Yet when it comes to Russia, the United States and its NATO allies have acted for decades in disregard of this same principle. They have progressively advanced the placement of their military forces toward Russia, even to its borders. They have done this with inadequate attention to, and sometimes blithe disregard for, how Russian leaders might perceive this advance. Had Russia taken equivalent actions with respect to US territory—say, placing its military forces in Canada or Mexico—Washington would have gone to war and justified that war as a defensive response to the military encroachment of a foreign power.
When viewed through this lens, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is seen not as the unbridled expansionism of a malevolent Russian leader but as a violent and destructive reaction to misguided Western policies: an attempt to reestablish a zone around Russia’s western border that is free of offensive threats from the United States and its allies. Having misunderstood why Russia invaded Ukraine, the West is now basing existential decisions on false premises. In doing so, it is deepening the crisis and may be sleepwalking toward nuclear war.
This argument, which I now present in detail, is based on the analyses of a number of scholars, government officials, and military observers, all of whom I introduce and quote from in the course of the presentation. These include John Mearsheimer, Stephen F. Cohen, Richard Sakwa, Gilbert Doctorow, George F. Kennan, Chas Freeman, Douglas Macgregor, and Brennan Deveraux.
How the narrative drives the war
In the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the explanation offered for America’s involvement has changed. What had been pitched as a limited, humanitarian effort to help Ukraine defend itself has morphed to include an additional aim: to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight another war in the future.
In fact, this strategic objective may have been in place from the start. In March, more than a month before the new US policy was announced, Chas Freeman, previously Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, observed:
Everything we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting, assisting the Ukrainian resistance—which is a noble cause, I suppose, but… will result in a lot of dead Ukrainians as well as dead Russians.
Freeman’s observation points to an uncomfortable truth: America’s two war aims are not really compatible with each other. Whereas a humanitarian effort would seek to limit the destruction and end the war quickly, the strategic goal of weakening Russia requires a prolonged war with maximum destruction, one that bleeds Russia dry of men and machine on battlefield Ukraine. Freeman captures the contradiction in a darkly ironic quip: “We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence.”
America’s new military objective places the United States into a posture of direct confrontation with Russia. Now the goal is to cripple a part of the Russian state, its military. Since the start of the war, the Biden administration and Congress have allocated over $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, the majority of it military. US officials have revealed that American intelligence enabled the killing of a dozen Russian generals in Ukraine, as well as the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, killing 40 sailors and wounding 100. America’s European allies fell into line, greatly increasing the number and lethality of the weapons they are shipping. British leaders have sought to expand the battlefield, openly encouraging the Ukrainian military to use Western weapons to attack supply lines inside Russia.
Further, one must consider what would happen if Russia started to lose, and its overall military capacity was degraded to the point where Moscow perceived itself as vulnerable to invasion. In that situation, Russian planners would surely contemplate using low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons to destroy enemy forces. Thus, the US Director of National Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, stated that Mr. Putin might use nuclear weapons if there was “an existential threat to his regime and to Russia, from his perspective.” This could occur if “he perceives he is losing the war.”3 If Russia did use nuclear weapons, the pressure for a Western nuclear response, followed by further escalation, might be irresistible. Yet that situation—Russian loss and depletion—is exactly what the new US policy is seeking to achieve.
Finally, we must ask what would happen if the war dragged on to the point where opposition to Mr. Putin within Russian elites led to his removal from power. Here we are talking about the vaunted goal of “regime change,” which in the United States is sought by an informal alliance of Republican neoconservatives and Democratic liberal interventionists. The assumption seems to be that Mr. Putin would be replaced by a docile, effete puppet subservient to American interests. Gilbert Doctorow—an independent, Brussels-based political analyst whose Ph.D. and postdoctoral training are in Russian history—comments:
Be careful what you wish for. Russia has more nuclear weapons than the United States. Russia has more modern weapons than the United States. Russia can level to the ground the United States in 30 minutes. Is this a country in which you want to create turmoil? Moreover, if [Mr. Putin] were to be overturned, who would take his place? Some little namby-pamby? Some new drunkard like [first Russian president Boris] Yeltsin? Or somebody who is a Rambo and just ready to push the button? … I think it is extremely imprudent for a country like the United States to invoke regime change in a country like Russia. It’s almost suicidal.
Whether or not eviscerating Russia’s military has been the American plan from the outset, the policy is not surprising because it follows logically, even predictably, from an overarching Western narrative about Russia that has already been widely accepted. According to this narrative, Mr. Putin is an insatiable expansionist who lacks any plausible national security motivations for his decisions. This narrative portrays Mr. Putin as a new Hitler, and the Russian move into Ukraine as akin to the Nazi aggression of World War II. Likewise, the narrative portrays any Western desire to compromise and negotiate a quick end to the conflict as wishful thinking and appeasement. America’s new military objective thus emerges directly from Western perceptions about Moscow’s motivations and the causes of the war.
And so a crucial question comes into focus: Is the Western narrative about the Ukraine war correct? If it is, then Western policies might arguably make sense, even if they entail some risk of nuclear conflict. But if the narrative is wrong, then the West is basing existential decisions on false premises. If the narrative is wrong, a quickly negotiated compromise, one that would spare the lives of combatants and civilians alike, and simultaneously greatly reduce the risk of nuclear war, would not represent appeasement. Rather, it would be a practical necessity, even a moral obligation. Finally, if the Western narrative about Russia’s motivations is wrong, then the actions the West is taking now are likely to deepen the crisis and may lead to nuclear war.
In this book, I argue that the Western narrative is incorrect. In crucial respects, it is the opposite of truth. The underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war. These provocations placed Russia in an untenable situation, for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution. In arguing this case, I pay special attention to the United States—and subject it to particularly sharp criticism—because it has played the decisive role in shaping Western policy.
In criticizing the West, it is not my aim to justify Moscow’s invasion or exonerate Russia’s leaders. I have no brief for Mr. Putin. Notwithstanding all I will say, I believe he had alternatives to war. But I do want to understand him—in the sense of seeking to rationally assess the causal sequence that led him to launch the war.
What do I have in mind when I speak of Western provocations? It is often suggested that the expansion of NATO into the countries of Eastern Europe has contributed to tensions. This assertion is correct but incomplete. To begin with, the implications of NATO expansion too often remain abstractions, with the actual threat to Russia not appreciated. At the same time, the United States and its allies, both individually and in coordination with one another, have taken provocative military actions that are not directly tied to NATO. Focusing on NATO is important, but attending only to NATO obscures the full scope and seriousness of the predicament that the West has created for Russia.
As a preview for what is to come, I list here key Western provocations, which I will explain and comment on over the course of this book. During the past three decades, the United States, sometimes alone, sometimes with its European allies, has done the following:
- Expanded NATO over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders, in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow
- Withdrawn unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and placed antiballistic launch systems in newly joined NATO countries. These launchers can also accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons at Russia, such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles
- Helped lay the groundwork for, and may have directly instigated, an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine. This coup replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one
- Conducted countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border. These have included, for example, live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia
- Asserted, without pressing strategic need, and in disregard of the threat such a move would pose for Russia, that Ukraine would become a NATO member. NATO then refused to renounce this policy even when doing so might have averted war
- Withdrawn unilaterally from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, increasing Russian vulnerability to a US first strike
- Armed and trained the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and held regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine. The goal has been to produce NATO-level military interoperability even before formally admitting Ukraine into NATO
- Led the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia and putting Ukraine in the path of Russian military blowback
Policy makers in Washington and the European capitals—along with the captured, craven media that uncritically amplify their nonsense—are now standing up to their hips in a barrel of viscous mud. How those who were foolish enough to step into that barrel will have the wisdom to extricate themselves before they tip the barrel and take the rest of us down with them, it is hard to imagine.
Benjamin Abelow has worked in Washington, DC, writing, lecturing, and lobbying Congress about nuclear arms policy. He holds a BA in modern European history from the University of Pennsylvania and an MD from the Yale University School of Medicine. His other areas of interest include the psychology of trauma, including war trauma.
