Footage of the strike and analysis of satellite imagery suggests that the Oreshnik can likely carry six warheads each armed with six submunitions, for a total of 36. As the missile descends toward Earth, it can disperse these submunitions to blanket a wide area with explosives, similar to how a shotgun sprays shot.

The Oreshnik is also almost certainly capable of being armed with nuclear warheads, and many experts have focused analysis primarily on these capabilities and the role that the missile plays in Putin’s nuclear signaling. But relatively little has been said about the Oreshnik’s conventional capabilities and how it might enable a change in Russia’s targeting strategy in a potential future war with NATO.

In a conflict where forces are dispersed over large areas, as is the case in Ukraine, an expensive missile like the Oreshnik is a poor choice. But the Oreshnik makes perfect sense for attacking dense targets like air bases, where its conventional submunitions can deal significant damage.

In a televised interview last December, Putin remarked that with the Oreshnik, Russia was “practically on the edge of having no need to use nuclear weapons.” The Russian leader was exaggerating, but there was a grain of truth to his statement. A mass Russian strike with conventional Oreshnik missiles on NATO strategic sites—such as air bases, command and control facilities, and missile bases—could leave NATO reeling without Putin using nuclear arms.

In a war with NATO, Russia is likely to attack the alliance’s air bases in the opening days of a conflict. Russia is well aware of NATO’s air superiority, and it hopes to give its forces some breathing room by destroying—or at least delaying—NATO’s ability to respond.

Modern fighter aircraft—particularly the F-35, which multiple NATO states increasingly use as their multirole aircraft of choice—are too complex to be repaired in the field. F-35s and similar aircraft were designed to be supported by large, sophisticated air bases. Decades of budget cuts have concentrated NATO’s airpower in only a handful of these bases, making them uniquely vulnerable to the Oreshnik’s shotgun-style munitions.

Russia’s nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) could certainly make short work of NATO air bases. But when it comes to conventional weapons, Russia’s experience in Ukraine has revealed problems with attacking strategic sites with its existing missiles. Russian missiles that are armed with unitary conventional warheads have failed to disable key Ukrainian air bases and other facilities due to a combination of low accuracy and successful Ukrainian air defenses.

The Oreshnik helps solve this problem. Based on Russia’s performance in Ukraine, it may take dozens of conventional Iskander missiles to destroy aircraft at major air bases. It would take far fewer Oreshniks to achieve a similar effect. During the Nov. 21 attack, a single Oreshnik missile dropped 36 inert submunitions on the Pivdenmash rocket manufacturing complex. If the submunitions had not been inert, the missile would have done extensive damage over a large area, negating the accuracy problems of Russia’s Iskander and Kh-101 missiles.

The good news is the Oreshnik’s conventional capabilities will give Russia more non-nuclear options, theoretically lessening the risk that the Kremlin would contemplate using nuclear weapons early in a conflict. The bad news is the Oreshnik’s non-nuclear capacities mean Russia will have more options to significantly disrupt NATO operations at the conventional level.

Current European defenses will do little to protect against the Oreshnik. Despite many NATO bases being protected by a multilayered missile defense grid, the Oreshnik can fly above the intercept range of most systems and comes down to Earth too fast for most terminal interceptors, such as the Patriot air defense system. The interceptors that can stop the Oreshnik—namely, the Arrow 3 and the SM-3 Block IIA systems—will likely have limited inventories if current procurement trajectories hold. In addition, Russian decoys and other countermeasures may be able to fool interceptors into going after a fake target.

The Oreshnik is not a technically difficult weapon to make. Russia is well-versed in the technology involved and has been making the rocket engines for missiles similar to the Oreshnik for decades. Russia is already expanding its missile production facilities to rebuild its arsenal in the long term. Notably, some of the facilities being expanded, such as the Kamensky Plant located across from Ukraine’s eastern border, specialize in the sort of large ICBM-sized rocket motors the Oreshnik uses.

Regardless of how the war in Ukraine ends, in a decade or two NATO may face a rearmed Russia wielding a reconstituted arsenal in which large conventional ballistic missiles like the Oreshnik feature prominently. This new force could defy expectations that Russia will become more reliant on its nuclear arsenal as its conventional capabilities deteriorate.

NATO should begin preparing for this now by making its major air bases less attractive targets for Russian missiles. This can be achieved by dispersing aircraft to remote locations—minor runways and highways throughout Europe—in a crisis so they are harder for Russia to find, target, and destroy.

Some NATO states already train and prepare for certain refueling and rearming operations at dispersed locations. But the problem of aircraft complexity remains. Though dispersion can help ensure the survival of the aircraft themselves, the major air bases will remain tempting targets because of how dependent fighter aircraft are on these bases for intensive maintenance. If Russia can attack these larger bases, it will be able to destroy the valuable maintenance tools and parts stockpiles that keep fighter aircraft running in combat.

To plan for a reconstituted and possibly more dangerous Russian missile force, NATO states should embrace a dispersal plan that allows for longer operations in the field. This plan would require investment in more spare parts and support equipment, as well as the ability to conduct more complicated maintenance operations in the field—such as through mobile units equipped with workstations inside vehicles that would be dispatched to sites to maintain aircraft. This would aid both deterrence and warfighting.

Two problems stand in the way of this effort, but both can be rectified. The first is parts. Budget cuts across many NATO air forces have reduced the readiness rate of aircraft. This is a problem especially for the F-35 fleet, where parts backlogs are widespread, but it extends to other aircraft such as the Eurofighter Typhoon. NATO states should budget for and invest heavily in not only fixing this parts shortfall but also exceeding it, maintaining depots of aircraft parts across their territory to ensure aircraft can be quickly returned to service from wherever they may be dispersed to.

The second problem is experience and personnel. The Government Accountability Office has noted in the past that U.S. military personnel lack experience in many maintenance tasks related to the F-35 due partly to the lack of spare parts and support equipment. Given the global state of the F-35 supply chain, other NATO states will also likely face these problems.

NATO states should regularly practice and perform more complicated maintenance and ensure that they are able to do these tasks on any F-35, regardless of what air force it belongs to. The alliance conducted its first-ever cross-service maintenance exercise with the F-35 last year. Such exercises should be a regular occurrence in all NATO states equipped with the F-35 to ensure jets can easily return to the war regardless of where they have been dispersed. Combined, these measures can reduce NATO’s reliance on a small number of major bases that may be heavily damaged in the opening days of a war.

Russia’s difficulty with long-range strikes against defended military targets in Ukraine should not make Europe complacent about the safety of its forces in the coming decades. The Oreshnik and other systems like it may defy expectations about Russian military posture, and, without action, they will take a toll on NATO’s ability to sustain the fight in a future war.

Decker Eveleth is an associate research analyst at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization based in Washington. He studies foreign nuclear postures utilizing satellite imagery. He holds a master’s degree from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a bachelor’s degree from Reed College.

However, the insistence on security guarantees is an insidious scheme that the United States should spurn. Going down the path that Kyiv and its backers suggest would substantially heighten the risk of a direct U.S. military confrontation with Russia—one that automatically has nuclear implications.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s reckless decision to use Ukraine as a military proxy to weaken Russia, our country is already incurring an unnecessary, alarming level of risk. Being a party to explicit security guarantees to Kyiv would be even more perilous.

This is a path the new Trump Administration must avoid. 

Security Guarantees for Ukraine: A History 

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, Moscow has repeatedly warned that Ukraine’s participation in NATO would cross a “red line” as far as Russia’s security was concerned. 

Making Ukraine a NATO military asset (whether as a formal member of the Alliance or as a de facto member) would be viewed as an existential threat. 

When the United States and key allies ousted Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian president in early 2014, Moscow struck back by annexing Crimea, thereby securing Russia’s crucial naval base at Sevastopol. Washington and its allies foolishly continued to ignore the Kremlin’s warnings, and Moscow escalated matters with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

Since Russia was unwilling to tolerate a NATO military presence on its border before the current war with Ukraine, it is highly improbable that Kremlin leaders will now accept such a presence as a “peacekeeping force” to enforce an accord ending the conflict. Americans and Europeans who believe otherwise are being delusional. 

As I have written elsewhere, the most likely outcome to the current war is either a continuing meat grinder of a conflict that ultimately produces a Russian victory, or a Korea-style armistice that freezes the opposing forces in place indefinitely, with a token peacekeeping contingent comprised of troops from genuinely neutral countries to discourage a resumption of the fighting.  

Let NATO Make Promises to Ukraine Without America

Security guarantees to Ukraine by Europe’s NATO members would almost assuredly be a nonstarter as far as Moscow is concerned. 

Having the United States as a guarantor power, with U.S. forces stationed along the cease-fire line, would likely be even more unacceptable. 

Moreover, trying to issue a security guarantee to Kyiv without a formal peace accord with Russia would cause the risk of an armed confrontation between NATO and Russia to soar.  

Suppose Ukraine and its European backers insist on giving Kyiv a security guarantee. In that case, Washington should make it emphatically clear that the United States will have no part of such a provocative stance. Clarity means letting the European members of NATO know that if they extend such a guarantee to Kyiv, the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5 pledge that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all would not apply in this case. 

U.S. leaders must not let the European allies drag the United States into a catastrophic war with Russia simply because they want to escalate their foolhardy backing for Ukraine.  Hawks in European capitals need to understand that they are on their own if they venture down this path.

Europe’s Changing Military Outlook 

Even the hypothetical danger that NATO’s European powers could drag the United States into war with Russia through the back door of a security guarantee to Ukraine underscores that the fundamental interests of the United States and Europe are increasingly divergent.  It is a realization that appears to be growing on both sides of the Atlantic.  Not only have European leaders condemned major features of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, they are looking more seriously at the need to develop a robust, independent military capability for the European Union. 

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has proposed a plan to “re-arm Europe” by boosting EU defense spending to approximately $840 billion. At that point, EU military spending would be nearly as significant as Washington’s annual outlays.  Adding Non-EU member Britain’s spending would narrow that gap even more.

French President Emmanuel Macron has expressed a willingness to consider extending his country’s nuclear deterrent to cover France’s neighbors—a step that would ease, if not eliminate, democratic Europe’s longstanding reliance on the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

Such changes are long overdue. Europe’s security dependence on the United States began in the aftermath of World War II, when the continent’s democratic countries were still recovering from the devastation of that conflict and were confronting a totalitarian superpower, the Soviet Union.

The initial arrangement to deal with that emergency situation morphed into decades of shameless free-riding on Washington’s protection, long after the European allies had recovered economically and could build whatever forces they needed for deterrence and defense. That point became even more evident when the Soviet Union dissolved and a much weaker Russia emerged from the debris as the USSR’s principal successor state.

Although the decades of free-riding were a financial bonanza for Washington’s European allies, there was a cost in another way.  U.S. leaders called the shots on all important issues.  European leaders and their publics have chafed regarding their policy impotence for decades.  U.S. administrations always resisted or outright sabotaged independent European security initiatives, even as they lobbied for greater financial “burden sharing.”  In other words, U.S. leaders wanted the European allies to pay more for policies that overwhelmingly remained under Washington’s control.

It is increasingly apparent that such an arrangement no longer is acceptable to the principal European powers.  Discontent with the Trump administration’s apparent desire to cut Ukraine loose and terminate NATO’s proxy war against Russia has brought those policy differences to a head.

No Backstop, Either 

Europe’s concerns about Moscow’s intentions are understandable, although giving a security guarantee to Ukraine seems excessively risky and unwise. Nevertheless, it is a decision that the EU and Britain have the right to make.

What the European powers do not have the right to do is trap the United States into absorbing the possible negative consequences of their decision. Given the diverging interests (especially security interests) between Washington and the European metembers of NATO, the time has come to consider dissolving the Alliance. 

At a minimum, U.S. leaders must eliminate any notion that their country will backstop a European security guarantee for Ukraine.  

About the Author: Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter

Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a contributing editor to 19FortyFive and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute.  He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute.  Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

The Russo–Ukrainian War is a great tragedy. Primary blame for the conflict lies with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. However, American and European officials recklessly flouted their assurances to Moscow and challenged its security concerns, then denied their complicity after war erupted. They too are drenched in blood.

Now Ukraine is running out of soldiers and the allies are running out of weapons, whereas Moscow has proved willing to pay the price necessary to win. The Biden administration was inclined to risk war by fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. That policy is now dead. Zelensky continues to push for Kiev’s membership in NATO. Why? Because otherwise, he contends, Russia will attack NATO.

Come again?

At the recent Munich Security Conference, Zelensky spoke of Putin, warning: “I think that he’s preparing the war against NATO countries next year. But it is not 100 percent. God bless we will stop this crazy guy. How to stop him? Security guarantees for us.” He cited a Russian military build-up in Belarus: “They can simply go on the offensive into Ukraine, just like they went in 2022… or they will go to Poland or the Baltic countries.” Indeed, Zelensky told Trump: “Even you. You have [a] nice ocean. And you don’t feel it now. But you will feel it in the future.”

Zelensky is not alone in predicting a Russian rampage. Allied officials, many of whom lied for years about NATO expansion and implementation of the Minsk accords, echo his claims. Putin is a bad guy, but the world is full of dictators who don’t commit aggression. And some democratic states do—the estimates of civilian dead resulting from Washington’s invasion of Iraq alone start in the low 100,000s and race upward. Zelensky’s contention that NATO can prevent Russian aggression against Ukraine but no one else, including America, is obvious nonsense. In fact, Moscow has no reason to attack other states or to expect an easy victory if it did so.

The Europeans are not behaving as if they believe Russia is preparing a Blitzkrieg to the Atlantic. Other than Poland and the Baltics, no European countries are engaging in serious defense buildups. Only last week did the United Kingdom offer a meaningful rearmament program, after shrinking its army to pre-Napoleonic size. France looks serious only compared to other Europeans. Germany’s much acclaimed “Zeitenwende” (historical turning point) was a bust, while Italy and Spain continue to sport large economies but minimal militaries. The Europeans still expect Uncle Sam to play Uncle Sucker.

Anyway, irrespective of Putin’s desires, Russia lacks the capabilities for large-scale aggression. The Soviet Union turned out to be much weaker than the military behemoth promoted in the Pentagon’s propagandistic annual publication Soviet Military Power. After the Soviet breakup the Russian military was but a pale reflection of its predecessor, which explains Moscow’s poor performance against Georgia. Although since reformed, the Russian military again demonstrated its significant limits in Ukraine.

Russia has spent three years battling one nation, even now only slowly gaining ground. Who imagines Moscow conquering Europe, with Russian soldiers overspreading multiple countries, defeating various militaries, occupying ever more territory, and maintaining control over hostile populations? Especially when the U.S. could enable its allies to unleash hell directed at targets in Russia presently beyond Ukraine’s reach.

Moreover, Putin also isn’t acting the part. He originally wasn’t hostile to the West. As a KGB agent stationed in Germany, he was more worldly than most Soviet apparatchiks. He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11 and just a couple weeks later told the German Bundestag “No one calls in question the great value of Europe’s relations with the United States.”

Alas, he changed his opinion of the US, as he explained in his famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. Even then, he targeted NATO expansion, fueled by bad faith and broken promises, as having no “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. … And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

In 2008 after the allies committed to induct Georgia and Ukraine, William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, reported: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). … I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Intelligence officer Fiona Hill, who later served with Trump’s NSC, predicted “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.”

Even so, Putin responded with violence in Ukraine only after the West sought to realign the country, backing a street putsch against the elected president and threatening Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol. He also limited military action to the Crimea and Donbass, eschewing a full-scale invasion of a much weaker Ukraine. And he engaged in negotiations to end the 2008 conflict, leading to the Minsk agreement which Kiev violated and which allied leaders now say they never intended to keep. He sought talks about the critical issues before invading Ukraine in February 2022, but Washington refused. Just weeks after invading, his government negotiated with Kiev to end the fighting. Putin still bears responsibility for attacking Ukraine, but continental conflict was never his objective.

No doubt, Putin’s war aims might expand. However, his demands so far have been limited. A joint Ukraine/NATO commitment to take alliance membership off the table might have forestalled the invasion. Even now the Putin government emphasizes military limitations, saying it would respect its neighbor’s sovereignty, including Ukraine’s joining the European Union—which remains years away because of European, not Russian, obstacles. Negotiations would be the best way to test Moscow’s ultimate intentions.

Nevertheless, Chatham House’s Keir Giles asserts: “Putin’s intention to take what he (and many Russians) see as rightfully theirs has never been clearer.” Elsewhere Giles insists: “There is no doubt as to the intent, and there is a strong risk that Russia might persuade itself it has the capability too.” Where and when has Putin stated or demonstrated these supposedly obvious intentions?

When asked by Tucker Carlson last September whether he planned to invade his neighbors, Putin responded: “We have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering.” War with Poland would happen “only in one case: if Poland attacks Russia.” His conduct so far matches his rhetoric. If he desired European conquest, why didn’t he grab the Baltics long ago? Why didn’t he take all of Georgia in 2008? Why didn’t he attack Poland before it began rearming?

Giles goes on to state: “We are once again living in an era where brute military force will determine the lives and futures of millions of people across the continent.” But that was the case throughout the Cold War. It was also the case with America as the unipower, when the U.S. and allies violently dismembered Yugoslavia while insisting that ethnic Serbs everywhere and always remain under oppressive majorities, as in Croatia and Kosovo.

So far Putin’s behavior, though odious, looks defensive. He has not sought to recreate the Soviet Union. Fearmongers can cite his statement: “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” However, his next line was “Whoever wants it back has no brain.” For the last quarter century Putin sought to create a military cordon sanitaire next to his country, something considerably smaller than what the United States claims as part of its “Monroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. foreign policy is ostentatiously more aggressive, asserting that Washington is entitled to intervene everywhere up to every other nation’s border and often inside their countries as well.

Does Putin have nefarious global ambitions? Much has been written about his “war against the West” and desire for a different “world order.” However, Moscow is not alone in its dissatisfaction with the West, which created a “rules-based order” designed for its benefit, and which it violates whenever convenient. The Global South’s skepticism toward U.S./European policy was well-earned. Moreover, until the allies’ proxy war against Russia, the latter cooperated with the U.S. on nonproliferation against Iran and North Korea. Putin offered assistance in the Bush administration’s campaign against terrorism and provided logistical support against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Russia has long valued good relations with China, but nothing like today’s “partnership without limits.”

After three years of war, Putin’s consistent policy remains: to avoid a clash with NATO. Allied officials lied to Ukrainians as well as Russians, promising membership that they never intended to offer. In moments of weakness, they sometimes admit the truth. For instance, in 2023 then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said of Putin, “He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.” The entry of Finland and Sweden, added Stoltenberg, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Again, Putin’s behavior backs this assessment. If Putin wanted an easy conquest and cared nothing of NATO members, he could have targeted the largely indefensible Baltic states in NATO, which brought a potentially hostile alliance just a few score miles away from St. Petersburg. However, Putin never took advantage of their vulnerable position, even as they upped their hostile rhetoric and military outlays. Finally, he waited years with Ukraine, acting only after the allies seemed intent to bring NATO into Ukraine via weapons shipments, military exercises, and allied training. So now Putin supposedly plans a frontal assault against the alliance he went to war to avoid?

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was, to paraphrase the French statesman Talleyrand, worse than a crime. It was a blunder. Even victory, whatever that means, will leave Moscow worse off. However, U.S. and European officials share blame for the conflict.

To Trump’s credit, he wants to end hostilities. If Kiev is determined to fight on, he should simply conclude America’s involvement. That certainly means no security guarantees to Kiev, or to European governments for aiding Ukraine. Ending the war is essential for the continent. Staying out of the war is even more important for America.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

But Trump has already escalated his burden-sharing demands at the start of his new term in the White House. 

He now insists that the NATO partners increase their military spending to at least 5 percent of annual GDP. Such a level of spending would require The European Union (EU) and Great Britain combined to spend $1.1 trillion—an amount even greater than the bloated U.S. “defense” budget.

Here Comes JD Vance

And it seems Vice President JD Vance, in recent remarks over in Europe at the Munich Security Conference, was tasked to carry a clear message to Europe. Early in Vance’s speech, he did include a call for greater burden-sharing.  “While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine,” the vice president stated, “we also believe that it’s important, in the coming years, for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense.”  It quickly became clear, though, that his emphasis was on another issue that loomed as a potential wedge dividing the Alliance.

“[T]he threat that I worry most about for Europe is not Russia.  It’s not China.  It’s not any other external actor.  What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values that are shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election.  He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.”

A Speech That Europe Should Consider Carefully 

Vance proceeded to enumerate numerous examples of European governments adopting authoritarian policies under the guise of defending democracy. Such steps included censorship measures to ban “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Vance and other critics argue that such exceptions to free speech protections are inherently vacuous and subjective. Worse, they can become a potent mechanism to silence political and ideological opponents. 

From the standpoint of Trump, Vance and other populist conservatives, what was taking place in many European countries was a more virulent version of the treatment they had been facing in the United States.

In addition to censorship measures, Vance and other conservatives believe that ideological opponents were now using unfounded or excessive allegations of Russian meddling to pervert election outcomes. 

Vance found the recent conduct of Romania’s government to be especially egregious.  A fading European commitment to democratic values, he charged, has become so bad that Romania “straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicious of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.” 

He admonished the Munich Conference attendees to avoid such hypocrisy.  “I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective.  You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections.  We certainly do.  You can condemn it on the world stage, even.  But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

His concerns about the handling of Romania’s election were legitimate, as I discuss here. Other analysts have reached similar conclusions that such conduct by a supposedly democratic government was deeply troubling.

A Warning to NATO? 

Vance’s objections about the alleged deficiency of Europe’s commitment to democracy was a message that European leaders and their admirers in the United States clearly did not wish to hear.  However, if they want to preserve NATO, it is a warning that they must heed. 

The Trump administration’s escalating demands for greater burden-sharing already threaten to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies. 

Washington’s ostentatious exclusion of Europe from playing a role in new negotiations with Russia regarding the war in Ukraine is another development that could fracture the Alliance.

U.S. complaints that Europe is betraying the democratic values supposedly undergirding the trans-Atlantic relationship might become a third major wedge dividing NATO. 

And this one may have even more potential than the other two to create a fatal division.

The Europeans need to face the fact that, like it or not, populist conservatives control the current U.S. administration.

Tucker Carlson and other populist conservatives even have expressed admiration for Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban and other right-wing political leaders in Europe. 

Trump administration policymakers are not likely to stand by idly as entrenched establishment governments in Europe harass their ideological compatriots on the other side of the Atlantic.

Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a contributing editor to 19FortyFive and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

First, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth effectively ruled out future NATO membership for Ukraine, saying that he does not see it as a “realistic outcome” of the war. Trump then went further, telling reporters that he agrees “that a country in Russia’s position” could never allow Ukraine to join NATO, and blamed Biden for refusing to take it off the table. “I don’t see that happening,” he added.

Trump also announced that he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the two would “start negotiations immediately” to end the Ukraine war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has done the same with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov – a dialogue that Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, shunned throughout his tenure – ahead of a proposed Trump-Putin summit. White House officials, including Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, will meet Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia next week. The US government’s post-Biden U-turn was capped by Vice President JD Vance, whose speech at the Munich Security Conference only mentioned Ukraine in passing.

In distancing himself from NATO’s Ukraine invite and speaking to Moscow directly, Trump has drawn a stark contrast with Biden.

In January 2022, the Biden administration undermined Germany and France’s last-ditch effort to avoid a Russian invasion by insisting that “there will be no change” to NATO’s “open door,” and reneging on Biden’s apparent concession on placing offensive US weaponry inside Ukraine. After Russia invaded, Biden ensured there would be no change to the conflict by undermining all opportunities for diplomacy. This included refusing to speak with the Kremlin; sabotaging the April 2022 peace deal that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators brokered in Istanbul; and, months later, ignoring the public pleas of his top military chief, Gen. Mark Milley, who took the unprecedented step of breaking with the White House to urge diplomacy.

The Biden administration undermined the April 2022 agreement not only by advising Zelensky to reject it, but by refusing to provide the security guarantees that his government asked for in order to finalize it. As the Washington Post explained at the time, the “awkward reality” was that some NATO proxy warriors believe that “it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost.” After Ukrainians kept fighting and dying at his behest, Biden closed his presidency by refusing to grant them the NATO membership that they had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for.

Now that NATO’s chief patron, under new leadership, has decided that it’s ready for Ukrainians to stop dying, Kyiv and Europe are receiving a new reminder of their subordinate status.

After Trump announced his call with Putin, European states scrambled for his attention. “If there is agreement made behind our backs, it will simply not work,” E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas complained. “You need Europeans and Ukrainians to implement this deal.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius pleaded that Europe should not be relegated to the “kids’ table.” According to the Financial Times, “EU diplomats are increasingly nervous about the difficulties” they’ve had “securing meetings with members of the Trump administration.” A senior Ukrainian official offered a blunt assessment: “It’s clear that everyone is waiting for Trump to tell them what to do.”

As of now, the Trump team is not even telling Europe to sit at the kids’ table. Asked if the US can guarantee that European states will take part in US-led negotiations with Russia, Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, responded: “The answer is no.” Referring to the Minsk peace process overseen by France and Germany, Kellogg added: “They failed miserably. So we’re not going to go down that path.” Kellogg declined to mention that the Minsk “failed” because the US actively undermined it, as Victoria Nuland quietly promised to do at the Munich summit ten years ago this month.

Zelensky is faring even worse. His government has also not been invited to join the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia. Asked if he sees Ukraine as an equal partner in peace talks with Russia, Trump declined to say yes, offering only that this was “an interesting question.”

Trump’s main engagement with Kyiv has been to demand that it hand the US half of Ukraine’s mineral resources. While Zelensky’s “Victory Plan” floated this offer in exchange for continued US military assistance, Trump’s proposed agreement seeks Ukraine’s resources “in exchange for past military assistance,” the Financial Times reports (emphasis added), “and did not contain any proposals for similar future assistance.”

Trump has also not offered any security guarantees for Ukraine, and Hegseth has already ruled out deploying US troops as part of one. According to one report, Trump is only seeking a security guarantee for US control of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, by proposing that US troops would safeguard it once a peace deal with Russia was reached. Trump is therefore seeking compensation from Ukraine and offering it nothing in return.

Zelensky has rejected Trump’s ultimatum. Beyond that one act of defiance, he has turned to his traditional tactics of NATO fearmongering and Trump flattery. If the US pulls out of NATO, Zelensky told NBC News, there is a “100 percent” chance Russia will invade the post-Soviet states of Europe and likely beyond. Meanwhile, after Trump told him that he believes Putin is “ready for these negotiations”, Zelensky says he replied: “No, he’s a liar. He doesn’t want any peace”, and that Putin is merely just “scared about the President Trump.”

Yet it is Zelensky who is scared of US-Russia peace talks, and for good reason. After subordinating his country’s future to Biden’s goal of bleeding Russia, he understands that his own political future is doomed without continued US military support.

“We will have low chance — low chance to survive without support of the United States,” Zelensky told NBC. “I think it’s very important, critical.” In another act of desperation, Zelensky has proposed making Ukraine the backbone of a new European military force. Yet as he acknowledged shortly before the Munich conference, both Ukraine and Europe’s NATO members are toothless without the US military watching over them. “There are voices which say that Europe could offer security guarantees without the Americans, and I always say no,” he said. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

Zelensky may have one ray of hope. Whereas Trump seems inclined to discard Ukraine and Europe, that does not mean that he is prepared to meet Russia’s security demands. While the Kremlin would clearly welcome Trump’s apparent decision to rule out NATO for Ukraine, it went to war three years ago this month for far more than that. Moscow also wants a rollback of NATO’s military presence on Russia’s borders, including the United States’ so-called “missile defense” sites in Poland and Romania, as well as a resumption of the arms control agreements that Trump nixed in his first term.

This week, Trump also floated the possibility of an agreement in which the US, Russia, and China, all cut their military expenditures by half. But as Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov warned, Russia will “defend its interests so as not to be seduced by any false promises” during its upcoming talks with Washington, a reference to broken pledges of years past.

Until Trump provides specifics on how he plans to negotiate with Moscow, any declarations of imminent peace are therefore premature. What is clear is that the US is no longer pretending to care about Ukrainian agency, and openly flaunting the decisive leverage that could have ended this conflict long ago.

No one illustrates this more than the increasingly desperate Zelensky. After signing an October 2022 presidential decree ruling out talks with Moscow so long as Putin is in power – thereby enshrining the neoconservative goal of regime change – Zelensky has now suddenly reversed himself and declared that the only Russian he would speak to is Putin.

By reversing his own signed order in a flailing bid for Trump’s approval, Zelensky is newly underscoring that only one decree has governed Ukraine throughout its catastrophic proxy war with Russia: Washington’s decree, at Ukraine’s expense.

We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to communists coming to power in France, Italy and elsewhere. The truth of the matter, however, is that even the worst case – a communist France (or Italy or Belgium) – was not a serious military threat to America’s homeland security.

As we pointed out in Part 2, the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles. Its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht and its Navy, which embodied but a tiny fraction of the US Navy’s fire-power, had no ability whatsoever to successfully transport an invasionary force across the Atlantic. Even had it allied with a “communist” France, for example, the military threat to the American homeland just wasn’t there.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for electorates who might have stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem, not a mortal threat to liberty and security on America’s side of the Atlantic moat.

Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives—aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and then NATO—were clinically described as “containment”  measures by their authors, who averred that they were designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, and were not a prelude to intervention in eastern Europe or to an attack on Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.

To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” from Stettin (Poland) on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.

That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left. Likewise, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.

So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed. Why did Washington plunge instead into deeply entangling alliances in western Europe and unnecessary confrontation and overt conflict with Soviet Russia for no good reason of homeland military security?

Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. So unless countered with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, it would be the 1930s all over again.

However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a substitute form of fiscal stabilization and safeguard against a relapse into 1930s-style depression.

Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization (1946), in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% from 1945 and never looked back.

What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, the private GDP growth rate clocked in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the Keynesian abyss.

To be sure, the overall GDP accounts said otherwise because they simply weren’t designed for a full-on war economy. That is to say, by the reckoning of the Keynesian-designed NIPA accounts government sector GDP in 1945 had clocked in at $2.3 trillion in today’s dollars and accounted for 75% of total GDP. Thereafter, of course, the government sector GDP numbers tumbled rapidly downhill as demobilization proceeded apace, dropping by nearly 70% to $750 billion by 1948 and about 26% of GDP.

Of course, the bloated 1945 government sector GDP figures were mostly for items which got accounted in the NIPA tables as “investment” in ships, plans, tanks, artillery and machine guns – none of which had a market price or much peacetime consumer utility. Accordingly, the overall GDP numbers were a case of wholly incompatible cats and dogs, which did not even fully normalize until after 1950.

Still, when you peeled back the Keynesian accounting chimera the American economy in the late 1940s was actually blooming with good health. And there was no reason to believe that the European economies would not have similarly turned the corner to civilian prosperity in due course.

Indeed, that the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.

In short, Washington’s “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European foundations, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.

The Soviet archives also make clear that the Soviet Union never had a plan to militarily conquer western Europe. In effect, the absolute absence of such offensive military plans amounts to the Cold War Dog which didn’t bark.

To the contrary, the Soviet leadership viewed themselves as relatively vulnerable and were well aware that their country was much weaker in industrial and military capability than the United States. Accordingly, their prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won in with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.

In fact, during the early post-war period Stalin himself had constantly changed his mind even about the politics of western Europe, tacking inconsistently to and fro about the role communist parties should play in their respective countries. Even then, he had still pursued a variant of detente with the Western Powers, hoping to reach a negotiated settlement on most areas of difference, especially on the question of Germany’s future.

Indeed, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR. As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.

They feared that the U.S. economic aid program might attempt to target Stalin’s new chain of Soviet-oriented buffer states for reintegration into the capitalist economic system of the West. Thus the Marshall Plan, conceived by U.S. policy-makers primarily as a defensive measure to stave off economic collapse in Western Europe, proved indistinguishable to the Kremlin leadership from an offensive attempt to subvert Soviet security interests.

At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from planning meetings in late July that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan—discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.

Yet even then, the archival documentation shows that in making this shift, the Soviet leadership was moved primarily by fear of its own vulnerability to American economic power, not by a plan of world conquest which became the ultimate justification for the post-war American Empire.

Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,

The Marshall Plan does appear to have been largely a defensive move on the part of the United States, as the orthodox scholars would have us believe. But the story hardly ends there. The plan had its “offensive” side as well, in that its authors did indeed hope to lure some of the Eastern European states out of the Soviet orbit and integrate them into the Western European economy.

In this sense, the revisionists were correct to focus on the economic motivations behind behind the plan, which was more than just a geostrategic move to counter Soviet expansionism. As for the Soviet response, as the new documentation suggests, it was indeed largely defensive and reactive, even if it often relied upon crude offensive tactics. What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable, and that assertive action was required to defend that status quo.

It was in this environment that the Western powers felt compelled to design the details of the Marshall Plan in such a way that it would stabilize Western Europe, but only at the cost of provoking a confrontation with the USSR. And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil. Neither the West nor the Soviet Union deliberately strove to provoke a confrontation with the other. Instead, the fluid political and economic conditions in postwar Europe compelled each side to design policies which were largely defensive, but had the unfortunate consequence of provoking conflict with the other.

The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb one year later in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, it did not create a requirement for US air bases in Europe – just as the Soviets were never to have such bases in the Western Hemisphere, as ultimately confirmed by the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.

To the contrary, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding a fringe of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.

This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally plausible and very highly certain.

In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had this deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers included the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker, both of which had impressive range capabilities, with the B-36 having a range of up to 10,000 miles without refueling.

However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 could carry a heavy bomb load and had a range of approximately 8,800 miles without aerial refueling.

By contrast, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their nukes, which was a reverse-engineered copy of the U.S. B-29 Superfortress. However, these bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of A-bombs to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.

When the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Age (ICBM) materialized in the second half of the 1950s, the Soviets were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed 4 of these ICBMs by 196o.

The United States conducted its own first ICBM tests at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in October 1959. By the end of 1960, the United States had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to about 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962.

As the decade unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and  securely-protected, solid fueled ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.

As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.

In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from the home country of each.

Secondly, there was no risk of conventional military attacks on the US on the far side of the great ocean moats. So NATO was not any kind of useful military defense asset for the US.

As we will elaborate further in Part 4, NATO was actually about international politics. As such, it had actually and materially added to the cost of US military security. That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there for the purpose of defending European nations from a largely non-existent Soviet threat – but one which in any case should have been addressed by their own military capabilities from their own fiscal resources.

Ironically, in fact, Washington’s plunge into “entangling alliances” has had the effect of sharply lessening Europe’s Warfare State costs by effectively shifting them to American taxpayers per Donald Trump’s patented complaint.

But America didn’t get any extra homeland security in the bargain. What it did get was the privilege of indirectly footing the bill for Europe’s generous Welfare States and enslavement to the myth that global alliances, allies, bases, interventions and regime change adventures have kept the world stable and America safe.

But none of that is true. Not by a long shot.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

How can NATO’s humiliating defeat and Austin’s view be reconciled?

Of course NATO was never the most powerful military alliance in history — that accolade surely goes to the World War II Allies: the U.S., Russia, Britain, and the Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, after 1945, NATO did its job, did it well, and those of us who served in it were proud to do so.

Since the Berlin Wall’s fall, though, its record has become tarnished. Satisfactory in Kosovo. Humiliated in Afghanistan. Strategic failure looming in Ukraine. Are we really sure NATO is up to the job of defending democratic Europe from a supposedly expansionist Russia in the doomsday scenario of a conventional NATO-Russia war?

The doomsday NATO-Russia war scenario is the defining way to explore this question. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics,” and our strategic analysis needs to start all the way back in NATO’s logistics rear areas, then work forward to a future line of battle on the continent of Europe.

First, unlike Russia, no major NATO nation is industrially mobilized for war, as evidenced by the fact that Russia is still outproducing NATO on 155mm shells for Ukraine. Which, incidentally, gives the lie to the view that Russia is poised to take more of Europe — if we in NATO truly believed this, we would all be mobilizing at speed.

More importantly, it is not clear that NATO could mobilize at the speed or scale needed to produce the levels of equipment, ammunition, and people to match Russia. And certainly not without a long build up that would signal our intent. This is not just about lost industrial capacity, but also lost financial capacity. Of the largest NATO nations, only Germany has a debt to GDP ratio below 100%.

Second, to have the remotest chance of success in this doomsday scenario of a NATO-Russia war, U.S. forces would need to deploy at scale into continental Europe. Even if the U.S. Army was established at the necessary scale — with a 2023 establishment of 473,000, under one third of the current Russian Army, it is not — the overwhelming majority of American equipment and logistics would have to travel by sea.

There, they would be vulnerable to Russian submarine-launched torpedoes and mines. As a former underwater warfare specialist, I do not believe that NATO now has the scale of anti-submarine or mine-warfare forces needed to protect Europe’s sea lines of communication.

Nor, for that matter, would these forces be able to successfully protect Europe’s hydrocarbon imports, in particular oil and LNG so critical to Europe’s economic survival. Losses because of our sea supply vulnerability would not only degrade military production, but also bring accelerating economic hardship to NATO citizens, as soaring prices and energy shortages accompanying an outbreak of war rapidly escalated the political pressure to settle.

Third, our airports, sea ports, training, and logistics bases would be exposed to conventional ballistic missile attack, against which we have extremely limited defenses. Indeed, in the case of the Oreshnik missile, no defense.

An Oreshnik missile arriving at Mach 10+ would devastate a NATO arms factory, or naval, army and air force base. As in Ukraine, Russia’s ballistic campaign would also target our transport, logistics, and energy infrastructure. In 2003, while I was working for the British MOD’s Policy Planning staffs, our post 9/11 threat analysis suggested a successful attack against an LNG terminal, such as Milford Haven, Rotterdam, or Barcelona, would have sub-nuclear consequences. The follow-on economic shock-waves would rapidly ripple across a European continent, now increasingly dependent on LNG.

Fourth, unlike Russia, NATO nations’ forces are a heterogenous bunch. My own experience, while leading the offshore training of all European warships at Flag Officer Sea Training in Plymouth, and later working with NATO forces in Afghanistan, was that all NATO forces were exceptionally enthusiastic but had very different levels of technological advancement and trained effectiveness.

Perhaps more contemporarily important, other than a handful of NATO trainers forward deployed in Ukraine, our forces are trained according to a pre-drone “maneuver doctrine” and have no real-world experience of modern peer-to-peer attritional warfighting. Whereas the Russian Army has close to three years experience now, and is unarguably the world’s most battle-hardened.

Fifth, NATO’s decision-making system is cumbersome, hampered by the need to constantly communicate from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe to national capitals — a complexity made worse each time another nation is admitted.

Worse still, NATO cannot do strategy. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was shocked to find that NATO had no campaign strategy. In 2022, notwithstanding numerous Russian warnings about NATO expansion constituting a red-line, NATO was wholly unprepared, strategically, for the obvious possibility of war breaking out — as evidenced again by our inability to match Russia’s 155mm shell production.

Even now, in 2025, NATO’s Ukraine strategy is opaque, perhaps best summarized as “double-down and hope.”

In summary, NATO is positioning itself as Europe’s defender, yet lacks the industrial capacity to sustain peer-to-peer warfighting, is wholly dependent on U.S. forces for the remotest chance of success, is unable satisfactorily to defend its sea lines of communication against Russian submarine, or its training and industrial infrastructure against strategic ballistic bombardment, is comprised of a diverse mix of un-bloodied conventional forces, and lacks the capacity to think and act strategically.

An easy NATO victory cannot be assumed, and I am afraid that the opposite looks far more likely to me.

So what? Conventionally, we could now work out how to redress the manifest weaknesses revealed. Strategic audits to confirm the capability gaps. Capability analyses to work out how to fill the gaps. Conferences to decide who does what and where costs should fall. Whilst all the time muddling on, hoping that NATO might eventually prevail in Ukraine, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.

But without unanimous agreement of the NATO nations to increase military investment at scale, we would be lucky to solve these capability shortfalls within ten years, let alone five.

Or we could return to consider — at last — the judgement of many Western realists that NATO expansion was the touchpaper for the Russo-Ukraine War. The Russians warned us, time and again, that such expansion constituted a red line. So too did some of our very greatest strategic thinkers, starting with George Kennan in 1996, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, even Bill Burns in his famous ‘Nyet means Nyet’ diplomatic telegram, and most recently John Mearsheimer with his 2014 forecasts. All ignored.

The truth is that NATO now exists to confront the threats created by its continuing existence. Yet as our scenario shows, NATO does not have the capacity to defeat the primary threat that its continuing existence has created.

So perhaps this is the time to have an honest conversation about the future of NATO, and to ask two questions. How do we return to the sustainable peace in Europe that all sides to the conflict seek? Is NATO the primary obstacle to this sustainable peace?

(Ret.) Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jermy commanded warships in the 5th Destroyer Squadron and Britain’s Fleet Air Arm. He served in the Falklands War and in the Adriatic for the Bosnian and Kosovo campaigns, and retired after an operational tour, in 2007, as Strategy Director in the British Embassy in Afghanistan. He is the author of Strategy for Action: Using Force Wisely in the 21st Century and now works in offshore energy.

It is the U.S. and the West that refused to negotiate NATO expansion and a general European security architecture and instead push Ukraine forward to the frontline in NATO’s confrontation with ‘Putin’s Russia’, despite the West’s own claims that Putin and his Russia were dangerous and expansionist. 

It is the U.S. and the West that conned Zelenskiy into continuing the war with Russia that Moscow escalated after losing all hope in January 2022 for any negotiations with the West over these issues. Putin opted to engage in coercive diplomacy by initiating the ‘special military operation’ and invading Ukraine and almost simultaneously offering peace talks to Ukraine in February 2022 in order to achieve with Kiev the kind of security agreement that eluded Moscow in relations with the West. The Minsk, then Istanbul talks that resulted reached a preliminary agreement only to see the West scuttle the agreement by refusing to provide the security guarantees envisaged in it any by dispatching then British Premier Boris Johnson to issue the NATO message that Kiev should fight and Washington and Brussels would provide everything Ukraine needed ‘for as long as it takes.’ The Western-Ukrainian relationship that has developed in the course of the war is reminiscent of that of a vassalage—Ukraine being the vassal with little to no sovereignty.

It is the U.S. and the West that have refused to begin peace talks with Moscow or pressure Kiev to do so and instead continuously escalated a war that is attritting Ukraine both in terms of its population and its territory even as Russian forces’ drive westward accelerates with each passing month (as I predicted in January 2024; see  https://youtu.be/P_MJi5H6HKU?si=rxRiaE0EglSgbclw at the 1:00:45 mark), despite Putin’s and other top Russian officials’ repeated statements that they are open to any negotiations.   

Now the Ukrainian state’s control over its territories is being whittled away by Russia’s mounting, if cautious offensive. It has been stated by Zelenskiy and Western leaders that Ukrainian forces’ ill-advised, costly, and failed incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in July 2024 provides Kiev with collateral to trade for its Russian-occupied regions. But Russia has stated that no talks with Kiev are possible so long as Ukrainian troops remain on Russian territory, and Russia’s advancing troops in Ukraine are moving deeper into regions beyond the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia regions Russia has laid claim to and annexed. Thus, rather than Ukraine being able to trade Kursk for one or more of those regions in any future talks, it will be Russia that will be able to demand concessions for the return of regions or parts thereof such as Kharkiv (Kharkov), Sumy, Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk), Mikolaev, and even eastern Kiev. 

Moreover, the danger of Russian forces crossing the Dnieper River into western Ukraine is just over the horizon. So it now is becoming more in NATO’s perceived self-interest in its pursuit of encroachment on Russia’s borders and encircling her to destroy what is Russia’s Ukrainian buffer than it is to preserve any Ukraine that is a non-bloc, neutral state. Russia has repeatedly declared that it is in its self-interestthat Ukraine be a non-bloc, neutral state and never become a member of NATO. This is because Russia prefers a buffer be situated between it and the Western alliance for all the obvious and not so obvious (to many) reasons. Therefore, the party in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War that is most interested in destroying Ukraine as a state is not Russia but NATO. 

The elimination of Ukraine will achieve the key goal that NATO’s expansion to Ukraine has been intended to achieve: NATO’s acquisition of members along all of Russia’s western and southwestern borders (the Transcaucasus). In comparison with having Ukraine as a member-state, Ukraine’s absorption by Russia has only two downsides for Washington and Brussels. First, they will have to forego the control over the Black Sea they coveted as the second goal of NATO expansion, though perhaps Georgia remains an option, however less liable in the wake of the recent elections and failed attempt to repeat the color of ‘rose’ revolution there. Second, there will be a blow to Western prestige in light of its failure to save Ukraine and deal a strategic defeat to Russia.

There are numerous ways in which the West or elements therein can facilitate or bring about Ukraine’s demise. The most likely is another scuttling of peace talks – this time those being worked on by the Trump Administration – forcing Ukraine to continue fighting a losing war of attrition with Russian advancing forces right up to the Polish, Hungarian, and Rumanian borders. This is precisely what hardline former Russian Security Council Secretary and FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev was warning in his much discussed Moskovskii Komsomolets interview. For Trump this will be a soon forgotten political defeat. But many in DC and Brussels will rejoice at the prospect of a long war for Russia that lasts until Putin’s physical or political health fails, sparking a power struggle that might offer the prospect of a Russian collapse on the Soviet model. 

A less likely scenario would be the previous one with annexations of Transcarpathian and western provinces of Ukraine by Hungary, Rumania, and Poland added in. Elements in all three of these countries are pushing for returns of traditional national territories given to the USSR’s Ukraine SSR by Joseph Stalin after World War Two. Midwives of Ukraine’s dissolution could also emerge as a result of NATO’s insertion of troops into Ukraine west of the Dnieper, as was proposed by some earlier in the war. Recent talk of British and French ‘peacekeepers’ in Ukraine could perform the same function. Although this variation is unlikely, such a ‘protectorate Ukraine’ could eventually be dissolved and its parts incorporated by its neighbors as noted above. 

With Ukraine’s disappearance, the Beltway and Brussels can and will assuage themselves with the knowledge that NATO has reached Russia’s borders in yet another sector and has the option of fomenting Ukrainian separatists inside Russia.

The one thing that would likely trump or delay the abovementioned scenarios, besides Trump and any innovative schemes his team might conjure up, is some form of direct Western intervention in the war on the ground. In this case, there is still no guarantee of Ukraine’s survival as Western and Russian troops rampage through the country in the long war over NATO expansion.

There is a persistent minority attempting to rewrite history regarding the Ukraine war. They insist it began as a Russian invasion without any provocation. Some even allege Russia launched a campaign to conquer all of Ukraine with the intention to move on to the rest of Europe with nations falling like dominoes to create a new Russian empire. Sound familiar?

A pair of neocons penned an article claiming a Russia full-scale invasion occurred on February 24, 2022 “expanding dramatically the war against Ukraine [begun] in 2014” without any provocation. A prime reason why Russia invaded Ukraine is due to “an asymmetric balance of power,” these neocons argue. Russia is bigger and militarily more powerful and Ukraine is much too weak to defend itself so invasion was a natural sequence of events. This claim is easily dismissed as wildly absurd. Belarus also borders Russia, has one-fourth the population of Ukraine, and a military about 1/20 the size of Ukraine’s armed forces; yet, Russia has not invaded Belarus due to any power imbalance.

There is even the cartoonish claim “Putin’s deep-seated hatred of democracy” led to the invasion. This is reminiscent of the silly response “Because they hate our freedoms!” to the question of why Al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. As far as democracy goes, under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Ukraine has banned opposition parties, canceled elections, censored independent press, regulated domestic and foreign press outlets, and enacted a citizen speech ban. Democracy, eh? Despite the confidence in their views and favorable press treatment, their version of an unprovoked invasion is patently false.

To understand what actually took place requires a thorough review of events in the years leading up to February 2022.

This column does not defend nor excuse the Russia invasion of Ukraine. It is a presentation of the pertinent facts and details to give the reader a complete understanding of what occurred. Most US news organizations are parroting the Biden Administration’s line there wasn’t any provocation. Major events rarely, if ever, occur in isolation. Oftentimes there are actions that influence momentous decisions. Those who insist Russia invaded without provocation steadfastly ignore events and precipitating factors that occurred long before February 24, 2022. This column addresses these.

First, the reader should review “Russia and the NATO Promise” (Substack, July 16, 2024) that highlights the repeated promises made by the US and NATO nations that the western alliance would not expand. These promises were made in return for Soviet (and later, Russian) support for German reunification after 1989. Soviet/Russian support regarding the status of Germany was not a courtesy offered by the US. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1, 1945 gave Britain, France, US and USSR equal say on the future of Germany. Those promises to the USSR/Russia to not expand NATO are documented with letters, State Department communiqués, meeting minutes and summit notes obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The first documented US assurance to not expand NATO was made in February 1990 by Secretary of State James Baker when he promised in a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO boundaries would not move “one inch to the east.”

Since that first promise was made, 16 nations have joined NATO. All 16 of those countries moved the NATO boundary east. Not surprisingly, the repeated expansion of NATO since 1999 fuels Russian distrust of the alliance and devalues US promises. Despite ample documented evidence, NATO still falsely claims promises to not expand NATO were never made.

This following point is very important to understand in the context of west European actions. There were 16 NATO nations in 1990 when the Berlin Wall fell. There are 32 NATO nations today. The US is not one among 32 equal passengers riding on the NATO bus. The US drives the NATO bus. Aside from rare exceptions, the US dictates NATO policy. That was true in the 1980s when this author worked with NATO and it is true today.

In the last 25 years, sixteen nations have joined NATO. They are Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were the first three to join in March 1999.

Ukraine has been under consideration for NATO membership since1997 when Ukraine and NATO signed the Charter on Distinctive Partnership. The CDP established military ties between Ukraine and the alliance and represented a first-step toward membership.

Progress toward membership was delayed in the early aughts as the US was preoccupied with the 9/11 attacks and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. US-Ukraine relations briefly soured in 2002 after it was learned Ukraine sold sophisticated air dense technology to Iraq in violation of UN sanctions and when the US was considering military operations against Saddam Hussein.

In the first decade after the USSR collapsed the Russians solicited NATO membership, and also explored the creation of a larger European organization to join. President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) viewed alignment with the west as the best path toward democratic and free market reforms, and to modernize Russia. At great personal risk from powerful Russian hardliners, Yeltsin openly advocated Russia partnering with the west. Bill Clinton repeatedly suggested to Yeltsin that NATO membership was in the offing, but privately worked to isolate Russia to exclude it from post-Cold War Europe.

Clinton’s policies to subvert Russian integration with the west were continued under George Bush. Bush’s administration was stocked with neocons who were laser-focused, without explanation, on policies that would isolate Russia from the world community. These neocons included Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, UN Ambassador John Bolton, among others.

According to historian Stephen Wertheim, “Neoconservatives [in the Bush administration] were one of the more cohesive intellectual and political groups that made a strident case for US global military dominance and, after 9/11, a series of open-ended wars.”

The Bush administration’s most aggressive taunt of Russia occurred in 2004. It was revealed the Bush administration planned to build an eastern European anti-ballistic missile system with an antenna array in the Czech Republic and missile systems based in Poland. The administration claimed the missile system was merely defensive to counter Iranian missile threats. This was a head-scratcher since Iran’s longest-range ballistic missile, the Shabab-3, could not reach beyond Turkey. Russian leaders understandably viewed the plan as a provocative measure aimed at Russia. To his credit, Barack Obama scrapped the plan in 2009 to ease tensions.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had long been considered the most corrupt nation on the European continent. Modernization was occurring very slowly. Democracy was relatively non-existent for the first 15 years in Ukraine following independence.

No doubt these shortfalls contributed to delays in offering Ukraine immediate NATO membership. There were internal and external attempts to nudge the country toward democratic reforms. The US was involved openly (USAID and US-funded NGOs) and covertly (CIA and others) in Ukrainian politics. These efforts ultimately undermined the fledgling democratic government. The US spent more than $5 billion to move Ukraine toward the west and away from Russia.

US-directed overt and covert efforts encouraged protests in 2004 against the government. Facing several corruption scandals, President Leonid Kuchma (1994-2005) declined to run for a third term. In 2004 and today, 35-years after independence, corruption still remains a very high-priority issue for Ukrainians. Polling in 2024 found Ukrainians believe corruption (51%) poses a bigger threat to Ukraine than Russian aggression (46%).

In 2004, the US-favored politician to be the next Ukraine president was Viktor Yushchenko. His main opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, was backed by Russia. Ukraine’s president is the head of state while the prime minister is the head of government. While the US and Russia engaged in a tug-of-war to gain influence in Ukraine, polling consistently showed Ukrainians wanted to remain neutral as a bridge between east and west. For a decade, about two-thirds of polling respondents strongly opposed NATO membership. Just 20-30% favored joining the western alliance.

After he was elected president in early 2005, Yushchenko (2005-2010) launched the “Our Ukraine” political party. A key party plank was to seek full NATO membership, contradicting the will of the people. Ukrainian opposition to NATO membership began to spike when Bush and Yushchenko began aggressively courting alliance membership.

In a February 2008 classified cable addressed to the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and the Joint Chiefs, the US ambassador to Russia William Burns warned Russia was deeply concerned over Yushchenko’s request of a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the upcoming NATO meeting. The MAP is a roadmap outlining the path toward full NATO membership.

The month prior, Yushchenko released a statement calling for Ukraine to be admitted to NATO. Joining him in the call for NATO membership was Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Parliamentary Chairman Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

According to Burns, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned “a radical new expansion of NATO [i.e., Ukraine] may bring about a serious political-military shift that will inevitably affect the security interests of Russia.”

Burns further cautioned Ukraine and Russia were bound by their 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership that included security guarantees between the two countries. Ukraine flirting with NATO membership could upset those security safeguards, he warned. Because western Ukraine was Europe-leaning and eastern Ukraine was loyal to Russia, Burns reported Ukraine membership in NATO “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Burns made it very clear that potential NATO membership for Ukraine was a volatile issue that could have serious repercussions for Ukrainians, neighboring Russia, and NATO.

Months later at that NATO council meeting in Bucharest, Romania in April 2008, Yushchenko told attendees unequivocally that Ukraine was seeking full membership in the alliance. Bush aggressively supported the request. The organization withheld offering Ukraine the requested MAP due to the very concerns outlined in Burns’ cable that it would unnecessarily antagonize Russia, and possibly destabilize Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, an invited attendee at the meeting, drew his red line. Putin warned Bush in-person that Ukraine membership in NATO was “a direct threat” to Russia and a provocation that would cause Russia to partition eastern Ukraine and Crimea from the rest of the nation. These two regions are about 60% ethnic Russian and 10% Crimean Tatars, an ethnic Turkic group indigenous to the Crimea. The Crimea had been part of greater Russia for centuries until transferred in 1954 as an autonomous republic to be administered by Ukraine. About 1 in 4 Ukrainians are ethnic Russians with most living in the east.

Ukrainian citizen opposition to NATO membership began falling in 2013, according to polling. However, results were dramatically skewed because Ukrainian pollsters began excluding participation by residents in the heavily Russian ethnic eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.

After his January 2009 inauguration, Obama received a letter of congratulations from Yushchenko. In the letter, Yushchenko emphasized his desire to join NATO. Yushchenko wrote: “We highly value the degree of support given by the United States to our strategic aim of becoming a full-fledged NATO member.” Yushchenko added: “We [are] hope[ful] the fruitful cooperation toward this goal will be … Ukraine’s full-fledged participation in the alliance.” Yushchenko absolutely wanted Ukraine to join NATO.

Although Obama remained personally silent on the topic of Ukraine NATO membership, key officials and proxies signaled the administration’s position. On February 18, 2009 Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “The [NATO-Ukraine Commission] will meet … about how do we help [Ukraine] move forward with the reform process, with entrenching democratization — in short, all of the things that are necessary in terms of eventual membership in the [NATO] Alliance.”

Gates’ comments did not fall on deaf ears. Two days later the Associated Press reported “Before a closed-door meeting with Ukrainian Defense Minister Yury Yekhanurov and ministers from the alliance’s 26 members, [NATO Secretary General Jaap] de Hoop Scheffer said NATO officials were considering ‘ways in which the alliance can continue to support its preparations for NATO membership’ for Ukraine.”

The following day, former ambassador William Burns now serving in the Obama Administration as the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs emphasized US policy was favorable toward NATO membership for Ukraine. Despite his first-hand knowledge of the angst it would cause Burns was carrying out Obama Administration policy. He said, “The United States attaches a high value to the NATO alliance. Our view is that sovereign nations have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. That means that Ukraine and Georgia have the right to membership in NATO.”

Reacting to those and similar comments, an American bi-partisan panel of diplomats and members of Congress strongly urged Obama to pump the brakes on promoting NATO membership for Ukraine (and Georgia). On March 17, the panel issued the following statement: “We do not believe that the United States has a compelling security interest in expediting NATO membership for either Ukraine or Georgia at this time.”

In early July 2009, NATO and Ukraine signed an addenda to the 1997 Charter on Distinctive Partnership. The addenda strengthened the Ukraine-NATO military relationship. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Kyrylych said the updated document was preparing Ukraine for NATO membership.

Weeks later, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and met with Yushchenko in Kyiv where he announced US support for Ukraine to join NATO. By this time, Yushchenko was considered a lame duck president. He was unlikely to be reelected president in early 2010. Among the chief concerns of Ukrainian citizens was the strong push by Yushchenko and the US for Ukraine to align with the west. The public wanted to remain neutral.

In February 2010 Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) succeeded Yushchenko as president. The vote was a sharp rebuke to Yanukovych’s opponent, then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Both Tymoshenko and Batkivshchyna, her political party, advocated NATO membership.

The following month, in an effort to counter US and NATO western pressure, and to remain neutral, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) passed a law that would bar the country from joining any military alliance.

There were other cultural battles taking place in Ukraine in the spring of 2010 that created perceptions of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians as oppressed minorities. In April, the government reversed an earlier decision made by Yushchenko banning the Russian language in eastern Ukraine offices.

Following independence in 1989, Ukrainian was named the state language and Russian was a de facto second language. Four in 10 Ukrainians want Russian designated as the second official language, according to a 2004 poll. The situation is very similar to Ireland where Gaelic is the official language, but English is widely used in most government offices and in public. Yushchenko’s Russian language ban was unconstitutional, according to Article 10 of the Ukraine Constitution, which states “In Ukraine, the free development, use and protection of Russian, and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine, is guaranteed.”

The majority of residents in eastern Ukraine are ethnic Russians. About 30% of all Ukrainians claim Russian as their mother tongue. Yushchenko’s campaign to de-Russify the country was unpopular, especially in eastern Ukraine. The government also rescinded a Yushchenko executive order naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of the Ukraine.’ Bandera is a divisive figure in Ukraine. He was a neo-Nazi whose militia joined the Germans during WWII, including donning German military uniforms. Bandera’s militia killed an estimated 100,000 Poles and Jews during the war and it was complicit in shipping about 1.4 million Jews to death camps during the Holocaust.

The pro-West newspaper Ukraine Weekly observed in May 2012 ongoing US efforts to admit Ukraine to NATO. The paper reported “US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared on more than one occasion that ‘we should continue to open NATO’s door to European countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, and help them meet NATO standards.’”

NATO was welcoming of Ukraine membership. Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (2009-2014) announced on February 22, 2013 that Ukraine progress toward joining NATO with full membership “still stands.”

By the spring of 2013, Arseniy Yatsenyuk had the full attention of the US State Department’s Victoria Nuland. She was a neocon who worked in prominent roles in both Democratic and Republican administrations. She served as chief of staff to deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott during the Bill Clinton administration. It was Clinton and his Secretary of State Warren Christopher who were promising Russian President Yeltsin they were considering Russia for NATO membership while privately scheming to isolate the nation. Nuland then served as deputy National Security Advisor to Cheney, and later worked in the State Department for Obama. She is married to fellow neocon Robert Kagan who wrote “American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order.”

Yatsenyuk earned the favor of Nuland when he released a statement five years earlier calling for Ukraine to join NATO. Nuland was one of the architects of US efforts to topple democratically-elected Yanukovych, who supported Ukrainian neutrality. The US enlisted the aid of the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and Azov battalion to overthrow the government.

In a leaked telephone call between Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine Nuland was heard saying the US wanted Yatsenyuk to become the new prime minister. This occurred while Yanukovych was still the lawful president. To be clear, the US and not the people of Ukraine, was selecting which candidate should become the next prime minister after the government would fall months later.

It’s understandable for Russia to have been deeply alarmed after observing this sequence of events. The US orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically-elected president and his prime minister (Mykola Azarov) in a bordering state and then dictated their replacements be pro-NATO politicians. Would the US sit idly if Russia did the same in Mexico or Canada?

As violence peaked in early 2014, protesters overran the presidential residence on February 22 forcing Yanukovych to flee Kyiv for safety. Ukrainian politicians promising Ukraine would end neutrality and join NATO were poised to cease power. Days later at a February 26, 2014 press conference, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (2009-2014) commented, “We all remember what we decided at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in 2008. We decided that Ukraine will become a member of NATO.”

This appears to be the red-line scenario Putin warned Bush about six years earlier at their face-to-face meeting at the Bucharest summit. Pro-separatist forces with Russia backing proclaimed the independent Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Russian military seized the Crimean peninsula.

That August, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (2014-2016), who Nuland identified as the next prime minister just months earlier, announced Ukraine would abandon neutrality and join the western alliance. He said, “The government is entering a bill to the [Verkhovna Rada] about the cancellation of Ukraine’s non-bloc status and resumption of Ukraine’s course for NATO membership.”

Two years later after pushing disfavored policies, including NATO membership, Yatsenyuk became the most unpopular elected official in Ukraine history registering a 1.2% favorability rating in polling. He resigned from office in 2016 at the request of the President Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019).

That autumn, the Obama administration publicly weighed-in on Ukraine developments. On November 20, 2014, National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh told the press, “Any decision on potential NATO membership for Ukraine is one for NATO and Ukraine, and the United States supports the right of Ukrainians to make their own decisions.” Days later, Poroshenko urged the Verkhovna Rada to consider abandoning the country’s nonalignment status in order to allow the country to join NATO.

On December 23, the Verkhovna Rada voted to end the country’s non-aligned status inching the nation ever closer toward NATO membership. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev posted on Facebook, “In essence, an application for NATO membership will turn Ukraine into a potential military opponent for Russia.”

Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president on May 20, 2019. Days later on June 5^th, he took his first foreign trip as president when he traveled to Belgium to meet NATO officials to renew Ukraine’s interest in joining the alliance. Zelensky told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty immediately after his meetings it was his goal was to get “full-fledged membership in the EU and NATO.”

After Joe Biden was inaugurated president, Ukraine stepped up its campaign for NATO membership. On February 9, 2021,Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal met with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (2014-2024) to press Ukraine’s claims. At a post-meeting press conference Stoltenberg remarked “The more successful Ukraine is in implementing reforms, the closer Ukraine hopes to meet NATO standards, and the closer you can come to the NATO membership.”

In a June 5, 2021 hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified “We support Ukraine membership in NATO. It currently has all of the tools it needs since the Membership Action Plan was created, a number of other very important tools were developed to help countries prepare for possible NATO membership, including an annual program that Ukraine benefits from. In our estimation, Ukraine has all the tools it needs to continue to move forward in this direction.”

Between 2014-2021, the US provided Ukraine with more than $60 billion in military funding and materiel. US troops were deployed to Ukraine. Although not officially a member of NATO, Ukraine became the nation most integrated into the NATO organization. By 2021, Ukraine was as close to being a full NATO member without actually possessing a laminated “NATO membership card.”

If Russia was already deeply concerned over Ukraine joining the west’s military alliance then those worries were likely elevated when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv on October 19, 2021. According to a Department of Defense statement, Austin visited Ukraine to follow-up on the Strategic Defense Framework signed two months earlier. “The strategic defense framework will also help Ukraine qualify for NATO membership,” according to the Pentagon statement. Before he left Kyiv, Austin warned Russia, “No third country has a veto over NATO’s membership decisions.”

On February 24, 2022, pro-Russia forces began military operations in the Donbas region of Ukraine and the Crimea.

Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

Nor is enough made of the fact that in 1990 and 1991, the Bush administration gave assurances to Gorbachev – assurances that arguably reached the level of a deal – that NATO would not expand east of Germany, including to Ukraine.

But even less is made of what the Clinton administration later promised Yeltsin nor of what the U.S. already knew at the time of where plans of NATO expansion to Ukraine would lead.

Recently declassified documents clearly show that, between 1993 and 2000, the U.S. already knew that a cornered Boris Yeltsin was distraught about NATO expansion and about the West’s broken promise, that expansion to Ukraine was a red line, and that if Russia ever enforced that red line, the U.S. would respond forcefully.

Though Czechia, Hungary and Poland were invited to begin accession talks in 1997 and joined NATO in 1999, a secret October 1994 policy paper, written by National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and entitled “Moving Toward NATO Expansion,” makes it clear that the decision to expand NATO had already been made by that time. The paper explicitly keeps “the membership door open for Ukraine.”

Interestingly, though Russia is always publicly painted as a predatorial nation with imperial ambitions, a confidential 1993 cable states that most Eastern European states seek NATO membership “not [because they] feel militarily threatened by Russia” but because they believe “that NATO membership can help stave off the return of authoritarian forces” in their own countries. Though the cable makes the exception that Ukraine and the Baltic states may feel threatened by Russia.

By September 1994, Clinton had explicitly told Yeltsin that NATO would expand. While visiting Yeltsin in the hospital on December 16, 1994, Vice President Al Gore clarifies that “What Clinton told you in September was that eventually NATO will expand.”

But Gore promises Yeltsin that “the process will be gradual and open and we will consult carefully with you.” He adds that “The process will be conducted in parallel with a deepening of the US-Russia partnership and your partnership with NATO.”

Though less than a week later, a secret NSC memorandum clarifies that Russia will not be given “a veto or right of prior consultation over NATO decisions,” this promise of a deepening “institutionalized relationship between NATO and Russia – possibly in the form of a Treaty (“alliance with the Alliance”) or Charter” that will be established in parallel with NATO expansion is repeatedly mentioned. A secret memorandum written by Anthony Lake to Clinton on July 17, 1995 identifies “plans to develop a formalized NATO-Russia relationship in parallel with enlargement.” The spirit of this promise would be broken.

Importantly, it is evident that the Clinton administration was very aware of Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion and of their feeling of betrayal. Knowing that expansion is an impossible sell in Russia, Gore promises Yeltsin that expansion won’t occur before 1996 because “[w]e understand you have parliamentary elections in mid-1995 and it would be hard for you if we moved forward then.

In the July 17, 1995 memorandum, Lake informs Clinton of a “hardening Russian opposition to NATO expansion.” In a section called “Intensifying Russian Opposition,” Lake says that “opposition to NATO enlargement appears to be hardening across the political spectrum among the Russian political elite.” He reports that key Russian officials insist “that NATO enlargement and NATO-Russia cooperation are incompatible.” He recognizes that Yeltsin has “approved… a strategy for delaying and possibly derailing NATO enlargement.” Lake forecasts little hope of the position softening because “Russia’s opposition is deep and profound.”

Though much has been made of William Burns’ important 2008 warning that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” it was not the first such warning.

In a 1991 appeal cited in M.E. Sarotte’s Not One Inch, U.S. ambassador to Moscow Robert Strauss warned that “the most revolutionary event of 1991 for Russia may not be the collapse of Communism, but the loss of something Russians of all political stripes think of as part of their own body politic, and near to the heart at that: Ukraine.” An internal 1991 draft paper recommended leaving “the possibility of Ukraine joining the NATO liaison program” for “a later time.” Sarotte reports that Richard Holbrooke, who aggressively pushed expansion, called NATO in a briefing paper “an Alliance [Ukraine] can probably never enter.”

A secret/sensitive memorandum dated July 29, 1996 clearly states that Russia seeks to “draw red lines around certain countries (e.g. the Baltics and Ukraine) to prevent their ever being considered for NATO membership.”

The declassified documents make it clear that, at the time of the decision to expand NATO east toward Russia, the Clinton administration knew that Russia vehemently opposed expansion and especially expansion to Ukraine. They also knew that crossing that red line could lead to trouble.

The July 29, 1996 memo shows, not only knowledge of Russian opposition, but understanding of it: “From a Russian perspective, they cannot (and probably should not ever want to) endorse formally NATO enlargement.”

An August 23, 1996 draft memorandum written by deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbot says that “The Russians are saying that they will not ‘negotiate’ on the issue of Baltic and Ukrainian eventual membership in NATO.” Using the language of conflict for, perhaps, the first time, Talbot says that “[t]his has the distinctly ominous implication of a warning to us…”

Remarkably, having recognized that Russia had drawn a red line at NATO expansion to Ukraine, the U.S. proceeded to invert that red line: “An important part of our job will be to make sure our red lines stick – and that the Russians’ <sic> don’t cross ours (i.e., trying to label UNACCEPTABLE Ukrainian and Baltic membership.” Enlarging on the new language of conflict, the memo then says that if Russia’s “nasty implication [of a warning] becomes explicit, we should slam back hard…” This is the most prescient line in the declassified documents, forecasting a “hard” American response if Russia asserts it red line at NATO expansion to Ukraine.

And it is clear that the Clinton administration had no illusions about Russia’s serious concerns or about their resentment of Clinton’s breaking the promise that was made to them at the end of the Cold War. In a memorandum to Strobe Talbot, Dennis Ross says that the Russians “see NATO expansion” as their being “humiliated,” but “worse,” that it confirms that “they will face potential threats closer to their borders.” Ross adds that the Russians “feel they were snookered at the time of German unification” by the breaking of “[Secretary of State James] Baker’s promises on not extending NATO military presence into what was East Germany” which was “part of a perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance eastward.”

In an important meeting between Clinton and Yeltsin in Helsinki on March 21, 1997, Yeltsin’s frustration and anger are made clear. Discussing the NATO-Russia Founding Act, Yeltsin makes sure that Clinton knows that Russia’s “position has not changed. It remains a mistake for NATO to move eastward.” He then says, “But I need to take steps to alleviate the negative consequences of this for Russia. I am prepared to enter into an agreement with NATO not because I want to but because it is a forced step.”

Yeltsin then personally tells Clinton, “But one thing is very important: enlargement should also not embrace the former Soviet republics. I cannot sign any agreement without such language. Especially Ukraine.”

Yeltsin implores Clinton that “[d]ecisions by NATO are not to be taken without taking into account the concerns or opinions of Russia.” He also demands that “nuclear and conventional arms cannot move eastward into new member to the borders of Russia.” Clinton then promises Yeltsin “to make sure that we take account of Russia’s concerns as we move forward.” Another broken promise.

Interestingly, as an indication that the U.S. recognizes that objections to NATO expansion are not just Putin’s objections but Russia’s, in a November 16, 2000 meeting, Talbot suggests that “the next round of NATO enlargement might be easier under Putin than it had been under Yeltsin.”

Reuniting the present with the context of its past is crucial, not for condoning Russia’s war against Ukraine, but for understanding it. More importantly, it will be crucial when it finally comes to resolving and ending it.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.