The New Doves on Ukraine
Could the U.S. prevent a war by giving up on NATO expansion?
By February 11, 2022
A pro-Ukraine activist holds the American and Ukrainian flags together at a demonstration outside the White House on Sunday.Photograph by Samuel Corum / Getty
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Nobody in Washington says they want a war, but everyone is girding for it. Intelligence officials have leaked estimates to the media that fifty thousand civilians could be killed if Russia invades Ukraine; analysts are decoding military insignia and scrutinizing the machismo politics of Vladimir Putin’s summit with French President Emmanuel Macron. The Winter Olympics in Beijing will end soon, and the ground in Ukraine will not yet have thawed too much for tank-bearing, making this, in the quasi-astrology of the military, the time to fear. From within Washington’s national-security world, you hear periodic brainstorms about how the worst outcomes might be prevented: a Europe-security expert, just out of government, told me on Monday that he thought that nato forces should stage joint exercises with the Ukrainian military in a nearby country, shifting its assets out of the way of a devastating Russian assault. Under the circumstances, such ideas can sound at once fanciful and pragmatic.
Amid this atmosphere of imminence, the conservative Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, last week wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken arguing that the United States should reëvaluate its position. It was time, he wrote, to reconsider plans for Ukraine to join nato, a commitment originally made at a summit in Bucharest in 2008. “Now is exactly the right time for confronting hard truths,” Hawley wrote. “Russia’s buildup on Ukraine’s borders makes apparent just how important it is for the United States to be deliberate about its commitments abroad.” Hawley’s position wasn’t exactly dovish—he wrote that he still supported arming the Ukrainians—but he said that President Biden’s movement of troops into Eastern Europe was unwise, especially at a time when U.S. attention ought to be on threats from Asia: “The legacy of a bygone era, the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s prospective membership in NATO demands particular scrutiny.”
Hawley, who encouraged President Donald Trump’s challenge to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, giving a raised fist to the protesters and militiamen who stormed the Capitol last January, is reviled by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. But he has a talent for putting things plainly, and asking whether nato should give up expansion soon became the position of an ad-hoc peace party. This happened most visibly on Fox News, where Tucker Carlson hosted Hawley and, on another occasion, the Trump defense official Elbridge Colby, a China hawk whose views often track Hawley’s. But it happened elsewhere, too. The progressive MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan wrote, “I hate, hate, hate agreeing with Josh Hawley, but he’s got a point—everyone knows Ukraine isn’t joining NATO anytime soon and if saying so publicly and formally helps prevent a catastrophic war, then maybe it’s worth it.” After the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, accused Hawley of “parroting Russian talking points,” Bernie Sanders’s influential foreign-policy adviser Matt Duss tweeted, “Hawley is awful but these are the same kind of accusations the Bush administration made against critics of the Iraq war. Do not do this.” In the Washington Post, the veteran political journalist David von Drehle published a column under the headline “it’s an open secret there’s no nato plan for ukraine. why not just tell putin?” Chris Hayes, the progressive evening anchor at MSNBC, tweeted that piece, writing, “I find this case pretty persuasive.” Bernie Sanders, in a Guardian op-ed, raised Finland’s neutrality as a possible model for Ukraine, writing, “Invasion by Russia is not an answer; neither is intransigence by Nato.”
For many of these figures, the key date is the 2008 Bucharest summit, when the nato principals decided to invite Croatia and Albania to join the alliance; they also took the lesser step of announcing that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of nato” without specifying exactly when or how. That announcement represented a compromise. Putin himself arrived in Bucharest, to hold meetings aimed largely at keeping the former Soviet states from allying with the West. President George W. Bush had pushed for a more aggressive expansion, but the United Kingdom, France, and Germany reportedly were more cautious. Bush’s stance was opposed, too, by some of his advisers. As one of them, Fiona Hill, wrote in a Times Op-Ed last week, “We warned him that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action. But ultimately, our warnings weren’t heeded.”
John Mearsheimer, the realist international-relations theorist at the University of Chicago, has been arguing for years that nato expansion was a mistake and that the United States ought to limit its conflicts with Putin in order to focus on China. When I spoke with him recently, he sounded like he was smiling, slightly, at the idea that others were coming around to his view.
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Nobody in Washington says they want a war, but everyone is girding for it. Intelligence officials have leaked estimates to the media that fifty thousand civilians could be killed if Russia invades Ukraine; analysts are decoding military insignia and scrutinizing the machismo politics of Vladimir Putin’s summit with French President Emmanuel Macron. The Winter Olympics in Beijing will end soon, and the ground in Ukraine will not yet have thawed too much for tank-bearing, making this, in the quasi-astrology of the military, the time to fear. From within Washington’s national-security world, you hear periodic brainstorms about how the worst outcomes might be prevented: a Europe-security expert, just out of government, told me on Monday that he thought that nato forces should stage joint exercises with the Ukrainian military in a nearby country, shifting its assets out of the way of a devastating Russian assault. Under the circumstances, such ideas can sound at once fanciful and pragmatic.
Amid this atmosphere of imminence, the conservative Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, last week wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken arguing that the United States should reëvaluate its position. It was time, he wrote, to reconsider plans for Ukraine to join nato, a commitment originally made at a summit in Bucharest in 2008. “Now is exactly the right time for confronting hard truths,” Hawley wrote. “Russia’s buildup on Ukraine’s borders makes apparent just how important it is for the United States to be deliberate about its commitments abroad.” Hawley’s position wasn’t exactly dovish—he wrote that he still supported arming the Ukrainians—but he said that President Biden’s movement of troops into Eastern Europe was unwise, especially at a time when U.S. attention ought to be on threats from Asia: “The legacy of a bygone era, the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s prospective membership in NATO demands particular scrutiny.”
Hawley, who encouraged President Donald Trump’s challenge to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, giving a raised fist to the protesters and militiamen who stormed the Capitol last January, is reviled by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. But he has a talent for putting things plainly, and asking whether nato should give up expansion soon became the position of an ad-hoc peace party. This happened most visibly on Fox News, where Tucker Carlson hosted Hawley and, on another occasion, the Trump defense official Elbridge Colby, a China hawk whose views often track Hawley’s. But it happened elsewhere, too. The progressive MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan wrote, “I hate, hate, hate agreeing with Josh Hawley, but he’s got a point—everyone knows Ukraine isn’t joining NATO anytime soon and if saying so publicly and formally helps prevent a catastrophic war, then maybe it’s worth it.” After the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, accused Hawley of “parroting Russian talking points,” Bernie Sanders’s influential foreign-policy adviser Matt Duss tweeted, “Hawley is awful but these are the same kind of accusations the Bush administration made against critics of the Iraq war. Do not do this.” In the Washington Post, the veteran political journalist David von Drehle published a column under the headline “it’s an open secret there’s no nato plan for ukraine. why not just tell putin?” Chris Hayes, the progressive evening anchor at MSNBC, tweeted that piece, writing, “I find this case pretty persuasive.” Bernie Sanders, in a Guardian op-ed, raised Finland’s neutrality as a possible model for Ukraine, writing, “Invasion by Russia is not an answer; neither is intransigence by Nato.”
For many of these figures, the key date is the 2008 Bucharest summit, when the nato principals decided to invite Croatia and Albania to join the alliance; they also took the lesser step of announcing that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of nato” without specifying exactly when or how. That announcement represented a compromise. Putin himself arrived in Bucharest, to hold meetings aimed largely at keeping the former Soviet states from allying with the West. President George W. Bush had pushed for a more aggressive expansion, but the United Kingdom, France, and Germany reportedly were more cautious. Bush’s stance was opposed, too, by some of his advisers. As one of them, Fiona Hill, wrote in a Times Op-Ed last week, “We warned him that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action. But ultimately, our warnings weren’t heeded.”
John Mearsheimer, the realist international-relations theorist at the University of Chicago, has been arguing for years that nato expansion was a mistake and that the United States ought to limit its conflicts with Putin in order to focus on China. When I spoke with him recently, he sounded like he was smiling, slightly, at the idea that others were coming around to his view.
“I don’t like Josh Hawley’s politics at all, but I think he’s right on this issue,” Mearsheimer told me. “The question on the table is: who bears responsibility for this crisis? Is it Russia or, let’s be honest, is it the United States?” He went on, “The Russians made it manifestly clear after the Bucharest declaration in 2008 that they were adamantly opposed to nato expansion into both Ukraine and Georgia, and that it was not going to happen.
They made that point manifestly clear after February, 2014”—when Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution led to the ouster of the Russia-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. “Throughout this crisis, they have emphasized time and time again that it is not going to happen.”
Mearsheimer said that the U.S. had led Ukrainians “down the primrose path,” angering the Russians and giving Moscow “all sorts of incentives to wreck Ukraine as a country,” without committing to protecting it.
“The only way this can be resolved is with the U.S. and nato saying that Ukraine will not become part of nato,” Mearsheimer said. “The Russians want it in writing. And I think this crisis will go away once this happens.”
For a generation, foreign-policy leaders have told Americans that a “pivot to Asia” is imminent: it was the explicit theme of Barack Obama’s foreign policy and, in a less coherent way, of Donald Trump’s. The Biden Administration began with it, too. This pivot has been so long promised and delayed that it has something of the rhythm of a sitcom: The heroine wants to introduce her family to her new boyfriend, but her son gets stuck at school for detention, or her daughter won’t leave her room, or her meddlesome ex has “borrowed” the car. Clean breaks are hard. Human attachments have a way of reeling you back into your own past, for countries as with sitcom heroines. For many years now, Americans have been promised a pivot to Asia, and yet something—history, inertia, idealism, Vladimir Putin—keeps getting in the way.
From some points of view—that of at least some of the Ukraine doves—the primary obstacle is the Blob, the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes’s term for the oleaginous community of post-Cold War foreign-policy thinkers, defense contractors, journalists, and politicians who always seemed to agree, at moments of peak international tension, that an oppressed people were imperilled, freedom was at stake, and anti-aircraft missiles needed to be sent. The term first appeared in a Times Magazine profile of Rhodes, in 2016: “According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”
Recently, in the wake of the populist movements of 2016, it has sometimes been possible to detect the emergence of a countervailing force, an anti-Blob, composed of China hawks, doctrinaire realists, anti-imperialists, and people exhausted by the forever wars. These figures are drawn together less by shared goals than by a discomfort with America’s traditional entanglements: some are isolationist, some idealistic, some just have a different strategic perspective. Their sensibility is tragic rather than romantic, and they come together conditionally, declaring all the while how much they can’t stand one another. On the Senate floor on Thursday, Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, criticized Hawley, saying that he might not be old enough to remember 9/11, and Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, got into a dustup with Sanders, after Sanders suggested that the U.S. should see the conflict in terms of the Monroe Doctrine, and from “the mind-set of the Russians.” The dynamic wasn’t so much left versus right as it was Blob versus anti-Blob.
Colby, the former Trump defense official and China theorist who argued in a recent book that the United States should be prepared to go to war over Taiwan, told me that he thought most grassroots conservatives fell into the anti-Blob group: “Republican voters, and especially active Republican voters, seem to be skeptical about the Biden Administration’s approach to Ukraine, or, for that matter, taking a neoconservative-style approach on the issue,” he said. Colby thought this was basically a good thing—that it reflected an intuitive realism about the China threat and the limitations of American power—but that there was a risk that the Party’s voters would withdraw into isolationism. “I will say, even in the last couple of months, more of the leading-edge thinkers on the right, not always people who I agree with, are being, like, Screw it. And not just on Europe—on China, too.” Another senior Trump foreign-policy official said that, among Republican voters, “There’s a deep disillusionment over what happened in Afghanistan. We were there twenty years and lost a lot of lives.” Part of the disillusionment, he went on, had to do with the impression that, toward the end, the American mission in Afghanistan became a nation-building project in which a culturally progressive agenda was often promoted. “So there’s a culture-war overlay, but then we get out so abruptly. It’s, like, ‘What was that for?’ ”
For progressives, the situation is more complicated, both because the Democratic Party has not moved to the left on foreign policy in the same way it has on domestic policy, and because, philosophically, a national-interests realism is a less appealing retreat. Duss, the Sanders foreign-policy adviser, told me, “American foreign policy is about the security and the prosperity of the American people. But progressives also bring a sense of solidarity. So we’re trying to think about, how can we show solidarity with the Ukrainian people?” To think simultaneously about the security of Americans and Ukrainians, and others, Duss said, “is a responsibility progressives accept. The question is: what tools do we actually have to make the situation better? To avoid loss of life? What is a realistic outcome that could conceivably avert a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine while also upholding Ukraine’s democracy and independence?”
Peter Beinart, a progressive foreign-policy journalist and commentator who has moved from a more enthusiastic view of American deployment to a more skeptical one, told me that, in Ukraine, he hoped for a solution that mixed progressive solidarity with a realist sensitivity to the “tragic nature of international politics.” For Beinart, the best outcome, given the circumstances, echoed Sanders: that Ukraine would adopt a posture of neutrality, on the model of Finland, seeking formal allegiance with neither Russia nor nato. (I’d heard this argument from other Ukraine doves, who also conceded that the Biden Administration probably could not withdraw the promise of nato membership unilaterally. Ukraine would have to voluntarily seek neutrality, which—with Russian troops massed on the border—does not seem imminent.) Beinart went on, “Where I hope progressives would come out is to say, ‘Of course we want Ukranians to live in a free society. We want that human right—those things are essential. We want the Ukranians to have self-determination. But we are also willing to face realities as they exist in the world.’ Those realities are that, whether we like it or not, and we may not like it, great powers do wield spheres of influence. And part of what’s valuable about being a progressive, and not just a blind American exceptionalism, is that we can see that the United States has a sphere of influence, too.”
If this is the alternative to the path that the Biden Administration is pursuing, a strategic step back, a public renunciation of nato’s formal but faint plans to expand to Ukraine, then it hinges on certain assumptions, too: that a neutral Ukraine would not lead to further Russian pressure on nato members that would require America to intervene directly, and that limiting nato expansion is not just one feature of Russian designs on Ukraine but their extent.
When I called Alexander Vindman, the former director for European affairs on the National Security Council, he sounded as if he shared Mearsheimer’s historical analysis, that the nato commitments to Ukraine had been a mistake. Vindman said, “We went too far, but not far enough. We said that they would eventually join, but we didn’t give them a map, which angered Russia but didn’t give the Ukrainians or Georgians the protections they need.” But he saw the Ukraine question in a different context: not as a distraction from a coming conflict with China but as a way to signal to other democracies that the United States would support them if they were menaced by authoritarian regimes. In Vindman’s view, “You can’t be progressive without believing, and buying into, the notion of supporting democracies.”
Of all the foreign-policy actors I spoke with this week, Vindman sounded the grimmest. An Iraq War veteran and lieutenant colonel, he was drummed out of the N.S.C. by Trump after he testified at Trump’s first impeachment trial. He’s now a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Observing recent events, he had wanted an earlier, more aggressive approach to dissuading Putin from an invasion—more anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukranians, more nato troops shifted into Eastern Europe—and feared that the current interventions had come too late. Vindman said that he foresaw “tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees. That’s not going to be an easy thing to turn away from. I just wish more had been done to avert it.”
On Zoom, Vindman looked a little burned out. He spent many years, as an analyst of Russia, watching Ukraine make some slow, irregular, but real progress toward democracy and prosperity. Much as we might want a do-over for Bucharest, he said, that progress had changed the situation. “nato is only part of the equation,” Vindman said. “This is about a rising Ukraine, a prosperous Ukraine. So even if we were to say, ‘Ukraine isn’t going to be in nato for twenty-five years, or forever,’ that doesn’t end this confrontation. Russia is still going to look for a way to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence.” In Vindman’s eyes, the argument for the withdrawal of the nato promise is less unconventional than it is magical. “So all it does is signal that the U.S. is not supportive of Ukraine, and lacks resolve regarding Ukraine. It does not end this conflict.”
An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Josh Hawley’s letter to Antony Blinken.
For a generation, foreign-policy leaders have told Americans that a “pivot to Asia” is imminent: it was the explicit theme of Barack Obama’s foreign policy and, in a less coherent way, of Donald Trump’s. The Biden Administration began with it, too. This pivot has been so long promised and delayed that it has something of the rhythm of a sitcom: The heroine wants to introduce her family to her new boyfriend, but her son gets stuck at school for detention, or her daughter won’t leave her room, or her meddlesome ex has “borrowed” the car. Clean breaks are hard. Human attachments have a way of reeling you back into your own past, for countries as with sitcom heroines. For many years now, Americans have been promised a pivot to Asia, and yet something—history, inertia, idealism, Vladimir Putin—keeps getting in the way.
From some points of view—that of at least some of the Ukraine doves—the primary obstacle is the Blob, the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes’s term for the oleaginous community of post-Cold War foreign-policy thinkers, defense contractors, journalists, and politicians who always seemed to agree, at moments of peak international tension, that an oppressed people were imperilled, freedom was at stake, and anti-aircraft missiles needed to be sent. The term first appeared in a Times Magazine profile of Rhodes, in 2016: “According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”
Recently, in the wake of the populist movements of 2016, it has sometimes been possible to detect the emergence of a countervailing force, an anti-Blob, composed of China hawks, doctrinaire realists, anti-imperialists, and people exhausted by the forever wars. These figures are drawn together less by shared goals than by a discomfort with America’s traditional entanglements: some are isolationist, some idealistic, some just have a different strategic perspective. Their sensibility is tragic rather than romantic, and they come together conditionally, declaring all the while how much they can’t stand one another. On the Senate floor on Thursday, Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, criticized Hawley, saying that he might not be old enough to remember 9/11, and Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, got into a dustup with Sanders, after Sanders suggested that the U.S. should see the conflict in terms of the Monroe Doctrine, and from “the mind-set of the Russians.” The dynamic wasn’t so much left versus right as it was Blob versus anti-Blob.
Colby, the former Trump defense official and China theorist who argued in a recent book that the United States should be prepared to go to war over Taiwan, told me that he thought most grassroots conservatives fell into the anti-Blob group: “Republican voters, and especially active Republican voters, seem to be skeptical about the Biden Administration’s approach to Ukraine, or, for that matter, taking a neoconservative-style approach on the issue,” he said. Colby thought this was basically a good thing—that it reflected an intuitive realism about the China threat and the limitations of American power—but that there was a risk that the Party’s voters would withdraw into isolationism. “I will say, even in the last couple of months, more of the leading-edge thinkers on the right, not always people who I agree with, are being, like, Screw it. And not just on Europe—on China, too.” Another senior Trump foreign-policy official said that, among Republican voters, “There’s a deep disillusionment over what happened in Afghanistan. We were there twenty years and lost a lot of lives.” Part of the disillusionment, he went on, had to do with the impression that, toward the end, the American mission in Afghanistan became a nation-building project in which a culturally progressive agenda was often promoted. “So there’s a culture-war overlay, but then we get out so abruptly. It’s, like, ‘What was that for?’ ”
For progressives, the situation is more complicated, both because the Democratic Party has not moved to the left on foreign policy in the same way it has on domestic policy, and because, philosophically, a national-interests realism is a less appealing retreat. Duss, the Sanders foreign-policy adviser, told me, “American foreign policy is about the security and the prosperity of the American people. But progressives also bring a sense of solidarity. So we’re trying to think about, how can we show solidarity with the Ukrainian people?” To think simultaneously about the security of Americans and Ukrainians, and others, Duss said, “is a responsibility progressives accept. The question is: what tools do we actually have to make the situation better? To avoid loss of life? What is a realistic outcome that could conceivably avert a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine while also upholding Ukraine’s democracy and independence?”
Peter Beinart, a progressive foreign-policy journalist and commentator who has moved from a more enthusiastic view of American deployment to a more skeptical one, told me that, in Ukraine, he hoped for a solution that mixed progressive solidarity with a realist sensitivity to the “tragic nature of international politics.” For Beinart, the best outcome, given the circumstances, echoed Sanders: that Ukraine would adopt a posture of neutrality, on the model of Finland, seeking formal allegiance with neither Russia nor nato. (I’d heard this argument from other Ukraine doves, who also conceded that the Biden Administration probably could not withdraw the promise of nato membership unilaterally. Ukraine would have to voluntarily seek neutrality, which—with Russian troops massed on the border—does not seem imminent.) Beinart went on, “Where I hope progressives would come out is to say, ‘Of course we want Ukranians to live in a free society. We want that human right—those things are essential. We want the Ukranians to have self-determination. But we are also willing to face realities as they exist in the world.’ Those realities are that, whether we like it or not, and we may not like it, great powers do wield spheres of influence. And part of what’s valuable about being a progressive, and not just a blind American exceptionalism, is that we can see that the United States has a sphere of influence, too.”
If this is the alternative to the path that the Biden Administration is pursuing, a strategic step back, a public renunciation of nato’s formal but faint plans to expand to Ukraine, then it hinges on certain assumptions, too: that a neutral Ukraine would not lead to further Russian pressure on nato members that would require America to intervene directly, and that limiting nato expansion is not just one feature of Russian designs on Ukraine but their extent.
When I called Alexander Vindman, the former director for European affairs on the National Security Council, he sounded as if he shared Mearsheimer’s historical analysis, that the nato commitments to Ukraine had been a mistake. Vindman said, “We went too far, but not far enough. We said that they would eventually join, but we didn’t give them a map, which angered Russia but didn’t give the Ukrainians or Georgians the protections they need.” But he saw the Ukraine question in a different context: not as a distraction from a coming conflict with China but as a way to signal to other democracies that the United States would support them if they were menaced by authoritarian regimes. In Vindman’s view, “You can’t be progressive without believing, and buying into, the notion of supporting democracies.”
Of all the foreign-policy actors I spoke with this week, Vindman sounded the grimmest. An Iraq War veteran and lieutenant colonel, he was drummed out of the N.S.C. by Trump after he testified at Trump’s first impeachment trial. He’s now a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Observing recent events, he had wanted an earlier, more aggressive approach to dissuading Putin from an invasion—more anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukranians, more nato troops shifted into Eastern Europe—and feared that the current interventions had come too late. Vindman said that he foresaw “tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees. That’s not going to be an easy thing to turn away from. I just wish more had been done to avert it.”
On Zoom, Vindman looked a little burned out. He spent many years, as an analyst of Russia, watching Ukraine make some slow, irregular, but real progress toward democracy and prosperity. Much as we might want a do-over for Bucharest, he said, that progress had changed the situation. “nato is only part of the equation,” Vindman said. “This is about a rising Ukraine, a prosperous Ukraine. So even if we were to say, ‘Ukraine isn’t going to be in nato for twenty-five years, or forever,’ that doesn’t end this confrontation. Russia is still going to look for a way to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence.” In Vindman’s eyes, the argument for the withdrawal of the nato promise is less unconventional than it is magical. “So all it does is signal that the U.S. is not supportive of Ukraine, and lacks resolve regarding Ukraine. It does not end this conflict.”
An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Josh Hawley’s letter to Antony Blinken.
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