ACURA ViewPoint: Benjamin S. Dunham: Ukraine: Why President Trump Is Leaving the Biden Policy Behind

In negotiating with Vladimir Putin over the fate of Ukraine, President Trump appears to have freed himself from the policies of his predecessor: a misguided effort by neoconservative think tanks and US government officials to capitalize on Ukraine’s divided social and political history in the hope of weakening Russia as a rival of the United States. Beyond that, if discussions about Ukraine’s mineral deposits are any indication, the diplomatic situation seems to be “up for grabs.”

Russia’s incursion into Ukraine was not “naked aggression,” as President Biden called it. It was aggression clothed in an aura of cultural heritage. Putin’s pre-invasion speech was full of historical justification that had special meaning for his Russian audience. Even for Western listeners, his visceral resistance to Western efforts to separate Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence should not have been surprising coming from one whose given name is associated with Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev and ruler of the Kievan Rus’ at the turn of the 11^th century. Since the Russian invasion, Vladimir Putin has revealed himself as an assertive strongman whose leadership of the Russian remnant of the Soviet Union seems to benefit, at least in his own mind, from restoring the country’s hegemony as it existed in the time of the Tsars.

But even before today’s Vladimir came to power, Senator Biden, in March 1998, argued vehemently in favor of expanding the countries in the NATO alliance eastward beyond a reunified Germany to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Waving a rhetorical red flag, Senator Daniel Moynihan, former Ambassador to the United Nations, countered, “We’re walking into ethnic historical enmities. We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Biden won the argument in 1998, as demonstrated by NATO’s addition of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in the next decade. But Moynihan’s warning showed that US diplomats and political leaders in this post-Cold War era should have been aware of the complicated history of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the interconnected relationship of Russia and Ukraine. 

And in important ways they were. The moves of the United States and its European allies in this period were designed to exploit the civil divisions in Ukraine between its Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking electorates—the result of years, centuries even, of convulsive conflict. This approach, taken in the interest of maintaining the US’s unipolar world dominance, was tried out with mixed success on a series of regime-change “color revolutions” promoted by a range of Western-aligned NGOs and underwritten by the United States Agency for International Development and other US agencies in countries like Serbia (Bulldozer Revolution, 2000), Georgia (Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (Orange Revolution, 2004), Kyrgyzstan (Tulip Revolution, 2005), Belarus (Jeans Revolution, 2006), and Russia itself. The expansion of NATO to the east was carried out in intentional disregard for the warnings of distinguished and thoughtful observers like George F. Kennan (President Truman’s director of policy planning and architect of the Cold War policy of Soviet Union containment), William J. Perry (secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration), and Jack Matlock (US ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991), among many, many other American scholars and political leaders like Sen. Moynihan who generally agreed that pushing NATO to the borders of Russia would lead to a missed opportunity for regional peace, at best, and at worst become a dangerous provocation.

In retrospect, the danger signals should have been clear. During the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin said, “NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” At the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in 2008, Putin repeated his previous warnings that Moscow would view any attempt to expand NATO to its borders as a “direct threat.” But the next year, when Biden made his first trip to Kiev as Vice-President and the Obama Administration’s point man on Ukraine, he insisted on supporting Ukraine’s “deepening ties to NATO,” saying, “We recognize no sphere of influence,” and pointing to US funding that year of $120 million to Ukraine to “bolster peace and security” and to “ modernize your military.” 

In his Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Robert M. Gates wrote of Vice-President Biden:

I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. …Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation.

In 2010, Russia drafted a “European Security Treaty” with clauses that might have prevented the United States and its allies from forming new ties to states that Moscow considered to be in its sphere of influence—a Russian version of our own Monroe Doctrine. The text of the Russian proposal was studied by the US, but to no one’s surprise, it was rejected.  

Three years later, building on experience gained during the Orange Revolution of 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy, a USAID-funded offshoot of CIA regime-change programs in the 1950s, was involved in sparking Kiev’s Maidan Square protests in late-2013 and early-2014. Just two months before they broke out, NED’s then-president wrote, “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.” In practice, this meant funding groups that the Financial Times reported “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.” The Maidan Square protests led to the ouster of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, effectively disenfranchising the Russian-speaking, Russia-leaning citizens in eastern Ukraine who had voted him into power in 2010 as a reversal of the Western-oriented Orange Revolution.

As Biden wrote in his book, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, Yanukovych fled Kiev after a remarkable series of extended phone calls with the Vice-President that ended with Biden telling him “it was over” and advising him to “walk away.” In the interest of democracy one might hope that Biden’s advice to Yanukovych had been even-handed, but during the uprising the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, was seen handing out snacks to the anti-government protesters in Maidan Square and caught on phone discussing with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt which Ukrainian leader would be acceptable to the US as prime minister and assuring him that “Biden’s willing” in Pyatt’s words “to help midwife this thing.” 

For many eastern Ukrainians the result of the Maidan protests was not just a new Eurocentric government but rather a political coup that ended their fragile bi-cultural democracy. One omen was the passage of legislation by the Verkhovna Rada to repeal the law protecting the use of Russian as a minority language. A civil war broke out in which government forces supported by Western countries were arrayed against separatist regions supported by Russia. After a referendum, Crimea, historically the site of Russia’s only warm-water port, was absorbed back into Mother Russia herself and Donetsk and Luhansk proclaimed themselves independent republics.

In 2014-15, the negotiated Minsk agreements—signed by Russia, Ukraine, separatist representatives, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—seemed to point the way to a federated republic as a solution, with the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine having a measure of autonomy and an effective veto on Ukraine joining NATO. But these agreements were never fully implemented, and were intended by the West—as admitted after-the-fact by the former leaders of Germany, France, and Ukraine—not to settle the conflict but rather to buy time to strengthen the Ukraine government’s military posture. A 2024 article in The New York Times documented how the US used this time to build up a network of CIA installations near the border of Russia capable of electronic surveillance and tracking the path of armed drones. In addition, the US Navy built a “maritime operations center” at the Ochakiv Naval Base near Odessa that could coordinate Western and Ukrainian activity in the Black Sea and accommodate NATO ships. (Imagine the US reaction if China set up a network of MSS state security installations along the Rio Grande and took over the port of Veracruz for its own purposes in the Gulf of Mexico.)

In mid-December 2021, after watching these confrontational developments over a period of years, Russia presented the West with a written set of regional security proposals, warning that Moscow might have to act militarily if the talks they desired did not materialize. Again, the most important of these proposals had to do with the non-expansion of NATO and steps that would lead to the guaranteed neutrality of Ukraine. These were rejected in early January by the US deputy secretary of state as “non-starters,” a cheeky response that seemed calculated to try Putin’s patience. Just days before Russia invaded, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled an urgent trip to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva, ironically and inexplicably citing Russia’s “wholesale rejection of diplomacy.” In the context of these exchanges and actions, US predictions of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine—announced repeatedly on the evening news in the months before the invasion—were less an intelligence coup and more a willful poking of the Russian bear. 

Without reference to these years and years of trying to wrest Ukraine away from Russia’s sphere of influence, often involving his own personal participation, President Biden assured us during his State of the Union Address on March 1, 2022, that the Russian incursion was “totally unprovoked” and that Putin had “badly miscalculated.” Biden promised that we would sap Russia’s economic strength with sanctions and “weaken its military for years to come.”

If Putin indeed miscalculated by invading Ukraine, one wonders whether this is what US diplomacy (or lack of diplomacy) was trying to achieve all along, tragically at Ukraine’s expense, as President Zelensky had predicted when the war began. An ultimate goal—unseating Putin—was manifested in Warsaw later that March when President Biden blurted out, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” These days, in the context of recent signs of Ukrainian weakness and Russian strength, we are not hearing much about the prospect of regime change in Moscow. (The government that experienced regime change is in Washington, DC!) If Putin had been removed from power, even if the direction of the war remained unchanged, perhaps some would have seen that as a feather in the cap of President Biden and his staff, as well as the Atlantic Council, the CIA, our military industrial complex, and our security establishment, who have been walking down this path together for more than two decades. 

It is also possible, however, that we are the ones who miscalculated. The changing of the guard with the Trump Administration has given the US an opportunity to reassess, to find a way out of this diplomatic misadventure. If President Trump is successful in negotiating an end to the war, it is still not clear who is going to emerge unscathed in world history in the telling of this story—who chose a course toward war and when. If he fails and the war escalates further, it is not even clear who is going to be doing the telling. 

© Copyright February 2025 Benjamin S. Dunham

About the author:

Benjamin S. Dunham (Harvard College, B.A., 1966) retired as editor of Early Music America magazine in 2014. Prior to his 12 years in that role, he enjoyed an active career in arts administration and journalism, serving as executive vice president of the U.S. National Music Council, executive director of the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, director of public relations and publications for the American Symphony Orchestra League (now League of American Orchestras), assistant editor of the Music Educators Journal, and editor of American Recorder magazine. In 1981, as the first executive director of Chamber Music America, he was named “Arts Administrator of the Year” by the Arts Management publication. He has served on the boards of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, the American Recorder Society, Early Music America, and the Boston Early Music Festival and was for many years a member of the Avery Fisher Artist Program Recommendation Board. He performed on recorder and viola da gamba in early music ensembles in Washington, D.C., and in the SouthCoast region of Massachusetts and has reviewed concerts and recordings for national and regional media. In retirement, he researches and manages a website on the British artist James Alphege Brewer (www.jalphegebrewer.info).