Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review.
Asked about the state of the war in Ukraine during a press gaggle last night on Air Force One, President Trump responded that the war is “a horrible thing that never should have started.”
That war is horrible is an idea that seems lost on the Democratic foreign policy elite which, since Obama’s election in 2008, has gotten us into one foreign war after another. And the war in Ukraine has been particularly horrible – the largest and deadliest war in Europe since the Second World War, it has taken the lives of roughly a million Ukrainians and Russians.
That it was entirely preventable only compounds the horror.
So what happened?
Vladislav Surkov has an answer that is as good as any. In a rare interview with the French newspaper L’Express last week, Surkov, once counted as among Putin’s closest and most influential aides, noted that, with regard to relations between Russia and Ukraine,
…Peaceful cooperation was prevented by two Western-backed coups in Ukraine, in 2005 and 2014. In both cases, Ukrainians were illegally subjected to the rule of an aggressive minority, motivated by the legends of a politicized ethnography and the mirages of European integration. This minority led Ukraine into war.”
After 8 years (2014-2022) of fighting between the Western-backed junta government in Kiev and Russian-backed insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russian president launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine.
But, as Trump noted, the war did not have to happen. That it did happen is a remarkable failure of diplomacy, imagination and strategic empathy on the part of President Biden and his national security team. It is a failure one hopes history will hold against them, should they be remembered at all.
While Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said last week that he believes peace is still “far away” it is helpful to remember how we got to this point so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
In a three month period leading up to the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022 the Biden administration made a seres of decisions that essentially took diplomacy off the table.
On November 10, 2021, a US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership was signed by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The Charter reiterated support for Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO by “deepening Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions,” and expressed Washington’s “unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, including Crimea.” The Charter also squarely laid the blame for the outbreak of the Ukrainian civil war in 2014 at Russia’s feet, referring to the war that was started by the US-backed Poroshenko regime as a “Russia-led armed conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”
The Russian response to the Charter came a month later in the form of proposed treaties with the US and NATO which demanded an end to NATO expansion (withal, there remain “expert” voices who are convinced that the war has not a thing to do with NATO).
The reaction to the Russian draft treaties from the political and media establishment in Washington and Brussels was as hostile as it was uncomprehending. The New York Times reported only hours after they were issued that they were “immediately dismissed by NATO officials.” The Republican ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch, issued a statement that called for the Biden Administration and NATO to “quickly and unequivocally reject the demands listed in this proposal.” In a piece for the Brookings Institution, a former Ambassador to Ukraine wrote that, “it is unrealistic to ask the United States to prevent further NATO enlargement.”
Yet an agreement to halt NATO expansion was the only off-ramp to war. But the truth is the Biden team didn’t want an off-ramp.
How do we know? We know because they said as much.
In an April 2022 interview given only two months after the invasion, State Department counselor Derek Chollet admitted that the administration had never considered negotiating over Ukraine’s membership in the alliance. Subsequent attempts at ending the war in Istanbul shortly after the war began were also fatally undermined by Washington and London.
Yet look at what the Russians wanted then and what they want now. There is no change; what has changed is that in the intervening years 1 million people have died; Ukraine is on its way to becoming an open air arms bazaar in the middle of Europe; its population now half of what it was upon gaining independence in 1992. No one has any right to be surprised at the result – not Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, Milley, and Austin none of whom could or would see what was staring them in the face; that, as President Obama admitted, Ukraine is a core interest to Russia in a way it is not for us. No amount of M777’s, ATACMS, Javelins, or bravura attacks behind enemy lines by the SAS or CIA will ever change that reality.
If President Trump and his chief negotiator Steve Witkoff understand that reality, then they should also understand that their entreaties to Putin to end the war as quickly as possible will come to nothing in the absence of the security guarantees laid out by Moscow on December 15, 2021.
James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs. He regularly writes on Substack at The Realist Review.
