The summit condemned Russia’s “illegitimate occupation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine” and ordered the creation of a “spearhead” force of several thousand troops prepared to deploy within a few days to respond to similar crises. Ten days later, 1,300 NATO troops from fifteen countries, including 200 Americans, began a military exercise called Rapid Trident around the Ukrainian city of Lviv. The Russian Foreign Ministry called that a continuation of NATO’s eastward expansion and promised an “adequate” Russian response.[7]
On a broader scale, NATO’s collective role remains problematic. The strategic response to the Crimean annexation has come mainly from the United States, whose Sixth Fleet, headquartered in Naples and traditionally focused on Libya, Egypt, and the Levant, has taken a renewed interest in the Black Sea. Typically nowadays, one U.S. warship is always on patrol in those waters. The NATO reconnaissance planes monitoring the area, shadowed and occasionally dangerously intercepted by Russian jets, are American too.[8]
NATO membership for Ukraine remains on the table. President Petro Poroshenko repeatedly voices his belief that “there is no other system in the world but NATO” that could ensure Ukraine’s security. Although the prospect seems to arouse zero enthusiasm at NATO headquarters, it remains a faint possibility. The same applied to NATO membership for the Republic of Georgia, which by no stretch of imagination could be called a North Atlantic country.[9]
Rather dramatically, in December 2015, NATO invited another Eastern European nation to join the alliance: Montenegro. That was NATO’s first expansion since 2009, and Russia angrily promised “retaliatory actions.” Geopolitically, Montenegro is a burden. The country of 650,000 people has a military force of just 2,000, and its territory is hard to defend: the Adriatic Sea in the west provides an invader with several convenient gateways, and in the east Russia’s friend Serbia waits.[10]
Despite the vast military power of the United States, there are many spaces on the globe where its presence simply cannot be introduced, even with casualties. The question is whether NATO has expanded to the edge of such a space, or past the edge.
How to Proceed?
The Crimea crisis has activated debates among competing schools in American foreign policy—neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, realists, isolationists, and paleoconservatives, to name just a few.
The harshest critique of America’s handling of the crisis came from isolationists. Ron Paul called President Obama’s sanctions against Russia “criminal” and declared that Crimea had a right to self-determination. Paul Craig Roberts angrily commented that on the hundredth anniversary of World War I, the Western powers were “again sleepwalking into destructive conflict,” because “Washington interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine” had led to developments beyond American control, raising the possibility of a “great power confrontation, which could be the end of all of us.” Oliver Stone announced that he would be making a documentary on the events in Kiev, dubbing what had happened “America’s soft power technique called ‘Regime Change 101.’ …The West has maintained the dominant narrative of ‘Russia in Crimea’ whereas the true narrative is ‘USA in Ukraine.’”[11]
Interventionists were largely pleased with the regime change in Kiev. The British historian Andrew Wilson called it an uprising “on behalf of everybody in the former Soviet Union,” a delayed “anti-Soviet revolution” that, he hoped, might inspire copycat rebellions in other post-Soviet nations, Russia included. But for that to happen, interventionist intellectuals not unreasonably concluded, the White House had to intervene more aggressively. Michael McFaul, a “specialist in revolution” and the U.S. ambassador to Moscow for two years during the Obama administration, warned from his premature retirement that Putin’s regime “must be isolated. The strategy of seeking to change Kremlin behavior through engagement, integration and rhetoric is over for now. …There must be sanctions, including against those people and entities—propagandists, state-owned enterprises, Kremlin-tied bankers—that act as instruments of Mr. Putin’s coercive power. Conversely, individuals and companies not connected to the government must be supported, including those seeking to take assets out of Russia or emigrate.”[12]
The leading neoconservative Robert Kagan saw the crisis as a test of America’s ability to lead the world: “Many Americans and their political leaders in both parties, including President Obama, have either forgotten or rejected the assumptions that undergirded American foreign policy for the past seven decades. In particular, American foreign policy may be moving away from the sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the interests of many others around the world and back toward the defense of narrower, more parochial national interests.”[13]
Realists argued that interference in Ukraine—past, present, and proposed—did not further American interests but hurt them. This is what Henry Kissinger had to say: “Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other—it should function as a bridge between them. …A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.” Ambassador Jack F. Matlock: “Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.”[14]
Strategy experts Dimitri Simes and Paul Saunders wrote in the Washington Times that if, in the fall of 2013, the White House and the European Union had “offered half of what they are now providing Ukraine, ousted President Viktor Yanukovych would likely have signed the E.U. deal that he abandoned instead. If the White House and Brussels had been willing to enforce the February 21 agreement, Ukraine would have had a new government without providing the Kremlin a pretext to seize Crimea or leverage for new demands. By trying to have it all in Ukraine for free, Mr. Obama blundered into disaster.”[15]
Veterans of American politics George P. Shultz and Sam Nunn: “Recent history has shown the damage done to global security and the economic commons by cross-border threats and the uncertainty that emanates from them. As far as Russia is concerned, the world is best served when Russia proceeds as a respected and important player on the world stage. …A key to ending the Cold War was the Reagan administration’s rejection of the concept of linkage, which said that bad behavior by Moscow in one sphere had to lead to a freeze of cooperation in all spheres. …Although current circumstances make it difficult, we should not lose sight of areas of common interest where cooperation remains crucial.” Shultz and Nunn mentioned securing nuclear materials, destroying Syrian chemical stockpiles, and preventing nuclear proliferation on their list of such areas.[16]
One could add other items. If the United States is to continue the global “war on terror,” cooperation with Russia is imperative, whether in intelligence gathering, covert operations, or the United Nations. The Northern Distribution Network, the elaborate web of land routes connecting American troops in Afghanistan to seaports in the Baltic and Pacific, runs through Russia. U.S. astronauts need Russian rockets to be able to travel to the International Space Station (in May 2014, reacting to U.S. sanctions, Russia announced that it was not interested in maintaining the ISS past 2020). Many American businesses have deep connections to partners in Russia. To name just two examples, ExxonMobil is drilling for oil in Siberia and the Arctic; and a company developing spaceships for NASA, Orbital Sciences Corporation, has been purchasing rocket engines from the Russian manufacturer Kuznetsov in Samara.[17]
7
Ibid.; “US and NATO Troops Begin Ukraine Military Exercise,” BBC, September 15, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29204505 (retrieved September 15, 2014); Russian Foreign Ministry press secretary Aleksandr Lukashevich’s statement, Novobsor.ru, September 11, 2014, http://novoboz.ru/2014/09/11/152500 (retrieved August 21, 2015).
8
“Raketnyi esminets USS Cole i shtabnoi korabl 6-go flota SshA USS Mount Whitney vkhodyat v Chernoye more,”
9
Thomas Barrabi, “Ukraine’s NATO Entrance Amid Russian Aggression ‘At Least 6–7 Years’ Away, Poroshenko Says,”
10
“Nato Invitation to Montenegro Prompts Russia Warning,” BBC, December 2, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34981973 (retrieved December 2, 2015).
11
Paul Craig Roberts, “Sleepwalking Again,” Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, February 22, 2014, www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/02/22/sleepwalking (retrieved July 4, 2014); Damien Sharkov, “Oliver Stone Meets Toppled Ukrainian President Yanukovych, Accuses CIA of Sparking Coup,”
12
Andrew Wilson,
14
Kissinger, “To Settle the Ukraine Crisis…”; Jack F. Matlock, “Who Is the Bully?”
15
Dimitri Simes and Paul Saunders, “Obama’s Crimea Blunder,”
16
George P. Shultz and Sam Nunn, “The U.S. Strategy for Keeping Ukraine Safe from Russian Aggression,”
17
“Rossiiski proizvoditel otkrestilsya ot avarii rakety Antares,” Lenta.ru, October 29, 2014, lenta.ru/news/2014/10/29/raketa (retrieved October 29, 2014).