What you should think about Ukraine, pt 1

Overdue nuance on NATO, the Budapest Memorandum, and who is to blame for the past three years.

I’ve delayed writing about this topic, even though it’s smack in the center of my wheelhouse, from not knowing where to start.¹

The war has raged for two years longer than I have Substacked, and the U.S. policy debate has raged with it. I’ve watched that debate devolve, in stages, from bipartisan support for aiding Ukraine into dueling echo chambers with distinct flavors of extremism.² At each stage of the devolution, I’ve ruefully tried to tug the two sides towards a reasonable compromise position—one with more empathy, pragmatism, and clear-eyed strategy than our indignant discourse now allows.

This series of posts will spell out that position.³ It is neither an exhaustive recap of all relevant context, nor a forward-looking roadmap to a just and lasting peace. It is rather an effort to referee the debates of the past three years to explain how we got to this point—the point where the President and his VP publicly berated a heroic allied leader for his stubbornly valiant efforts to repel a Russian invasion.

Here are nine truths⁴ about the war and the U.S. response, that alternate between things the left and right need to hear.

1. The United States did not promise to defend Ukraine — nor even to support its defense — in the Budapest Memorandum.

Ukraine’s sympathizers (including some U.S. Senators, foreign policy wonks, Zelensky himself, and the current Secretary of State) commonly claim that the U.S. has betrayed Ukraine by failing to honor its obligations in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In their telling, Ukraine was formerly a nuclear state, but gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for “security assurances” or “guarantees” from the West, which are often said to include a promise to defend or support Ukraine in the event that it were attacked.

This is entirely false.

Here is the text of the Budapest Memorandum. It’s very short, so feel free to read the whole thing. But the relevant section is as follows (emphasis mine):

“4. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”

As you can see, neither the U.S. obligation nor the conditions triggering that obligation are what these sympathizers claim. The only commitment was to seek action from the United Nations Security Council; the United States did this mere days after the invasion, and has repeatedly done it since. Even if the U.S. had incurred this obligation, that obligation is more than satisfied.

As importantly, the obligation only triggers in the first place if Ukraine is attacked or threatened with the use of nuclear weapons—not if it is attacked by conventional means.⁵ Russia has not used nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and it’s debatable at most whether it has threatened to do so.

If this strikes you as lawyerly weaseling out of the spirit of an agreement, that’s probably because you have not seriously studied public diplomacy. Lawyerly language is the entire game! Every diplomat worth their salt understands that international agreements are worded extremely carefully to carve out the exact scope of each side’s commitments. Ukraine knew it damn well in 1994.

Why, then, did Ukraine choose to sign such a toothless agreement? That’s the third reason this narrative is bunk: it never really had a choice, because it never really had its own nuclear weapons in the first place. It did not have operational control over the nukes in its territory, nor any realistic alternative to giving them up.

The nuclear weapons that Ukraine briefly possessed were inherited from the Soviet Union, and the control systems to actually operate these missiles were still in what is now Russia! At any time, Russia could have opened the silos and bombed them to ensure Ukraine did not retain them. The Ukrainians did not have an independent nuclear weapons program of their own, and did not know how to operate or maintain the nukes that fell in their lap.⁶

Furthermore, the United States, Russia, and the international community shared a strong interest in ensuring that Ukraine would not nuclearize, and the fledgling Ukrainian state was far too weak to resist that pressure. Had they resisted long enough, it is very possible that the U.S. or Russian militaries could have come in and seized the nuclear sites by force. Ukraine had no leverage, and knew it; so they gave up something that was never really theirs in exchange for a few hundred million dollars in aid money and largely symbolic promises.

To be clear, Russia absolutely violated the Budapest Memorandum by attacking Ukraine, which signatories promised never to do. But the United States has gone above and beyond its legal obligations from 1994, and Ukraine was never a credible nuclear power in the first place.

2. The war in Ukraine is a murderous atrocity, and 100% of the moral blame for it lies with Russia.

Contrary to President Trump’s recent insinuations, Russia is the one who “started it.” Its invasion of Ukraine was a textbook war of aggression and conquest. The direct goals of this invasion were to topple Zelensky’s democratically elected government and replace it with a Russian puppet regime; to conquer Ukrainian territory and subsume it into Russia; and to deny, disperse, and erase the Ukrainian language, heritage, and national identity, in ways that probably meet the legal definition of genocide.

This invasion had neither moral, legal, nor sound strategic justification. It was publicly justified with lies, including a complete bastardization of Ukrainian history. Far from defending the Russian people from actual threats, it has killed, conscripted, or immiserated millions of them for the sake of expansive ambitions rooted in pride and resentment.

The ensuing war has caused roughly a million casualties. Throughout the war, Russia has repeatedly, intentionally, and illegally targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure at scale, through both airstrikes and atrocities on the ground. It has also abducted about 20,000 Ukrainian children from their families and shipped them all across Russia to be raised by new parents.

Ukraine, by contrast, has demonstrated overwhelming pluck, tenacity, and resilience throughout this terrible ordeal. The ferocity and effectiveness of its self-defense, against all odds, is a moving inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere. It breathes 21st-Century life into the quintessential American ideal: give me liberty, or give me death.

Picture taken from the New York Times on February 26, 2022. Caption: "Julia, a teacher and Ukrainian volunteer, weeps as she waits to be deployed to fight Russian troops around Kyiv on Saturday." MAGA, take note: this what actual patriotism looks like.

No amount of miscalculation by Western leaders can lessen Russia’s agency or responsibility for waging senseless, unnecessary violence on millions of innocent people. All good people should wish it were possible for Ukraine to retake every inch of its territory and for Putin to hang in the Hague for his monstrous crimes. Just because our moral judgments do not matter to Russia, or constitute a strategy, doesn’t mean they should not matter to us.

3. Also, NATO expansion clearly precipitated this conflict. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

I wrote about this subject at greater length in an IR journal called Survival, but I’ll summarize my argument here:

• National interests are central to international relations. You cannot understand why states behave as they do without understanding how they perceive their interests.
  

• We, as Americans, do not get to decide which of another state’s demonstrated interests are “legitimate.” Some security interests are socially constructed and not actually essential to the safety and wellbeing of the nation’s citizens. This is certainly true of many supposed U.S. security interests! But our opinions about how other countries should assess their interests are irrelevant to how they do. Thus, they are irrelevant to predicting how those states will behave in response to various stimuli—which is a very important part of foreign policy!
  

• For generations, Russia has consistently signaled its perceived security need for a sphere of influence in its near abroad. It has also increasingly demonstrated a willingness to defend this interest by force. There are many reasons for this, which I’ll elaborate on in a footnote.⁷ But in short, it’s view is historically rooted; not unique to Russia; and not unique to Putin, such that no plausible successor is likely to deviate from it.
  
  This does not mean the West needs to doom Russia’s neighbors to authoritarian domination. It does mean we should have incorporated Russia’s sensitivities into our model of cause and effect; anticipated escalating pushback for deeper encroachment within that sphere; and then reserved such encroachments for cases when the expected long-term benefits were clearly worth the expected costs.
  

• NATO expansion flouted Russia’s sphere of influence and threatened its credibility as a great power, which is why so many predicted it would lead to war. To serve as Russia’s desired buffer zone, Russia’s neighbors needed to be militarily neutral at least. Russians have never seen NATO as militarily neutral, in part because NATO was founded to contain the Soviet Union and seen as Russia’s sworn enemy for generations. Arguments that NATO is merely a defensive alliance fell on deaf ears after NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, and Libya in 2011, the latter resulting in the deposal of the Libyan regime. Such operations also bypassed the UN Security Council, which reduced Russia’s influence on world affairs.
  
  Whatever the reasons, the fact is that Russia has always seen NATO expansion as a threat. Each time NATO expanded anyway, it did so against the strenuous warnings of dozens of respected U.S. experts and diplomats. My paper summarizes:

  “William Perry, US Defense Secretary from 1994-1997, opposed NATO expansion so passionately he almost resigned in protest. During the first round of NATO expansion, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter describing expansion as “a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.” Famed statesman George Kennan called NATO expansion a “tragic mistake”, predicting Russians would “gradually react quite adversely.”

  In 2008, the Bush administration pushed hard for granting Ukraine and Georgia NATO Membership Actions Plans. It did so against many objections. France and Germany feared it would dangerously antagonize Russia. Fiona Hill (then a national intelligence officer) warned that steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO “would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.” CIA Director Bill Burns, then the ambassador to Russia, warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” He predicted the move would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

  The Bush administration pressed ahead anyway, pressuring NATO to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members.” Sure enough, Putin “flew into a rage” at the news, and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the Eastern regions.” Soon thereafter, Russia took military action in Georgia…

  For over 25 years, therefore, Russian leaders explicitly and angrily objected to NATO expansion. Dozens of prominent Western experts heard and amplified their warnings, fearing NATO expansion might provoke Russia to respond aggressively—especially against Ukraine. That such aggression has now occurred does not necessarily prove these experts right, but it certainly cannot prove them wrong.”

• Russia’s other stated motives for invading Ukraine are fully compatible with NATO expansion playing an important role. In recent years, Putin has paired his complaints about NATO with revisionist narratives that deny Ukrainian sovereignty. But far from suggesting a departure from his long quest for a sphere of influence, these narratives attempt to legitimize that quest. This is why they often appear alongside lengthy complaints about NATO.
  
  Putin also likely sees other types of Western influence—such as democratization, EU membership, or economic ties with the West—as parallel threats to his desired sphere of influence. It’s not just NATO. But these are complementary explanations, not rival ones. From Putin’s perspective, these trends are parallel forces in the same geopolitical tug of war, working hand-in-hand to eat away at Russia’s strategic buffer. Westernization proceeding along one axis feeds into his fears about the others. Had NATO not expanded as far, nor tried to expand into Ukraine, he may have seen other axes of Westernization as less threatening.

Many idealists are irritatingly unable to distinguish culpability from causality. They are so driven by a sense of right and wrong that whenever a country does something wrong, their sole instinct is to point and judge and blame and condemn, over and over, as if our sheer disapproval carried any corrective force.⁸ Any talk of what factors led to that decision, or what other countries might have done to avoid or inflame the situation, is dismissed as “victim blaming”.⁹

This mindset misses that foreign policy is fundamentally different than domestic issues like sexual assault, or any other context in which victim blaming is fairly alleged. There is no higher authority, with a monopoly on the use of force, to which you can appeal to right all wrongs. We cannot structure IR so that only the blameworthy suffer. Right or wrong, power gets a vote on the ultimate outcome—and those outcomes have moral consequences that need to be factored in. Outcomes that impact which of our policy choices were actually right or wrong.¹⁰

We have no hope of persuading Putin to change his values, so we have to take them as a given. The relevant question is how we, as U.S. policymakers, can achieve the best outcomes given the world as it is. That goal requires that we do what we can to prevent people from being needlessly victimized in the first place.

In recklessly expanding NATO against the advice of many experts, the United States failed at this basic strategic task. That doesn’t make us blameworthy, in the same way that a direct and intentional inflictor of evil is blameworthy. But it does mean we made irresponsible decisions that foreseeably contributed to bad outcomes—decisions we should learn from moving forward.

1. I write about U.S. foreign policy for a living. I write about tribalism for fun. With the possible exception of the war in Gaza, no issue falls more squarely in the overlap of those topics than the U.S. policy debate surrounding the war in Ukraine.

2. Like most political debates today, just because both sides are stuck in unthinking echo chambers does not mean that both sides are equally wrong, immoral, or detached from empirical reality. But in this case, the extremes were something like “The fate of America, peace in our time, and the entire global order is at stake in Ukraine, for democracy is not safe anywhere until Ukraine retakes every square inch of its territory whatever the price” and “Ukraine is a bunch of corrupt ungrateful Nazis taking America for a ride.”

3. There will be either two or three installments – haven’t decided yet.

4. Three in this post, and six forthcoming.

5. Some could argue that the text is ambiguous about whether the qualifier “in which nuclear weapons are used” applies to “an act of aggression,” or whether it applies only to a “threat of aggression.” If it were the latter, Russia’s invasion would indeed trigger the obligation. But this argument doesn’t make sense eithes, again for three reasons. First, the word “used” suggests an actual firing or detonation of a nuclear weapon. A purely verbal threat to use a weapon would not itself constitute use of the weapon in common parlance. Second, if they wanted to distinguish the two conditions, they’d likely have used a comma or semicolon between them for clarity. Third, again, even if the obligation were triggered, the United States has more than met it, because that obligation is simply to seek action from the United Nations Security Council.

6. As an aside…Putin justified this invasion with a narrative that Ukraine has always basically been a part of Russia, not a truly independent nation. I think this is wrong. But if our goal is to refute and resist that narrative, it seems counterproductive to elevate the nuclear weapons Ukraine inherited from what is now Russia as a symbol of its independence. Weren’t these nukes actually a symbol of Ukraine’s one-time dependence on Russian technology and military might?

Again, I don’t think this matters at all, because I believe in democratic self-determination. If Ukrainians want to be independent, their history shouldn’t matter. But it seems to me that what Ukraine gave up in Budapest was essentially Russia’s technology in the first place, which plays into Putin’s revisionist rhetoric.

7. Russia’s core security goal is to return to the high table of international relations as a coequal great power in a multipolar world. Russians see the difficult years following the collapse of the Soviet Union as a brief aberration from Russia’s historical status as a powerful empire, and their security documents have always stressed the need to regain that status. With more nuclear weapons than any other nation, they want the United States and China to respect them as equals instead of bossing them around.

Russia’s leaders feel (and have felt, long before Putin) that all great powers radiate influence into neighboring regions and ward off other great powers from interfering with those regions. They argue that the United States did this with the Monroe Doctrine and that China now does it in the South China Sea. Russia also remembers that three empires have invaded Russia through Ukraine in particular: Napoleon, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany. Thus, Russia sees its former territories in the Soviet space as a buffer zone against foreign encroachment that must, at minimum, remain militarily neutral: unaligned with rival great powers.

8. Freddie de Boer has written insightfully on the psychology behind this, and I’ve observed similar mindsets. The most committed, government-loving liberals I know find comfort in structure and authority. They are type-A strivers and achievers, and pathological rule followers who crave affirmation of compliance. They organize their lives around rising to the top of institutional hierarchies, which they see as fundamentally fair, merit based, virtuous, and improvable by communal input. Where no such institutions exist, they yearn to create them to bring order to chaos.

These are all symptoms of growing up in a healthy society where authority figures at all levels—parents, teachers, mayors, Presidents—really did try (or convincingly appear to try) to align the exercise of power with what was morally right. A society that included democratic deliberation in its policymaking process, centered questions of justice within those deliberations, and then made slow, unsteady but eventual progress toward the righting of wrongs.

In that formative universe, it really was conceivable—and sometimes even true!—that merely presenting powerful people with evidence of a wrong would be enough to right it. And for one generation in particular, which came of age in the unipolar moment after the Cold War, it was even conceivable that those same authority figures could make the whole world work that way. That the same all-powerful dispensers of justice at home might also, as our Navy boasted, be “a global force for good.”

I went to high school with these kids. Together we watched our country elect the first black president, legalize gay marriage, and pass a sweeping healthcare reform bill on the backs of moral argument. And throughout the 2010s, I saw their beautiful naivete spill over into 1,000 internet disputes, be they about race or gender or gun control. In those contexts, in that decade, it really was enough to just end your case with an appeal to the moral high ground—as if everyone listening understood that this was power’s endpoint.

So of course our social media landscape is trained to talk about Ukraine the same way. Russia’s wrong, Ukraine is right, so that’s the end of the story.

9. It’s not just liberals and not just Ukraine; conservatives dismissed this nuance after 9/11, and Israel’s sympathizers dismissed it after October 7^th.

10. The criminal justice system is, and should be, fundamentally concerned with abstract principles of justice. It has this luxury due to the government’s ability to enforce its verdicts. International relations does not have this luxury. IR is concerned with cause and effect. And a moral foreign policy is, by and large, the one that produces the best outcomes.