- The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
By John J. Mearsheimer (Foreign Affairs)
A man takes a picture as he stands on a Soviet-style star
re-touched with blue paint so that it resembles the Ukrainian flag,
Moscow, August 20, 2014. (Maxim Shemetov / Courtesy Reuters)
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis
can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President
Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing
desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after
the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In
this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in
February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order
Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies
share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the
trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to
move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At
the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the
pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange
Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s,
Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent
years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their
strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For
Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and
pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a “coup” — was the
final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would
host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it
abandoned its efforts to join the West.