Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: It’s Not About NATO
BY NAHAL KAZEMI
The Russian government has made a concerted effort to frame its invasion of Ukraine as the natural response to NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.
To a significant degree, this framing has succeeded, even though Putin should not be anyone’s idea of a credible narrator. In the West, we talk about whether NATO’s Open Door Policy is to blame for Russia’s military adventures in its near abroad. We debate whether Russia has legitimate “security interests” in preventing its neighbors from joining the U.S.-led security alliance.
This debate misses the mark in two critical ways. First, it credulously accepts that the threat Russia views to its own interests and designs is NATO. Second, it ignores the interests and aspirations of the independent nations and their populations who want what most of us take for granted – self-determination.
NATO’s door has been open to new members since the beginning. Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which entered into force in 1949, held out the opportunity for membership for any “European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” Allies must unanimously support membership for any new member to join. Since 1952, there have been successive rounds of NATO enlargement, including the admission of new Allies close to the then Soviet Union’s borders, including Norway and Turkey, where strategically significant forces were and are currently positioned.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, numerous former Soviet Republics and satellite states sought to reorient themselves toward the West.
They wanted what NATO and the EU had to offer – free markets, free people, and free societies. NATO did not need to drag new aspirants through its Open Door (nor did the EU); they were clamoring to get in. Any effort to understand NATO expansion in the post-Cold War era must consider the demand side of the equation – why were these countries seeking to join NATO?
The answer should be perfectly obvious. NATO offers its members a security guarantee under Article 5. The Allies have confirmed that an attack on one of them is an attack on all of them. For Central and Eastern European countries whose existences over the last few centuries have depended largely on the fortunes and whims of their more powerful neighbors, Article 5 offers the promise that their territorial integrity and right to self-determination will be respected. It allowed the citizens of these countries to build and orient their societies’ futures based on their aspirations, without concern that Russia would intercede in their internal politics and coerce them into remaining Russian vassal states.
On the supply side, NATO Allies saw expansion into the former Warsaw Pact as advantageous because it would help bring stability to these states in transition.
NATO is more than a military alliance – it is also a political one. It requires its members adhere to key democratic norms, including civilian control of a professional, apolitical military.
The transition in many former Eastern Bloc countries from having state security apparatuses that were their own political power centers into professional military forces subordinated to democratic, civilian control, was critical for these countries’ successful liberalizations. Afterall, no president or prime minister can hope to build a consolidated, stable democracy if he or she is constantly afraid the military will react to political policies it does not like by staging a coup.
It is easy, with thirty years’ distance from the fall of the Iron Curtain, to assume these states’ transitions to highly-functioning, consolidated democracies was a fait accompli. It wasn’t. The current precarious state of transitioning democracies around the world should tell us there was nothing to guarantee the former Eastern Bloc countries would succeed in their transitions. We should recognize that it is remarkable that so many of them have and that part of that success is due to their successful integration (at their own choice) into Europe’s political, economic, and security institutions. The former Eastern Bloc countries that chose to reorient themselves toward the West have enjoyed peace and prosperity, delivering to their populations the benefits of rising incomes, personal liberties, and political stability. The ones that didn’t, or couldn’t, have by and large, not achieved the same gains.
As NATO began to admit new members from the former Warsaw Pact, it also increased its direct engagement with Russia, through the NATO Russia Founding Act and the NATO Russia Council. In an effort to address Russia’s stated security concerns, NATO agreed not to permanently station substantial combat forces in NATO’s eastern Allies, including Poland, and the Baltic states. The admission of these new NATO members did not bring hostile troops onto Russia’s doorstep; but it did give these new NATO members the political and security breathing room they needed to build their democracies free from Russian interference.
In 2007, in his now-infamous Munich Security Conference speech, Vladimir Putin initiated what is now widely seen as a pivot from his early days as the Russian president, focused on Russia’s economic growth and acceptance into existing geopolitical institutions, to a new focus on rebuilding the concept of Greater Russia. He denounced NATO expansion and framed it as essentially the United States encroaching on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. In doing so, Putin also denounced the post-war, rules-based order which recognizes states’ rights to self-determination, territorial integrity, and to form their own international alliances and associations. NATO was merely a useful totem to Putin – a bogeyman he could use as an excuse for why Russia should be allowed to control its neighbors.
Since 2007, Putin has launched numerous asymmetric attacks on states in Russia’s near abroad, some in NATO aspirants, such as Ukraine and Georgia, which were nowhere near ready to join NATO when Putin attacked them. Others of Putin’s targets, like Transnistria in Moldova or Nagorno Karabakh, disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan, have nothing to do with NATO expansion. Putin can hardly blame NATO for his recent “peacekeeping operations” in Kazakhstan, either. These hostile military actions are not responses to NATO expansion – they are part of a larger strategy of ensuring the states around Russia are pliable clients, dependent on Moscow. What Putin seems to fear most are stable, prosperous, democratic states on his borders that can demonstrate to the Russian people that there are viable alternatives to authoritarianism and living under a police state.
It seems beyond Putin’s ken that the Ukrainians have a right to determine their own fate. It was, after all the Maidan Revolution, which focused on removal of an unpopular Russian stooge as Ukraine’s president and Ukraine’s desire for an association agreement with the European Union that triggered Russia’s annexation of Crimea and instigation of war in the Donbas region. In 2014, there was no plausible argument that Ukraine was close to NATO membership; what Ukraine was seeking at that time was a closer integration into the EU’s political and economic institutions. That was a threat to Putin significant enough to trigger an irridentist land grab, redrawing the maps of Europe by force.
Putin did not expect the Ukrainians to mount a ferocious defense of their homes, their country, and their independence. They have. The heroism of the Ukrainian people is as inspiring to us as it seems bewildering to Putin.
We cannot now, in trying to imagine a resolution of this conflict, de-center the Ukrainian people from the narrative. They are fighting with their very lives for the values we in the West claim to hold dear, but too often take for granted. They are not pawns. They are not mere serfs occupying land destined to change hands in a great game fought between larger powers. They must have the same right to decide their own destiny as we claim for ourselves, including the right to determine their own government and how to orient their country on the world’s stage, free from outside interference.
Russia is not seeking security against the threat of NATO; it’s seeking the recognized right to subjugate its neighbors. And Putin’s goal is not a rebalancing of power between Russia and the West – it is thoroughly undermining democracy and Transatlantic unity. We risk the values we hold most dear when we buy into the idea that Russia has a legitimate sphere of influence – that the people in the lands surrounding Russia are somehow less entitled to self-determination than we are. The rules-based international order is worth defending. The Ukrainians are defending it with their lives. We’d do best to remember that.
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Nahal Kazemi is Senior Counsel at Keller/Anderle LLP and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. Ms. Kazemi is a former Political Military Affairs Officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. She served tours in Morocco, Iraq, Hungary, and as the NATO Desk Officer. The opinions expressed in this article are solely her own and do not reflect the official positions of the United States Government.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
