A lot of people on the right, both on this blog and elsewhere, are arguing that Putin did what he did in Ukraine because of NATO’s “expansion” towards his borders. I’ve been arguing otherwise for quite some time, mounting similar points to those expressed in this article by Claire Berlinski. I think she says it especially well, however, so I’m going to quote her.
Her article takes the form of her answer to a reader on the topic of Ukraine, Russia, and NATO (I’ve put the reader’s initial statement to which she’s responding in bold, and I also have bolded certain parts of Berlinski’s response that I want to emphasize):
Independent of Putin, any regional power that has sufficient military capability will try to prevent distant powers from stationing military forces on their border.
Claire: Will they? Why hasn’t France, say, tried to prevent us from stationing forces on its border? Or Poland? The United States has troops stationed in nearly 150 countries. I haven’t counted how many borders this represents, but clearly, it is not true that any regional power with sufficient military capability will try to prevent distant powers from stationing military forces on their border.
Russia objects to the presence of our military forces on its border because it views us as an enemy. It does not view us as an enemy because our military forces are on its border. This gets the causality wrong. Our forces are on its border because it views us as an enemy—and what’s more, it means to invade our allies.
Russia views us as an enemy because we’re an obstacle to Russian imperialism, first; and second, because it sees us as what we very frankly are: a revolutionary country whose ideas are an inherent threat to Russia’s system of governance.
The idea that this conflict is owed to NATO’s determination to encroach upon Russia’s borders is Russia’s talking point. It’s incoherent. NATO is a defensive alliance. The Kremlin knows perfectly well that NATO will not, like Napoleon or Hitler, march on to Moscow in an unprovoked and conventional war. Russia’s security is not threatened by NATO. The security of Russia’s neighbors, however—who are our longstanding, democratic allies—is gravely jeopardized by Russia.
We’re not a “distant power” stationing forces on “Russia’s border,” in any event. We’re members of the NATO alliance; the alliance comprises 30 countries of which only two are not in Europe. If Russia objects to having armed forces on its Western border, it should stop invading its neighbors. That would without a doubt result, quite quickly, in a demilitarized Europe. The evidence for this is that even when Russia was busily picking off its neighbors, one by one, much of Europe had trouble imagining why they needed to spend more on their militaries…
This seems a relevant moment to remind readers that dissolving NATO was precisely what Russia demanded in its ultimatum before it invaded Ukraine. It did not demand that Ukraine abstain from joining NATO, as many seem to think.
There’s more about NATO there, and the article also goes on to publish in full another piece that appeared briefly in the Kremlin-aligned media on February 26. It’s publication back then was apparently an error. It appears to have been one of those pieces that are written in advance, in this case with the expectation that Russia would win the Ukraine War in a couple of days. Please go to Berlinski’s article and read the whole thing.
And apparently it’s bona fide, not some sort of fake news. I can’t swear that, but the circumstances under which it appeared certainly strongly indicate it.
That artile was taken down fairly quickly, but not before people had seen it and archived it. If it’s serious – and I believe it is – it makes it clear that those who say this conflict doesn’t concern us are sadly and utterly mistaken. I wish they were correct, but I strongly suspect that they are not. The article dovetails with things Putin has been saying and doing for years, which is another reason I believe it’s for real and that it expresses his actual goals: not just to regain the old Russian empire, but – as Khrushchev once famously said – of buryng us.
Here’s an excerpt [my emphasis]:
Russia is restoring its unity — the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome. Yes, at a great cost, yes, through the tragic events of a virtual civil war, because now brothers, separated by belonging to the Russian and Ukrainian armies, are still shooting at each other, but there will be no more Ukraine as anti-Russia.
Remember Nineteen Eighty-Four? To paraphrase, “If you want a picture of the future [of Ukraine and all other countries Russia conquers], imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”
Remember, too, that although Orwell’s book was set in England, it was modeled after what Orwell knew of the Soviets. Putin isn’t a Marxist, but he has the same devotion they had to subjugating those who might want autonomy. Don’t forget also that before he was a politician, Putin was a KGB guy.
More [emphasis mine]:
Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together —in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians. If we had abandoned this, if we had allowed the temporary division to take hold for centuries, then we would not only betray the memory of our ancestors, but would also be cursed by our descendants for allowing the disintegration of the Russian land.
Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a historic responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution of the Ukrainian question to future generations. After all, the need to solve it would always remain the main problem for Russia — for two key reasons. And the issue of national security, that is, the creation of anti-Russia from Ukraine and an outpost for the West to put pressure on us, is only the second most important among them.
The first would always be the complex of a divided people, the complex of national humiliation…
…Now this problem is gone—Ukraine has returned to Russia.
So, after Big Brother Russia has taught Little Brother Ukraine how to love Big Brother, like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the focus will be on a larger project:
And here begins the second dimension of the coming new era—it concerns Russia’s relations with the West. Not even Russia, but the Russian world, that is, three states, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, acting in geopolitical terms as a single whole. These relations have entered a new stage—the West sees the return of Russia to its historical borders in Europe. And he is loudly indignant at this, although in the depths of his soul he must admit to himself that it could not be otherwise.
Did someone in the old European capitals, in Paris and Berlin, seriously believe that Moscow would give up Kyiv? That the Russians will forever be a divided people? And at the same time when Europe is uniting, when the German and French elites are trying to seize control of European integration from the Anglo-Saxons and assemble a united Europe? Forgetting that the unification of Europe became possible only thanks to the unification of Germany, which took place according to the good Russian (albeit not very smart) will. To swipe after that also on Russian lands is not even the height of ingratitude, but of geopolitical stupidity. The West as a whole, and even more so Europe in particular, did not have the strength to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence, and even more so to take Ukraine for itself. In order not to understand this, one had to be just geopolitical fools.
Note the resurgence of a language of European racism – the Anglo-Saxons versus the Slavs, I suppose. Note also the contempt expressed for the west as well as the hatred.
More [emphasis mine]:
And already fifteen years ago, after Putin’s Munich speech, even the deaf could hear — Russia is returning.
Now the West is trying to punish Russia for the fact that it returned, for not justifying its plans to profit at its expense, for not allowing the expansion of the western space to the east. Seeking to punish us, the West thinks that relations with it are of vital importance to us. But this has not been the case for a long time — the world has changed, and this is well understood not only by Europeans, but also by the Anglo-Saxons who rule the West. No amount of Western pressure on Russia will lead to anything. There will be losses from the sublimation of confrontation on both sides, but Russia is ready for them morally and geopolitically.
This next prediction has turned out to be somewhat incorrect so far:
Because the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well — this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlanticists, this is Russia’s return of its historical space and its place in the world.
Russia does have some allies, but they are other non-Western powers such as China, and even China has pulled back a bit. More people are horrified by what Putin has done than the Russians bargained for.
However, nuclear weapons remain Putin’s not-at-all-secret weapon. I don’t think we’ve ever had a situation in which a nuclear power has been quite so threatening, except perhaps the Soviets during the Cold War era. Putin’s nuclear-weapons rattling brings me back to my youth, a time in which nuclear war with the USSR seemed very possible and childhood imaginings that it would destroy the world were easy to entertain.
I hope the Russian article I just quoted is mere hyperbole. I don’t think it is, though. As I’ve said before, I think it represents Putin’s long-held mindset. As the world takes its actual COVID masks off, Putin has taken his metaphoric mask off and shown us his face even more clearly and completely than ever before. You can feel the bitter taste of his swallowing post-Soviet Russian humiliation for all those long years, and now he spits it out again at Westerners’ conventions, niceties, naivete, and desires.
Sadly, I don’t think our leaders are up to the task of threading this needle – of stopping Putin without triggering a destructive rage in him that could cause him to launch such weapons, depending on his state of mind. I have no idea what the Russian protocol is regarding that or even what those under him believe – do they share his mindset? – and whether anyone could stop him or whether anyone would stop him. Putin’s power in the world comes from that threat, and his money comes from selling fossil fuels to a west that was too stupid to see what was coming, and too busy virtue-signaling to protect itself.
