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Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, by Scott Horton. The Libertarian Institute. 690 pp.

Provoked is a monumental work, an essential guide to understanding how the United States and Russia came to face off in an horrific bloodletting on Russia’s border a generation after the Soviet Union abandoned communism. Scott Horton seems to have read every published English-language source bearing on the deterioration of Washington’s relationship with Moscow, and has produced an acerbic, polemical, factually dense first draft of history.

There are many threads leading to the collapse of the mutual good feelings that American and Russian leaders entertained for several years after the Soviet Union began to disband the Warsaw Pact in 1989. Horton relates how the U.S. and NATO threw military weight around in the Balkans (its military intervention against Serbia over its province of Kosovo exposed the hypocrisy of Washington’s professed respect for the sanctity of borders), supported radical Muslim Chechen rebels within Russia, and gave financial and political backing to various “color revolutions” in the former Soviet states, most with the unveiled intention of spreading regime-change “democracy” in the Russian Federation itself.

The strong continuous thread running through the entirety of Horton’s narrative is  Washington’s insistence that NATO expand into the states of former Soviet empire and keep expanding, despite consistent warnings from Russian diplomats, European leaders, and the crème de la crème of American regional and foreign policy experts that such expansion would lead inevitably to conflict. NATO expansion was not the policy of “the best and the brightest”—David Halberstam’s sardonic phrase for the elites who led America into Vietnam. In this case the best and the brightest were divided, but predominantly opposed.

Horton, the host of a popular foreign policy podcast and the editorial director of Antiwar.com, a leading outlet of the Ron Paul persuasion in foreign policy, is an unlikely advocate for the realists of the American establishment. But in Provoked they emerge as sympathetic but tragic characters—the men (in most cases) whose judgement was always proved to be correct, who were listened to but then ignored by every president from George H.W. Bush to Joseph Biden. Those ready to recognize post-communist Russia as a serious power—one with regional interests that it was in America’s interest not to ignore or flout—made up the faction that always lost in Washington.

The NATO expansion story begins with Secretary of State James Baker’s statement to Soviet premier Gorbachev in a 1990 Moscow meeting that NATO would expand “not one inch” to the East if the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from East Germany and allowed peaceful German reunification. The meeting and parallel ones between Russian and German leaders have since been parsed endlessly. Yes, Baker’s statement never was written into any codified agreement, and Gorbachev headed an entity—the Soviet Union—that  would soon cease to exist. After the Union dissolved itself and its Russian core fell into a decade of economic and social crisis under the regime of shock privatization, Russia was so weak that a verbal promise from an American secretary of state could safely be ignored if Washington chose.

The main government players pushing for nato expansion were Richard Holbrooke and Anthony Lake; they were aided mightily by Bruce Jackson, the Lockheed vice president and DC lobbyist, who formed the Committee to Expand Nato in 1996.  (Jackson surely merits his  own biographer; he later founded  the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq” and is plainly a man who can get things done in Washington.) The defense industry, as political scientists have long noted, has constituents scattered nationwide who appreciate its manufacturing jobs. NATO expansion promised to be good for business. Electoral factors counted. Clinton had lost the 1994 congressional elections, and Polish Americans wanted Poland to be part of NATO; Polish suffering and resistance under Soviet occupation gave Poland’s wishes considerable moral weight in the West.

In one of Provoked’s many vignettes, Horton relates Strobe Talbott’s conversation with Clinton. Talbott had been a close friend of Clinton’s since their Oxford days, and was the key Russia expert in the White House with regular access to the president. In 1996, Kennan had given Talbott a heads-up about his public dissent from NATO enlargement, to be published in the New York Times. Clinton took Talbott aside, and, noting his aides’s longtime admiration of Kennan, asked, “Why isn’t Kennan right”? Talbott, as he would later write, thought he sensed a “hint of doubt” in Clinton’s mind, not so much about expansion per se, but about whether the policy was compatible with a comfortable integration of Russia into Europe, which Clinton desired. Talbott tried to reassure him—he admired Kennan, but “not as a source for all wisdom.” Clinton gave him an atta-boy smile: “Just checking, Strobe, just checking.”

In fact, for all the prominent dissenters in the mid 1990s, the NATO debate balanced a hypothetical future danger—a stronger Russia convinced that the United States was acting deceptively and aggressively—versus immediate short-term gains. NATO expansion was popular politically; Republicans regularly chided Clinton for being “weak” by delaying it. Drawing on the work of Barnard’s Professor Kimberly Marten, Horton concludes that the expansion forces simply outmaneuvered their opponents. Holbooke and Lake were skilled bureaucratic infighters, figures like Secretary of Defense William Perry were not. The issue was settled by 1994, and expansion opponents did not really begin to mobilize until two years later.

Striking is the memoir of Perry, who lamented that a true partnership with Russia would have been possible without NATO expansion. When Perry tried to explain to the White House how Russia viewed it, he was met with an attitude of “Who cares what they think?” He considered resigning and laments that he didn’t fight harder; insisting on one-on-one meetings with Lake or Talbott might have made a difference. “I could have followed up on my consideration to resign,” Perry writes. “It is possible the rupture of relations with Russia would have occurred anyway. But I am not willing to concede that.” Perry and the generals were outmaneuvered by Lake and Holbrooke. Madeleine Albright later acknowledged that two-thirds of the members of the Council of Foreign Relations opposed NATO expansion.

Russia complained but could do nothing but acquiesce to NATO membership for Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, European countries without organic links to Russia. Ukraine was a different matter. Even hawkish strategists recognized the difference. Both Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski—America’s two most prominent foreign policy thinkers from the mid 1960s virtually until their recent deaths—highlighted Ukraine as an especially neuralgic point for Moscow. In the 1990s, the deeply anti-Russian Brzezinski had supported the eventual entry of Ukraine into NATO, while acknowledging it would cause “a major disruption” in American–Russian and Ukrainian–Russian relations. Ukraine’s future membership was proclaimed formally by George W. Bush (in the face of serious French and German objections) in 2008. After Ukraine’s “Maidan revolution” crisis of 2014, in which an elected president was deposed, Brzezinski began to worry how major the disruption might be. He wrote several articles after Russia’s seizure of the Russian-majority Ukrainian province of Crimea, stressing that the United States should support Ukraine but acknowledge that NATO membership was out of the question.

“If you look at the map,” Zbig wrote, “it’s important to Russia on a psychological and strategic point of view. So Ukraine will not be a member of NATO.” It should pursue something “along the lines of the relationship Russia has with Finland.” Henry Kissinger made the same point: “If Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other, it should function as a bridge between them.” Ukraine, he added, “has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then.”

Kissinger also warned against helping western Ukraine dominate the largely Russian-identifying provinces of its east, saying this would lead to civil war or the break-up of the country. Of course, three subsequent presidents pursued exactly the opposite of the policies of those recommended by the veteran strategists, as presidents Obama, Trump and Biden enhanced the scope and lethality of weapons shipped to  Ukraine while pursuing the integration of Ukrainian forces with NATO’s—a sort of incremental NATO adhesion by stealth.

Washington’s insistence on the non-negotiability of Ukraine’s pending NATO membership continued through Russia’s 2022 invasion. In the months prior, Biden representatives engaged in a final, futile negotiation. Russia raised the questions of offensive nuclear weapons being placed in Ukraine and Ukraine’s path to NATO admission. Biden administration officials said repeatedly that the latter was “non-negotiable.” Russia put forward a draft treaty as a first step to negotiation; Biden replied it was a complete non-starter.

There was a peculiar twist to Biden’s insistence: officials repeatedly said Ukraine would not be offered NATO membership soon; National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in 2023 that every NATO member needed to understand that “admission to Ukraine into NATO at this juncture means war with Russia”—and Ukrainian president Zelensky was told privately that Ukraine’s NATO membership was not imminent, but that he must never say so publicly.

In the final weeks  before Russia troops crossed the border, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “Sergei, tell me what it is you’re really trying to do. Was this really about the security concerns Russia had raised again and again about Nato’s encroachment… or was it about Putin’s almost theological belief that Ukraine was part of Mother Russia?”

Lavrov reportedly walked away. Days before the war started, Vice President Kamala Harris reaffirmed the U.S. position at the Munich Security Conference: “The founding principles of NATO is [sic] that each country must have the ability, unimpaired, unimpeded, to determine their own future both in terms of their form of government and whether they desire to be a member of NATO. And isn’t that at the heart of the very issue we’re presented with [regarding] Ukraine?”

The NATO question came to the fore a final time after the war had been under way for a month. Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, trusted by both sides, served as Putin and Zelensky’s go-between and developed the outline of a ceasefire. Putin dropped his demand for the “disarmament of Ukraine”; Zelensky agreed to drop plans to join NATO.  Substantive talks between diplomats from the two countries continued in late March in Belarus and Istanbul: Russia would withdraw from eastern Ukraine; Ukraine would  recognize Russia’s possession of Crimea; Ukraine would drop its NATO aspiration and seek security guarantees from individual Western countries.

Zelensky’s advisor, David Arakhamia, later commented, “They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality and committed that we would not join NATO. In fact this was the key point.” The Istanbul negotiations even produced a draft agreement. Zelensky’s aide, Alexey Arestovich, described the negotiations as completely successful: “We opened the champagne bottle.”

But Washington would have none of it. Bennet later explained, “The Americans decided to crush Putin rather than to negotiate.” Shortly thereafter Boris Johnson showed up in Kiev with promises of more weapons and a message from Biden. Horton cites a Ukrainian paper, Ukrainska Pravda: “Putin should be pressured, not negotiated with…. The collective West now felt…that Putin was not really as powerful as previously imagined, and there was a chance to ‘press’ him.”

Following orders, Ukraine abruptly broke off the talks. There are not good sources yet about this American push to throttle an early ceasefire, or, given what we know now about Biden’s condition, who was responsible for it. But Washington decided continuing the war was preferable to a Finlandized Ukraine.

Since then Ukraine and Russia have suffered a million casualties, and Ukraine’s infrastructure may be wrecked for a generation. Russia’s ties to China are closer than at any time since the 1950s. In my baby-boomer life, I’ve participated in mass demonstrations against two wars, Vietnam and Iraq. There have been no real demonstrations against our Ukraine policy, which Americans have experienced as a blip—or perhaps, as hawkish politicians proclaim, an economic and strategic benefit.

Yet in weighing a moral judgment about America’s leaders, those who led us into Vietnam and Iraq were far less culpable: They at least had large and plausible reasons for their actions. Vietnam emerged as a crisis at a time when an advance of communism to a significant mid-size country would have been perceived all over the world as a major victory, when people the world over believed the conflict between Marxism–Leninism and bourgeois capitalism the defining issue, and when everyone was looking for tipping points. The Iraq decision was made because at least some, in the aftermath of 9/11, felt that a potential alliance between al Qaeda terrorists and an Iraqi state considered capable of producing weapons of mass destruction was an existential threat. Both beliefs were flawed in myriad ways. But neither, on their face, was idiotic.

Compare either of them to Washington’s insistence that Ukraine be allowed to join NATO—even as it is constantly reiterated that Kiev’s membership wasn’t imminent. There is really no one in Washington who can, with a straight face, claim that Kiev’s status makes any strategic difference one way or another to America. And yet it has been pushed as if it did, relentlessly, at a staggering human cost.

If a large tragedy must have a major cause, perhaps it is found in the inability of the baby-boomer foreign policy leaders to appreciate in all its gravity and grandeur the end of the Cold War. For those born after 1960 or so, Cold War anti-communism is a remote  “historic” topic; yes, the United States was anti-communist—and wrong to have been so, according to the preponderance of progressive academia. But the conflict with Soviet communism and its allies, which initially included China, was the moral center of both foreign policy and, for a long time, the domestic politics of every Western country. A movie like Oppenheimer provides a telling and accurate window into how deeply pro-communism was nestled into the highest levels of American intelligentsia—it was no different in France or England.

Communism was an evil murderous system, but it was seriously considered the wave of the future by many in the West—a fever which didn’t really break until the mid-1950s. Long after, it remained a potent armed doctrine, attracting adherents throughout the Third World. The Soviet Union was a peer nuclear competitor; Washington and Moscow came close to nuclear war when the Soviet Union tried to build missile bases in Cuba.  And then, surprisingly to many smart people, it all changed. As the late National Interest editor Owen Harries wrote in 1997, in what remains the most poignant essay about NATO expansion:

Between 1989 and 1991 a political miracle occurred. The Soviet regime, steeped in blood and obsessed with total control as it had been for most of its history, voluntarily gave up its Warsaw Pact empire, collapsed the Soviet system upon itself and then acquiesced in its own demise—all with virtually no violence. This extraordinary sequence of events was in no way inevitable. Had it so chosen, the regime could have resisted the force of change as it had done in previous occasions, thus either extending its life…or going down in a welter of blood and destruction…. A necessary condition [for the peaceful surrender] was an understanding, explicit according to some but in any case implicit, that the West not take strategic and political advantage of what the Soviet Union was allowing to its empire and to itself. Whatever is said now, such a bargain was assumed by both sides, for it was evident to all involved that in its absence—if, that is, the West was intent on exploiting any retreat by Moscow—events would not be allowed to proceed along the liberalizing course they actually took.

Harries added that the break-up of the Warsaw Pact gave the United States everything it wanted. It had never sought the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the bargain required only that it refrain from doing what it never expressed any intention of doing.

Owen Harries did not live to see the Ukraine war. To travel from 1990 to a situation where the United States has invested hundreds of billions in a massively destructive proxy war to ensure Ukraine’s right, in some unspecified future, to become a NATO base, is to witness a defiance of common morality that far transcends the habitual follies of statesmen.

Original article: theamericanconservative.com