If there is a boneheaded consensus on foreign policy inside the Beltway, it is the CFR, and they have just published an article in their house organ, Foreign Policy magazine, that blamed the US and NATO for creating the problem:

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.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

I differ a bit here.

In addition to the whole Kumbaya stuff that John Mearsheimer is talking about, there is also the whole international finance/IMF colonialism, where they slash the social safety net, privatize everything at pennies on the dollar, and strip the assets from the country.

It’s what Larry Summers protege Andrei Shleifer did after the fall of the USSR.

The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.

California has a population of about 39 million, and in the ferociously expensive California Senate campaign in 2010, the two campaigns spent about $38 million dollars, or about a dollar per resident.

The Ukraine has a population of about 45 million so that $5 billion, which does not include the spending of other governments, nor the spending of private actors, is about $105 per resident.

It should be noted that the media markets in California are significantly more expensive than those of the Ukraine.

The West’s triple package of policies — NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion — added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. ………

Note that the Russian offer was FAR more generous than that of the EU/IMF, grants rather than rolling over loans, and not requiring that pensioners be thrown out in the street, nor requiring that the cost of home heating to skyrocket.

……… That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.

Unfortunately, no one in the US understands the history, a real weakness of our body politic:

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

I would add that the fact that this was done through a coup, and that the US continues to back neofascist and hyper nationalist elements in the Ukraine makes it even worse.

Mearsheimer ascribes the impetus on coming from things like Eastern European emigres, etc., but I think that the impetus for the US was far more mercenary: They knew that if the former Warsaw Pact members joined NATO, they would be replacing their military equipment with equipment primarily made by US defense firms.

The Clinton administration was desperate to preserve the defense industry’s industrial base, hence their subsidies for the aggressive merger activity in the sector in the 1990s, and in the time of the “Peace Dividend” selling our stuff to Eastern Europe.

The Europeans wanted integration with the East as well, but the cultural imperative there was that integration into the EU/Euro zone would make things better for everyone, prevent rain on picnic days, and keep their daughter from dating the guy with the tattoos and piercings. (Seriously, I can see no reason to admit Greece except for this. The country has been a complete basket case for its entire modern history)

George Kennan, Ambassador, Historian, and arguably the father of the Cold War strategy of containment, was prescient in his condemnation of NATO expansion:

In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.

I think that the author is overestimating Putin a bit.

I think that Putin’s real strength is that he separates the personal from foreign relations: He does not think that friendly relations between world leaders count for much, so he does not take disagreements personally, while many in the west, particularly in the US, seem to think that friendly personal relations trump national interest.

It does not, and it should not.

H/t Washington’s Blog.