The Ukraine Crisis and Beyond: Avoiding Another 'March of Folly'
Image: Wikimedia Commons
“Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.”
– Shakespeare, Othello
May 9th marks a milestone in the Ukraine war. Victory Day celebrates the Russian defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, and will, ironically, offer Vladimir Putin a moment to observe his country’s might on the military parade ground, despite its shoddy performance on the battlefield.
The Russian leader will need to claim some gains consonant with the triumphant symbolism of that day. And yet, a larger picture has emerged: a longer war on many fronts, including economic and cyber, between much of the West and Russia. Lost in this scenario of escalation will be the triggers and causes of the war. Both the West and Russia need to understand these origins if they are to manage the war less destructively, and their relationship in its aftermath more constructively. The ongoing debate as to whether Russia or NATO was more responsible is insufficient so long as it remains framed as an either/or question. The reality is both those perspectives need to be synthesized.
Vladimir Putin’s violence against a neighbouring state is abhorrent, but the roots of the current conflict lie in a more complex collision between a kind of Western systemic autism and the angry mind of Vladimir Putin manifesting a Russian history of trauma and civilizational grandeur.
In a CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria in March, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy alleged that NATO leaders told him unequivocally in the past, “You’re not going to become a NATO or EU member.” Yet, Zelenskyy added that they also told him that the façade of NATO accession would nonetheless remain on the table. Since then, we have also heard Zelenskyy indicate a readiness to discuss Ukrainian neutrality.
If this is true, and there is no reason to suspect Zelenskyy is fabricating, then, despite Russian belligerence, was the war in Ukraine partly preventable with a different kind of western diplomacy?
Since the end of the Cold War the West has been more interested in its own internal systemic cohesion—maintaining certain bureaucratic habits, and propagating its organizational pillars (the EU and NATO)—than in how these actions might impact Russia, and specifically its leader. Warnings about NATO expansion came from experienced quarters, including George Kennan and Henry Kissinger and former Russian President Gorbachev, but they were ignored. This tendency was encouraged by Eastern European nations who are in large part fearful of Russia because of their tragic entanglements with their neighbour in the past.
Meanwhile, Moscow viewed these developments in another way. Western expansionism was seen through a perceptual prism clouded by centuries of trauma and paranoia, that included, for some, the conviction that the West was laying down obstacles to Russia’s greatness. Certainly, some Russians, including Putin, believe that their civilization should not be dictated to by the West. Ukraine, for example, whether the West likes it or not, is perceived by Moscow as being part of the Russian civilization, or sphere. As a result, Russia increasingly responded with anger and resentment. The 2014 annexation of Crimea was an initial and notable reflex.
As American historian Stephen Kotkin and others have noted, such aggressive results, including against neighbours, are also the result of Russian autocratic tendencies developed over centuries. Most importantly, latent Russian fear and grandiosity were incarnated and magnified in the mind of the one man for whom revenge and the reversal of national humiliation following the Soviet collapse was of paramount importance: Vladimir Putin.
But the West has not helped manage this problem. As Shakespeare’s character Iago said in Othello, “trifles light as air” on one side are “holy writ” to the other. The final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 may have represented the triumph of the Western model, but putting aside the needs and mindsets of the defeated is fraught with dangers, especially if the goals are rather lofty and not easily achieved. Moscow perceived the eastern expansion of NATO and EU as a threat rather than what it is from the Western point-of-view: a spread of virtuous values.
Even if NATO expansion was not truly on the table, the façade, as indicated above, had to be maintained for internal Western reasons. The need for any system to propagate itself results in a kind of blindness to the core needs of whatever lies outside it. In parallel, why was Ukrainian neutrality not considered more actively years ago, as it is now? The Russian leadership misinterpreted or took advantage of these signals. This has all come to a head today in Ukraine.
This blind collision between a machine-like propagation of Western systems and values and an exponentially magnified Russian paranoia, specifically in the mind of Putin and his entourage, has led to war. The responsibility for the conflict may not be equal. However, it is difficult to deny that these two elements are dynamically related—are in relation—like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that combine to form a larger picture.
Today, Western diplomats will indicate correctly that Putin was not dissuaded from his plans by offerings during the months before the war. However, once Putin’s mind was made up, and sufficiently inflamed to ignore sensible diplomatic initiatives, it was simply too late.
The opportunity to avoid the current conflagration may have come much earlier, at least in the events of 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, it not before, in the 1990s. A judicious mix in Western diplomacy of putting Russian fears ahead of blind and dogmatic NATO principles of expansion, especially in Ukraine, combined with the use of sticks, including on Russian energy after 2014, may have been enough to deflect Putin back then from the recklessness of war.
There will be no way to avoid such collisions in the future, nor indeed an end to this one, without a much better understanding of how human systems and the history of nations lead to blindness in politics. And by extension: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, which American historian Barbara Tuchman described as “The March of Folly."
Can we learn to work in greater context by diminishing the blindness that comes with the juggernaut of systems and bureaucracy in the West, or the inflamed minds of demagogues, often in the East? Ukraine and other East European countries are the victims of such collisions.
Nothing is preordained, but this will involve a kind of learning in politics that has heretofore not been demonstrated. Russia and the West are in relation. The quality of that relation—the how—is what matters most.
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