by Benn Steil
IN 1992, SLAVIC-LANGUAGE-SPEAKING INSURGENTS, SUPPORTED by Russian troops, seized control of the Transnistria region of largely Romanian-speaking Moldova, on the southern border of Ukraine. Though the region’s assertion of independence has never been recognized internationally, Russia supports Transnistria economically and maintains an estimated two thousand armed personnel on the ground (including four to five hundred peacekeepers under the 1992 cease-fire agreement).59
Since 2008, Russia has created two new “frozen conflicts” in bordering former Soviet republics—Georgia and Ukraine—on the Moldovan model. All three serve an important strategic purpose in keeping NATO and the European Union from expanding further eastward.
Following the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003, the Georgian government of President Mikheil Saakashvili initiated a military modernization program, using American hardware, in conjunction with a campaign for NATO membership. With the aim of demonstrating its commitment and capabilities, Georgia contributed forces and equipment to American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This military assistance sent a clear signal to Moscow that it was both aligning its policies with Washington and opening up another front for western forces on Russia’s borders.
By 2008, Kremlin officials considered their efforts to dissuade the Georgian government from joining NATO a failure, creating a sense of urgency. Given that the country could call upon Article 5 security guarantees after joining the alliance, the window for low-cost Russian military intervention was closing. In March, the breakaway republics of Abkhazia (largely Russophone) and South Ossetia appealed for Russian recognition of their independence from Georgia, citing the precedent of Kosovo. By August, mounting tensions between Tbilisi and Moscow escalated to war, resulting in a Kremlin-orchestrated standoff marked by ever-growing political, economic, and security ties between Russia and the two effectively autonomous republics. Gorbachev, whose urgings against NATO expansion had been treated as domestic posturing in Washington, backed Russian military action in Georgia.60
More recently, Russia followed a similar template in Ukraine. Political crisis in the country erupted in November 2013, after intense pressure from Russia, its main energy provider, persuaded President Viktor Yanukovych to abandon an Association Agreement with the European Union. A struggle between pro-EU forces in the country, mostly in the west, and pro-Russia forces, mostly in the east, led to Yanukovych fleeing the capital in February 2014. Russia denounced his departure as a White House–orchestrated coup, and responded by annexing Crimea in March. Aided by Russian soldiers and matériel, pro-Russian separatist forces in the eastern Donbass region began seizing territory in May. This was a crisis that Kennan had seen coming, having in 1999, at age ninety-five, decried “the thoughtless tossing” of the “un-Ukrainian Crimean peninsula” into Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union.61
While the conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine have been attributed to aggressive Kremlin efforts to reestablish elements of the Soviet empire, it is notable that none of the breakaway regions—with the exception of Crimea, which houses the Russian Black Sea Fleet—has been annexed by Russia. The reason is that annexation of pro-Russian territories would have strengthened the pro-Western forces in the remaining parts of each country. Annexation therefore stymies Russia’s primary objective, which is keeping the countries beyond the reach of western institutions seen to threaten Russian interests. The presence of frozen conflicts in the three nations effectively blocks them from joining with the West. In the case of NATO, the alliance has always rejected aspirants with unresolved border disputes, internal territorial conflicts, and insufficient military capacity to provide for a credible national defense.
In the cases of Georgia and Ukraine, the timing of the Russian interventions coincided with their achievement of tangible benchmarks on the path to EU and NATO membership. The combined separatist territories, under effective Russian control, now form a valuable protective arc along Russia’s western and southwestern border.62 Just as Stalin strengthened the Soviet Union’s buffer zone in response to the Marshall Plan, which he expected Washington to supplement with military force, Putin has strengthened Russia’s buffer zone in response to NATO expansion.
IN 2016, ON THE OCCASION of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Cold War, the German daily Bild interviewed Vladimir Putin. What, he was asked, had gone wrong in relations between Russia and the West?
“Everything,” Putin responded. “[T]he Berlin Wall fell, but invisible walls were moved to the East of Europe.” Moscow, he insisted, had been promised that “NATO would not expand eastwards,” a reference to alleged commitments from then-NATO secretary general Manfred Wörner and U.S. secretary of state James Baker. But NATO and the United States, Putin said, decided that they alone would “sit on the throne in Europe.” They went back on their word. “This has led to mutual misunderstandings and assignments of guilt. They are the cause of all crises ever since.”
Putin’s view was wholly consistent with how Soviet officials perceived the shift in U.S. policy toward Europe back in 1946. Having expected FDR to withdraw American troops within two years after the war’s end, they were now convinced Truman wanted “to preserve [U.S.] military potential [in Europe] as a necessary base for carrying out . . . aggressive aims in the future.”63 Putin’s perspective was also a pointed challenge to Holbrooke’s prediction, eighteen years earlier, that NATO expansion would have no effect on “Russia’s relationship with the West.” Everyone would “look back . . . and wonder what all the fuss was about.”
At the time Putin spoke, Ukraine was the focus of tension between Russia and the West. He justified annexing Crimea by pointing to NATO action the year after Holbrooke’s prediction. “Serbia [was] bombarded and attacked with missiles,” Putin said. “It was a military intervention of the West and NATO against the then rump Yugoslavia.” Why, he asked, “if the Kosovars have the right to self-determination should the people of Crimea not have it?”64 The implication was that if NATO could go to war to move borders, it was in no position to condemn others for acting in support of the same principle: self-determination. Rather than challenge the American idea of a liberal international order that respected national sovereignty, he exploited an apparent contradiction.
Following the annexation, conflict between Russia and Ukraine over NATO intensified. In November 2014, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the BBC that Russia wanted “a 100% guarantee that no-one would think about Ukraine joining NATO.” Such an expansion was a dangerous “attempt to break the . . . balance of power.”65 One month later, the Ukrainian parliament voted to end the country’s nonaligned status, a preliminary step toward joining the alliance. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the move as “counterproductive,” saying it “only worsens confrontation.”66 In June 2016, he clarified that Russia did “not consider the existence of NATO a threat,” but that “the doctrines of [Russian] security are clearly written, and one of the main threats is the further expansion of NATO to the east.”67
“What do [the Americans] need NATO for?” Putin asked Shimon Peres in a private conversation shortly before the latter’s death that year. “The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore.”:
The Warsaw Pact was dismantled. I am ready to be a member of NATO. . . . But why do they need Georgia in NATO? Why do they need Romania in NATO? [If Georgia and Romania] want to go to Europe, [let them] go to Europe. But which army do they want to fight? [The Americans] think I didn’t know that Crimea is Russian, and that Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as a gift? I didn’t care, until [the Americans] needed the Ukrainians in NATO. What for? I didn’t touch them. They wanted to go to Europe, I said, “Great, go to Europe.” But why did [the Americans] need them in NATO?68
Kennan, who had died only a decade earlier, age 101, would not have been surprised at the rising tensions. In 1997 he had written an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-
war era.” Kennan predicted that it would “inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy,” “restore the atmosphere of cold war to East-West relations,” and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”69
In figures such as longtime Yeltsin foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, and economic and political reformers Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, Washington had interlocutors in Moscow not unlike Litvinov, Maisky, and Gromyko in the 1940s—figures who viewed cooperation with the West as Russia’s most promising course.70 But NATO expansion undermined their credibility at home. The subsequent two decades would see a different, more nationalist and confrontational, breed of politicians in the Kremlin.
THE MARSHALL PLAN AIMED AT Aiding American military disengagement from Europe, yet ended up, through NATO, making it both deeper and enduring. That Moscow believed Washington had planned this all along only helped make it so. Stalin’s aggressive reaction to the Plan convinced Western leaders that the increased U.S. military commitment he feared had now become vital to their economic and physical security. Given this history, it should not be surprising that EU expansion a half century later also created conflict with Russia.
As with the Marshall Plan and NATO, the EU has for all practical purposes been a body open to all European nations save Russia.71 The EU began negotiations in 1998, shortly after Albright’s Harvard speech, with the ten central and eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) that would join in 2004 and 2007. Tensions with Russia began rising almost immediately, as they had after Marshall’s speech in 1947.
Russia, it was clear, would lose political and economic leverage with countries on its borders that were pooling sovereignty with the EU and its institutions. The Foreign Policy Concept paper approved by Putin in 2000 highlighted a lack of “adequate respect for the interests of the Russian side in the process of the EU expansion.” Seeing a connection with the simultaneous enlargement of NATO, the paper further suggested that “the EU’s emerging military-political dimension should become an object of particular attention.”72
In 2000 and 2001, EU-aspirant nations Estonia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia imposed visa requirements on Russian visitors. The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned the action, likening it to the erection of a new “Berlin Wall.”
Economic restrictions followed travel restrictions, as the EU bound the newcomers to its trade and investment regimes. Rejecting EU arguments that it would benefit from lower average tariffs in the East European accession states, Russia insisted it would face higher ones on its most important exports. It estimated annual export losses from extending the EU common tariff to the ten new eastern member states at €200 million to €300 million.73 It also criticized new technical-standard barriers and potential anti-dumping levies.
Critical Russian interests, such as energy exports to and through the east, would be infringed further and further through time. The first U.S. liquid natural gas (LNG) tanker to pass through the Baltic Sea, in 2016, would be greeted as a major political event in Europe—“a game changer,” according to the EU’s energy chief (a Slovak). “U.S. LNG is more than just about gas,” said the mayor of the Lithuanian port town that would receive the American ships. “It’s about freedom.”
As former Soviet satellites and republics shed their dependence on Russia, traditional Kremlin sanctions to discipline their behavior, like trade bans and gas embargoes, would lose their effectiveness. Russia would therefore resort to new and tougher methods—such as covert propaganda campaigns, espionage, cyberwarfare, and political threats—to prevent Western imports from threatening its lucrative monopolies in the East.74
Politically, much would change with EU expansion as well, to Russia’s detriment. Rotating leadership roles within the EU would frequently place its policies in the hands of hostile states, such as Poland and Latvia. The 2000 FPC had called it an “indispensable condition” of “goodneighborliness and mutual cooperation” between Russia and the Baltic states for there to be “respect for the rights of the Russian–speaking population” within the three neighboring nations.75 As Russian-speaking communities in such states, often large, became increasingly marginalized, pressure grew in Russia to intervene on their behalf.76
Such radical changes in Russia’s external environment were bound to have security implications, much as the Marshall Plan had. An isolated Russia would seek to retain and regain influence in its region, while the rest of Europe would insist on upholding its sovereign prerogatives.
“European politicians thought that the creation of the so-called belt of friendly countries on the outer border of the EU would reliably guarantee security,” said Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2016. “But what were the results of this policy? [A]n exclusion zone with local conflicts and economic trouble on the eastern [and] southern borders.”77
Much as Moscow sought to undermine “Churchill’s reactionary venture” to create “a United States of Europe” in 1947,78 it today seeks to create an “arc of instability” along its western frontier to subvert EU expansion.79 Far from welcoming closer ties between its neighbors and the EU, as early expansion advocates argued it should and would, Russia threatened to block Ukrainian access to its market if it went forward with plans to enter a free trade arrangement with the EU.80 To punish Russia for its military and political intervention in the country, the West hit Russia with economic and financial sanctions.
The EU has rejected Russian criticism of its expansion. European nations, German chancellor Angela Merkel said, denied any obligation to “ask Moscow first” before acting. “That’s how it was for 40 years, and I don’t want to go back to that.”81 For countries caught between Russia and the EU, the standoff is dangerous. “We don’t want somebody over our heads to decide that we will never join,” said Georgia’s EU ambassador Natalie Sabanadze, “that we will never be part of the Euro-Atlantic community.”82 Here again was the self-perpetuating dialectic of fear and threat, accusation and response, action and reaction, that characterized the early Cold War.83
Western political and security interests, as the Marshall planners learned, are difficult to separate. Not surprisingly, elites in Russia, Germany, and the United States have long seen the EU and NATO as two sides of the same coin.84 This highlights the challenge to the European Union in eastern expansion: the deeper the penetration, the deeper the conflict with Russian interests. If not controlled through negotiation and compromise, conflict spills into the security sphere.
COMMUNISM IS GONE FROM EUROPE, but geography has not changed. Russia is, as it has always been, too large and powerful to embed within Western institutions without fundamentally changing them, and too vulnerable to Western encroachment to acquiesce in its own exclusion. Advancing new means of positive engagement will, therefore, require a difficult, perhaps impossible, reimagining of Cold War legacy institutions.
In contrast with the early Cold War period, the post–Cold War period has been marked by the absence of an American Grand Strategy, a calibrated mapping of means to large ends.85 Over the course of 1946 and 1947, the United States developed a framework of Soviet containment to safeguard its interests without appeasement or war. It then devised the Marshall Plan as the most promising means, given Soviet conventional military superiority in Europe and a large American edge in economic power, to implement it. When France and Britain averred that economic integration made Marshall nations more dependent on each other and less able to defend themselves against hostile action by Russia or Germany, the United States responded with NATO. Together, the Marshall Plan and NATO provided the means to carry out containment.
Yet in the quarter century since the passing of the Soviet Union, Grand Strategy has been set aside in favor of improvisation to pacify competing interests. Democratization has been conflated with security objectives, serv
ing neither. The result is an under-resourced NATO facing growing pressure from an increasingly embittered and authoritarian Russia.86 “We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries,” observed Kennan in 1998, “even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”87 He was right. In consequence, the expansion policy is failing.
The Marshall Plan is remembered as one of the great achievements of American foreign policy not merely because it was visionary but because it worked. It worked because the United States aligned its actions with its interests and capacities in Europe, accepting the reality of a Russian sphere of influence into which it could not penetrate without sacrificing credibility and public support.88 Great acts of statesmanship are grounded in realism no less than idealism. It is a lesson we need to relearn.
1 Food protest in Vienna, May 14, 1947.
2 Secretary of State George Marshall before giving his speech on the European economic crisis at Harvard University, June 5, 1947.
3 Secretary of State George Marshall testifying on the European Recovery Program before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, probably on January 8, 1948.
4 President Truman being briefed in advance of the London Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, November 13, 1947. From left to right: President Truman, Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett, Director of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department George Kennan, and State Department counselor Charles Bohlen.
5 Election propaganda in Rome, c. February 1948. The poster on top left says “Help from America—be it coal, food, medicines—helps us help ourselves.” Below, a poster for the Italian Anarchists Federation; to the right, a poster for the Italian Republican Party.