Justin Logan on Ukraine
2022-03-07 · Guest: Justin Logan (Cato Institute Senior Fellow) · 52:01
Root causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Bob Zadek interviews Justin Logan of the Cato Institute regarding the root causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They discuss the history and expansion of NATO, the strategic mistakes made by the US and Western Europe, and whether a diplomatic solution involving Ukrainian neutrality could have prevented the conflict.
Topics: Ukraine, Russia, NATO, US Foreign Policy, Cato Institute, European Union, Diplomacy, Military Alliances
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Justin Logan: Guest, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute
Introduction to the Conflict [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are, as always, live.
You may have noticed that a disproportionate amount of the news is devoted to a country now known—in fact, known for some time—as the Ukraine, that is adjacent to a somewhat larger country now known as Russia, FKA, as we say in business, formerly known as the USSR. They share a common border, they are neighbors, but they are not getting along so well. And of course, as we know, Russia has invaded—if that’s the right word, we’ll learn if that’s the right word or not very shortly—Russia has invaded the Ukraine and we have been given live, up-to-date news throughout the day on who is winning and who is losing that battle within the territorial borders of the Ukraine.
We are all pretty aware of what’s going on. What we are infinitely less aware of—and this is a question that often comes up in conversations on foreign policy—is who should we, as Americans, be rooting for, if I can use such a banal word as rooting for? More specifically, who is right? Who is wrong? Who is the villain? And most importantly of all, what is the cause? Why was there a week ago peace, and now there is war? What are the root causes of that? What are we to learn from those root causes? Have mistakes been made by the West, by the United States, in foreign policy? If so, was the West, the United States, a contributing factor to the conflict now being fought within the territorial borders of the Ukraine?
These, my friends, are very difficult questions, and they require an in-depth discussion if you are to follow at all what is going on and to know and understand how we got here so that we do not, if mistakes were made, make the mistakes again. And when you as voters are asked to express your approval or disapproval of American foreign policy, at least it is my hope that you will have the information in order to vote intelligently.
To help us understand these complex issues, I’m happy to welcome to the show Justin Logan. Justin Logan is a scholar at the Cato Institute who has spent a good portion of his adult life studying these very issues, studying American foreign policy, specifically with regards to Russia, the Ukraine, and that part of the world. And Justin has been gracious enough to join us this morning to share with us what he has learned and what he believes to be what is really going on, what is the backstory, if you will, behind the conflict between Russia, the Ukraine, and hopefully not Western Europe and NATO. Justin, welcome to the show this morning.
Justin Logan: Thank you very much for having me.
Defining NATO and Its Expansion [04:36]
Bob Zadek: Now, Justin, the players in this conflict, the most active players are, of course, Ukraine, an independent sovereign country; Russia, a sovereign country. Russia has its troops and military within the borders of the Ukraine, so “invasion” is the proper word, but maybe we will learn it is a bit more subtle than that. Those are the active players, although I believe now neighboring Belarus may have joined the conflict—you will help us understand that. But the only slightly less active players, certainly less active from a troops standpoint, is NATO, which includes Western Europe and the United States. So you cannot understand the conflict without understanding the bigger picture of the relationship to that conflict of NATO and the United States.
So to get us into the conversation, Justin, and simply by way of background, tell us—this is going to seem like a basic question, but there’s a degree of subtlety—tell us what is NATO? And tell us, if you will—and this will require a bit of an expansive answer—what does the existence of NATO have to do with this conflict between two sovereign countries, neither one of whom are members of NATO? Where does NATO fit into this, and then we’ll get into what were the foreign policy decisions that brought those two countries to war. But first, NATO. Why is NATO a player, if you will, and why are they so important in this conflict?
Justin Logan: Sure. So NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, named after the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949. It was originally 12 countries, centrally in North America and Western Europe, and subsequently has expanded to include now 30 countries, including three that border Russia. So the Baltic states were admitted in 2004: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And there were two rounds of expansion; there was a round before it and there were some rounds after it. So Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, has been saying fairly consistently, probably hundreds of times since the original speech that he gave in Munich, Germany in 2007, saying that the further expansion of NATO, which was an alliance founded to confront the then-Soviet Union in Europe—he views the further expansion of NATO as a threat to Russia. And he has been saying this over and over and over again.
Is NATO Still Necessary? [07:40]
Bob Zadek: Now, let’s back up for a second, if I may. So NATO, North Atlantic, North Atlantic Treaty. Now, the most recent entrants to NATO are pretty far from the North Atlantic. So just that observation. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created, as you explained, as a counterbalance to Russia because the individual—putting aside the United States—the individual European members of NATO were individually no match, it was felt, for Russia at that time, Russia being the USSR. Since that time, NATO has grown tremendously, and Russia has disappeared—or the USSR has disappeared as the USSR and now it is now Russia, a different political constituency. Tell us if there was no NATO today, if NATO didn’t exist, would there be a need for NATO given the size and strength of Russia as compared with the size and strength of Western Europe? And putting aside the United States, focus only on Europe. If there was no NATO today, would one be needed today?
Justin Logan: So in my view, the answer to that question is no. And I suspect that citizens in places like the Baltic states or in Poland, for example, would vehemently disagree with me on this question. But we live thousands of miles away from one another and our countries have different interests. I think that if you look at even now on paper the military power that Western Europe has, it has a GDP that is many times larger than Russia’s and a population that is many times larger than Russia’s. Its military power, particularly in fighting a notional defensive war, a Russian invasion, is more than adequate to match Russian aggression. So I think if we didn’t have NATO today, no, from an American point of view, there would be no reason to invent one.
And I would just add, if I may, that I think that if NATO did not exist today, it’s not the case that Russia would sort of be a cute, cuddly teddy bear. I think it would act like most major powers act, which is to say it would tend to bully its neighbors and to have an outsized sense of its desires and its security, as major powers have done historically. Right? Thucydides said that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That’s a little severe for my taste, but I think the fundamental fact is true. Right? Ukraine is just a smaller, weaker state than Russia and living on its border is sort of subject to Russian prerogatives in a lot of places. We, or certainly I, don’t like them, but that’s just sort of a fundamental fact of international politics that’s very hard to obviate.
Russian Intentions and the “Democracy Club” [11:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, you say that Russia would behave the way other large countries—putting aside whether Russia makes the cut as a large country, that conversation is a separate conversation—but not to get bogged down in minutiae, stipulate that Russia is, as you use the term, a large country. And assuming there was no NATO today, when Russia might be acting like other—like many other, some other big countries—is the fear that Russia desires to take over Western Europe, to have Western Europe become annexed to Russia? Is that a realistic fear of the West to have? Assuming Russia flexes its muscle and behaves in its self-interest and ignores norms along the way—assuming Russia does all of that—what is the worst case that Western Europe would have to fear if there were no NATO today? Because I don’t see much imperialistic behavior as opposed to defensive behavior, but I’ve asked you to join us to help me and my listeners really understand what is the worst case of misbehavior to be attributed to Russia, which means we have identified the fear and then we can confront the fear.
Justin Logan: I think this is pretty close to the worst case. And I would just, you know, not to quibble, but it is an invasion of a sovereign country. Right? Let’s just call it what it is. They certainly view it as defensive, but we, you know, should also say that they massed almost 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and then invaded it from the north, the east, and the south. So they had already annexed in 2014, of course, Crimea, and they have these two fledgling breakaway regions in what’s called the Donbas, a region in sort of far southeastern Ukraine. So I think this is something close to the worst scenario.
And I think that in the early days of the war, if you want to be really cynical about things, we learned some important facts about how the Russian military operates. And those facts, to my mind, lead you to see that it doesn’t have a prospect at conquering Poland, let alone plunging, you know, into Western Europe through the Fulda Gap or something like we used to fear in the 1950s and ’60s. So I think Russia is a major power, it has thousands of nuclear weapons, it has an enormous territory. So I think it has to be in the realm of major powers, and I think this is very much in keeping with the kind of behavior that you see by major powers.
I mean, if you look at an image of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when it was founded and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization today, I mean, it is like someone spilled a pot of ink. You know, I mean, it’s expanded quite significantly. And I think you can credit that apprehension in Russia without, you know, sort of saying that they’re doing something defensive. I mean, I think it is reprehensible and it’s just clearly a violation of international law. I mean, one can go on. But I think the question for us as analysts is how to deal with reality. Right? And I think there’s been a tendency to say, well, Russia shouldn’t fear NATO, or Russia should do this, or Russia should do that. Those are irrelevant questions. The questions are: what are we dealing with? What sorts of ideas are we dealing with? And is there any way to be transactional with this state? Right? To haggle? To say, look, Ukraine is a sovereign country and we support its sovereignty, but it’s not maybe going to become a member of NATO.
And I think that was a fact that was true before the war happened. It’s definitely a fact that’s going to be true after the war. And so the question is, on what principle, on the altar of what principle did we sacrifice Ukraine? Right? We really did not make an effort to say, look, we’re not going to put nuclear weapons in Ukraine, which is a sort of fanciful idea that Vladimir Putin has floated. We’re not even going to put it into NATO. What about something like armed neutrality? What if it had a normal military and no alignment with the West? Why isn’t that something that we could agree on? And I think there have been hints from Vladimir Putin in his more direct and lucid moments, one can say, where a possible deal like that looked very much doable that could have forestalled this whole war. So I think the tragedy is that we may in fact wind up not having won anything for Ukraine, but as this war, you know, in the last two or three days has really become much more brutal on the part of the tactics and operations that the Russians are employing, to what end is this war being fought and could the West have done anything to forestall it? Those are the central questions with which I’ve been occupied.
The Net Cost of NATO Expansion [16:40]
Bob Zadek: Now, as to the growth of NATO, which you have explained—as to its growth—is NATO and the constituent members of NATO, are they incrementally better off or worse off as new Eastern European member states become members of NATO? Isn’t it like—isn’t it sort of like, and this is going to be a very crude analogy, the fear that Americans have with allowing immigration because we will have to support the immigrants, the immigrants will be net takers from the economy rather than net contributors? So every new potential American who crosses our border is a net cost to us. Is every new member of NATO a net detriment to NATO, a benefit to NATO, or neutral? Putting the same question another way: when an Eastern European country joins NATO, is NATO welcoming them in for the benefit of the new member or for the benefit of NATO?
Justin Logan: Yeah, I think NATO is an organization that has become really Janus-faced. Right? On the one hand, it is still a military alliance that was formed to confront the USSR and now is confronting the Russian Federation. But at the same time, in the ’90s and in the 2000s, policymakers in the West sort of talked about it as a fun democracy club. It was a place where people could talk about liberal ideas, freedoms, market economies, and things of this nature. And I think that there’s been a certain amount of bait and switch that goes on where we talk about expanding to countries that have really serious military vulnerabilities and almost no military power. And when we talk about admitting them to NATO, we talk about their domestic virtues, in most cases which are true, right? That they are liberal democracies, that they are market economies, and these are good things.
But when hard questions are asked, like “How will we defend Estonia if Russia attacks it?”, you know, those are sort of waved off as impolitic and rude questions. And if you look, for example, at the admittance of the Baltic states, which are obviously geographically and population-wise very small and on the Russian border, therefore very vulnerable to Russia, there was no defense plan. There was no plan for defending the Baltic states from Russia until the Baltic states lobbied NATO to draw one up after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. So we admitted countries to a formal treaty alliance with no plan for defending them and that, quite frankly, in military terms, are still pretty much indefensible. Right?
So you get this bait and switch where on the one hand it’s a liberal democracy club, and on the other hand it’s a formal military alliance to confront Russia. And I think the other thing that gets sucked up in here is every state that is the frontline of NATO has an incentive to want NATO to expand further because the effect of that is that it makes someone else the frontline of NATO. Right? So if you’re Poland, the idea of putting Ukraine into NATO looks pretty good because if there’s a NATO-Russia confrontation, it has to cover an awful lot of territory until it gets to you. So I think there has been a real failure in Washington to take this alliance seriously for what it is, which is a formal military alliance. Viewed in that light, I think admitting a lot of these countries that have enormous liabilities in military terms and almost no assets really doesn’t look great in hindsight.
Bob Zadek: It sounds like the answer to my question is—but you didn’t really answer it frontally—is that there’s no real—you told us the motivation why NATO says, “Okay, you can join us.” You told us the feel-good motivation, but not whether or not it’s in NATO’s best interests, neutral, or harmful to existing countries. I understand the Poland example and many others, but is it a net minus if Eastern European countries join NATO? Is that simply more to take care of? The cost of taking care of the new member is greater than the amount they will contribute. So isn’t it like a wealth transfer to the new member from NATO, a wealth transfer in sorts? And is it just from a NATO standpoint a bad idea to admit new countries, putting aside the fact that it stirs things up?
Justin Logan: So to talk about NATO’s interest to me elides a fundamental reality, which is that you have to look at the member states. Right? It’s still the case that states look out for their own interest. And I think it’s quite clear that the organization of NATO felt as though it had an interest in expanding after the Cold War. There was this saying, “NATO either needs to go out of area or out of business.” Right? If it’s a military alliance for dealing with the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, then what is NATO about? And so I think from an institutional point of view, yes, NATO itself as an organization had an interest in the alliance expanding so that it could tell a story about why it existed.
But certainly from an American point of view, it is absolutely the case that NATO serves as a net transfer payment from US taxpayers to European taxpayers. Right? So even the states, the original states that were in NATO—France, for example—gets to have a lower military budget because of the American contribution to the provision of European security. So I look at it from a very much more state-centric point of view. But if you look at it from the interest of the organization, it’s absolutely clear that in the ’90s and 2000s they felt like they had to come up with a new project because Western Europe, the original members, looked pretty darn secure at that point.
Russia’s Perception of NATO [23:30]
Bob Zadek: And isn’t it an historical—isn’t it accurate to say that from a USSR initially and now Russia inherited what I’m about to say—just inherited it from its birth out of the USSR—isn’t NATO the enemy? NATO was created to counter, to oppose the USSR and now Russia. So from a standpoint of Russia, NATO is the enemy. And NATO is both as an enemy is both growing in size and growing politically so that now it’s on Russia’s doorstep, to the extent that geography matters. Now, with weaponry today, geography matters as much from a feeling standpoint as from a practical standpoint, although it’s easier to invade the Ukraine if you share a border. But so Russia’s not crazy in feeling a bit insecure. That’s not irrational on their part, is it? Their enemy is growing and moving closer. Is that too simplistic?
Justin Logan: No, I think that’s absolutely accurate and I’m not the only one who thinks it’s accurate. The former Secretary of Defense and Director of Central Intelligence, Bob Gates, wrote in his book in 2014 that he felt the effort in 2008 where the Americans were trying to get Ukraine and Georgia into NATO was really a step too far and an affront to what Russia—putting aside Vladimir Putin—any Russian leader would view as dangerous to Russia. Bill Burns, somebody who’s been very high up in the American foreign policy establishment, cabled in 2008 saying the same thing.
So this is, you know, what’s sometimes viewed as this provocative apology for Russian misbehavior has been a widely circulated belief in the upper echelons of the American foreign policy establishment for decades. I hope I’m not embarrassed in asking the question I’m about to ask, but all of my life I would have knee-jerk considered Russia to be an enemy—whatever the word “enemy” means, Webster’s definition of enemy—to be an enemy of the United States. Now, and they’re certainly more than ever, I think, in the public, in the eyes of the American public, people who vote, people who form opinions, they consider Russia to be more or less an enemy.
Is Russia a Threat to the US? [26:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, what—here’s my question, and I can’t answer it for myself and that’s why I’m laying off the question to you. What is there in Russian foreign policy that makes them an enemy of the United States? How did they get that lofty goal of being an enemy as opposed to a country with a different belief system? We’re past Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the UN and saying “We will bury you.” Those are like the old days. Those days don’t exist anymore, I think—you may correct me. So help us understand the question: is Russia an enemy, and if so, what is there about their perceived or stated intention that makes them an enemy?
Justin Logan: Yeah, so I would put it slightly differently. I would say that they really don’t represent a security threat to the United States. Right? If you start from the bottom up and think, “What does the United States need from its military? What does it need in terms of security?” Right? The Russians are not going to invade the United States. They’re not going to bomb the United States. So those sort of fundamental considerations about US national security really aren’t at stake here.
But given the fact that we have made ourselves the central fact in European security affairs for the last 65 years, it is clear that Russian revisionism, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, endangers that project. Right? So it’s quite clear that, you know, to the extent that Russia is viewed as an enemy, invading your neighbor has contributed to that. I think that if you look at the partisan identification of Russia as an enemy, it has gone up significantly among Democrats and gone down significantly among Republicans because of the politics of the 2016 election and the perception that Donald Trump was a sort of sock puppet for Russia. So I think it’s become sort of securitized in American politics such that every domestic political problem for the Democrats sometimes is attributed to Russia.
But as an enemy of the United States, I would just ask, you know, is it a security threat to our way of life, to our ability to buy and sell goods from overseas, to our ability to live in safety, to any of these things? And to my mind, there the answer is no. But if you want to put yourself at the very center of the European security architecture, then yes, it starts to look much more like a serious security problem for the United States.
Bob Zadek: Just build on that a little bit more, if you will. How so? Be expansive, because the first part I appreciate your comments and I 100% agree with them—they’re my views. But as to the second part, when you bring in indirect threat, threat to Western Europe—an enemy of my friend is my enemy kind of thing—tell me more about why Russia, how Russia is a threat to Europe or Western Europe perhaps, or Eastern Europe, whatever you want to say, and then how that is therefore a threat to the United States. I just—that link was broken to me.
Justin Logan: Sure, so I may have misspoke. I don’t think that connects it as a threat to the United States, but it threatens the political project in which the United States is engaged in Europe. Right? So again, we’ve gone from 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty to now 30 members, and that is viewed as a danger in Moscow. And I think that, you know, we have really been driving the bus on that expansion for decades now. And so I think if you value that political project, right, you value committing to protect vulnerable states from Russian predation, yes, to the extent that you see Russian predation, that is a danger.
And I think that, you know, so it’s not that that somehow connects to, you know, there’s going to be a car bomb that’s going to blow up a school somewhere in Tallahassee or what have you. But I think to the extent that you identify that political project in Europe as vital for US national security through whatever mechanism you sketch out, then yes, then obstacles to the completion of that political project are a problem.
NATO vs. the European Union [31:30]
Bob Zadek: More than once during our time this afternoon, you have referred to NATO as being—I don’t remember your words, but you put it beautifully—sort of “democracy club,” words to that effect, as opposed to simply a treaty for mutual defense held together by Article 5 and other sections of the NATO treaty. But that sounds to me like—isn’t that the EU? That’s exactly what the EU was supposed to be: a club, yes, has geographic boundaries of course in its founding, but the EU is a club for people who have their fiscal and political house in order; they are welcome to the EU. So is NATO simply that, and has it lost track of the fact that it was a defense pact, a mutual defense pact—although “mutual” is in quotes because we didn’t feel very comfortable that France was going to send troops to the US to protect us, so it wasn’t quite that mutual, but mutual enough. So where does—is that need of NATO already filled adequately, if you like that kind of thing, by the EU and thereby obviating that need?
Justin Logan: I would say that NATO’s mission as a military alliance could be met by the EU. So there’s two fundamental distinctions between NATO on the one hand and the EU on the other. The first and most important is that the United States is in one and not in the other. And on military terms, that matters a lot. The other difference, as you pointed out, is that NATO is a security organization on the one hand and the European Union is not. There were efforts in the 1990s particularly, and actually going back to the 1950s if you want to go back that far, to develop a what they used to call a “third force” in Europe, right, a collective security organization among states that were both members of NATO and members of the European Union to sort of pool and develop a security capability to secure themselves.
And the United States historically did not like this idea because we like having influence. We like to be able to sort of tell countries what to do. And we’ve been able to do that successfully and that’s why we remain, again, at the center of the European security architecture. From my point of view, that’s short-sighted. Right? It’s not as though we’re going to create a monster in Europe. It’s not as though if there were a meaningful European defense capability, a meaningful European army that could easily defend itself from Russia, a meaningful European navy—they’re not going to attack us. Right? We’re not going to engage in security competition or war with the European Union.
But because NATO was viewed as this crucial vehicle for exerting American power in Europe, we were assiduous, particularly through the 1990s and the 2000s, to stifle European security cooperation because we wanted those countries to stay in NATO, to be stuck with us in NATO so that we could have influence over their policies. And I think only in recent years, maybe in recent months, have you seen the glimmers of change in Washington. In an era where we’re supposed to be pivoting to Asia and dealing with China, a country that is larger in economic terms relative to the United States than the Soviet Union ever was, there’s been the beginnings of some thinking in Washington that, hey, maybe a European autonomous defense capability wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But what you want to understand, the centerpiece of this question, is that the United States has gone to great lengths to stifle European security cooperation because we wanted to remain the central actor in Europe. We thought we knew better than the European countries did. So it’s a very good question and I think it’s one that we as a sort of foreign policy establishment have been slow to realize that this would actually be a good thing for the United States, not a bad thing.
Was the Invasion Preventable? [35:50]
Bob Zadek: Was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine preventable by a different United States or European and United States foreign policy? Was Russia’s invasion inevitable and there’s nothing we could have done differently to stop it, or could we have stopped it but at too great a cost which shouldn’t have been done? Tell me about, in your opinion, the inevitability or not of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine vis-à-vis our own behavior.
Justin Logan: Sure. So the unfortunate reality is we will never know. As I mentioned at the very opening of the show, Vladimir Putin has been remarkably consistent since at least 2007 that the further expansion of NATO would be viewed as a threat by Russia, in particular to Ukraine. And this has come up over and over and over again and was a sort of centerpiece as Russia was massing forces over the last 10 or so months around Ukraine. Putin just hammered this point over and over and over again: “No Ukraine in NATO, no Ukraine in NATO, no Ukraine in NATO.”
And the response from NATO itself, as well as from the United States independently, was to say, “We’re not going to commit to anything.” So on the one hand they were saying, “Look, look, look, Ukraine doesn’t meet the criteria right now. We all know that. You should know that. Come on with this NATO—Ukraine in NATO stuff.” And on the other hand, for example, last October, the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in Ukraine urging them to make needed reforms so that they could become a member of NATO. So Russia sees us sort of speaking out of both sides of our mouth on the issue: that it’s outrageous that they would say they have any reason to fear Ukraine coming into NATO, and on the other hand, going to Ukraine and urging it to make reforms so that it can join NATO.
So I think, and a lot of other people think, that we should have been willing to say that. Look, let’s say take a temporary moratorium of 25 years. We commit that Ukraine’s not going to become a part of NATO for 25 years. Does that obviate the security concerns that you’re expressing about its alignment? It’s possible that the answer is no, but I think it’s pretty likely that the answer would have been maybe or yes. And this war has gotten much uglier over the last 10 days and I think is likely to continue to get uglier. And again, we’re left with the question: at the end of this war, where will Ukraine be vis-à-vis a notional scenario at the outset where we said it’s not going to become a member of NATO for 25 years, it’s not going to have offensive weapons on its territory, etc., etc.? Reasonable people can disagree and the answer to that question is most appropriately left with Ukrainians, but to my mind, from a US point of view, it’s really a missed opportunity that we didn’t explore that possibility further.
Bob Zadek: Looking back, will we—being NATO including the US—did NATO and the US save Ukraine by destroying it? It may be a defeat, but is that the case? And then something which is not on our agenda but just an observation: that sounds like Afghanistan. It sounds like countries where we end up leaving behind rubble in the guise of saving them from something. And it seems like it’s two in a row. I’m almost self-conscious that I’m being overly simplistic.
Justin Logan: Well, I definitely don’t think that we will look back on this and say that we’ve saved Ukraine from anything. I think Ukraine is already suffering tremendously and is likely to continue suffering for this war for many years into the future. And again, if you look at it in terms of Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, Ukraine’s desire to join the EU, these objectives, these political goals are going to be further away for Ukraine, not closer. So I very much view this as a war that we should chalk up as being potentially unnecessary, but that we’ll never be able to prove one way or the other because of the diplomatic approach of the West and the US more generally.
So I think it does belong in with Afghanistan and with Syria in the sense that we may wind up with a political result for Ukraine that should have been viewed as inevitable. Or we may wind up with a political result for Ukraine that is worse than one that could have been produced via diplomacy. Right? So the political equilibrium that we left behind in Afghanistan in 2021 was absolutely there for the picking in 2002. Right? 19 years of war produced nothing, ephemera that were brushed away like chaff in the span of less than a month. This is very serious foreign policy malpractice.
If you look at the US experience in Syria, we decided that we wanted the regime of Bashar al-Assad to go for good reason—it’s a contemptible, loathsome government. But then, of course, ISIS came about and we had conflicted desires about countering ISIS and countering Bashar al-Assad. So what we did is poured over a billion dollars into an effort to build up and fund rebels that could fight and ideally defeat the Assad regime, but were not ISIS or sort of radical Islamists. The effect that this had was merely prolonging the war. They didn’t win, they didn’t defeat Bashar al-Assad, they don’t exist anymore by and large. But what it did was cause the war, which was catastrophic for Syria, to drag on for a longer period of time. And we all know who’s at the head of the government in Syria today: Bashar al-Assad. So you really do need to connect, I think, your policies to the outcomes that they’re designed to produce. And if there’s somebody that thinks that this war is going to be better for Ukraine in the medium term than a potential diplomatic settlement that led it to accept neutrality, I think if you credit the idea that a diplomatic solution was available before the war, to my eye that looks absolutely worth pursuing and it’s a real tragedy that we didn’t in any serious way.
Lessons for the Future [48:52]
Bob Zadek: Justin, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us for the hour. We have a lot of other countries in the UN; maybe I’ll have to have you back for 168 more weeks, one at a time, so we can discuss the countries one at a time. But for the minute, we’ll have to hope our audience is satisfied with an in-depth discussion of the Ukraine and its neighbor Russia. Thank you again to Justin Logan from the Cato Institute, and thank you to all of my friends out there.
If you were addressing a conference room, an auditorium of senior foreign policy officials and you were doing—although it’s early, there’s no mortem for there to be a post-mortem, but one can look a bit into the future for the purpose of answering the question, so let’s pretend there is a mortem to be post- and to look back on—what are the bullet points, the headline points of what clearly were mistakes in American foreign policy that if they were different, we wouldn’t be in the trouble we’re in—we, the world—in the Ukraine, and what are the lessons to carry into the future so that they don’t happen again?
Justin Logan: I mean, I think the first one that comes to mind is to not tell countries what their interests are. So as I’ve pointed out, Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that he views further NATO expansion as a threat to Russia, and our response has been to say, “Well, you shouldn’t feel that way.” That’s not really a good basis for conducting foreign policy. The world exists apart from our prerogatives on the interests of others. And Vladimir Putin has been remarkably consistent on this point that he was willing to fight about it. And all last year, as these forces were massing around Ukraine, he said it over and over and over again, and the response was to say, “You know, your views on your country’s interests are wrong.” That’s not a great way to conduct—you have to deal with the world as it is, not as you wish it might be, especially in an area where you’ve made very clear publicly and internally that you’re not going to fight for the country.
Then don’t act like you’re going to fight for it. I mean, last year we had Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Joe Biden talk about an “ironclad commitment” to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That doesn’t look like a very smart thing to have said with the benefit of hindsight. Don’t say things that you’re not going to follow through on. Don’t assert your own interests in places where they don’t exist, and don’t ignore other actors’ assertions of their own interests in places that they appear likely to exist.
I think we have a tendency to take really contemptible dictators who, in Assad’s case, was engaged in an absolutely brutal civil war, committing war crimes right and left, and say, “We’re not going to put up with this. We don’t like this and we’re going to get rid of this guy.” But then not to commit the force that you would really need to commit to knock over that regime, and let alone to have any plan for what comes next. I mean, this is to get even further afield from our original subject of discussion, the Iraq situation. Right? No one thought that Saddam Hussein was a great guy, but the question becomes: can you produce a political outcome that is superior to the one that preceded it at an acceptable cost? And in that case, the answer was no. And in the Syria case, deep down we really realized that. So I pointed out we spent a billion bucks trying to build up a rebel force that could overthrow Assad. It didn’t work. But in the scheme of the American foreign policy and defense budgets, a billion dollars isn’t that much money. We have still to this day high single-digit hundreds of US servicemen in Syria just as a sort of potential scraping point, if you will, for Iran. They have been attacked on more than one occasion by Iran. So we don’t really commit to saying we have a national security objective or even a sort of philanthropic objective. We find Bashar al-Assad’s approach to this war so loathsome and contemptible that we’re going to knock him off, and we’re going to use military power to do it, and come what may after him. We tend to have this “we’re really, really outraged, but we’re not really going to do that much about it” attitude. And I think that has produced some really bad outcomes over the last couple decades.