letting Ukraine, as well as the former Soviet republic of Georgia, embark on a “Membership Action Plan,” with the aim of accepting their full ascension at some point.
His idea was instantly, in some cases angrily, opposed by the other NATO leaders, especially German chancellor Angela Merkel, who thought—like several US officials in the previous two administrations—that such a move was, first, impractical, since Ukraine couldn’t meet many of NATO’s requirements (among them a firm anticorruption policy), and, second, needlessly provocative to Russia. Yet by the end of the summit, Bush prevailed. The official communiqué read, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO,” then added—more definitively than anyone could have predicted—“We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” It may have been no coincidence that four months later, ethnic-Russian militants in Georgia launched a separatist war, expelled Georgian nationals from South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and “requested” Russian military aid, including the installation of permanent bases.
It was certainly no coincidence that in 2014, when Ukrainian protesters chased out their Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych, and elected a new government that made moves to join the European Union, Russia reacted to the Western push by annexing Crimea (which Khrushchev had given to Ukraine as a symbolic gift in 1954) and sending special forces, wearing unmarked uniforms, to help pro-Russia separatists fight Ukrainian army troops in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. (In the eight years since, more than 14,000 people have died in that war, including at least 500 Russians.)
The warnings of two decades earlier by Kennan, Perry, and others that after the Russian economy revived to some degree, an ultranationalist might come to power and act on the resentments over the expansion of NATO were vindicated by the emergence of Vladimir Putin.