{"id":9854,"date":"2023-03-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aspeninstitutece.softmedia.cz\/article\/2023\/return-power-politics\/"},"modified":"2024-09-30T19:24:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T17:24:38","slug":"return-power-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/article\/2023\/return-power-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Return of Power Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russia\u2019s brutal invasion of Ukraine is a sobering sign that militarized great-power competition is back. The transatlantic alliance must revise its grand strategy accordingly and now focus more on defending instead of expanding the democratic community. Throughout the building crisis over Ukraine, the West\u2019s ideological North Star\u2013 the promotion of democracy \u2013guided statecraft. <\/span><\/p>\n

The commitment to keeping NATO\u2019s doors open to Ukraine constituted a laudable and principled stand against the efforts of an autocratic Russian Federation to further violate Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty, scuttle its democratic institutions, and quash its aspirations to join the West. Yet Vladimir Putin would have none of it, launching a savage war of choice\u00a0 aimed at putting Ukraine back under Moscow\u2019s sway. <\/span><\/p>\n

Putin owns this war and the death and destruction that it has unleashed.\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The West\u2019s muscular reaction\u2013 arming Ukraine, sanctioning Russia, bolstering NATO\u2019s eastern flank \u2013is therefore fully justified. Yet legitimate outrage over Russia\u2019s pummeling of Ukraine should not obscure the need to draw sober lessons from the war. <\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that power politics is back. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ideological ambition must more regularly yield to strategic realities in order to ensure that the West\u2019s purposes remain in sync with its means. To be sure, by combining its values with its power, the West has succeeded in bending the arc of history away from the rules of realpolitik and toward greater freedom, human dignity, and peace. But the transatlantic community must now temper its idealist ambitions with greater strategic pragmatism, and thus successfully navigate a world that has just taken a step backward toward Hobbesian realism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The more dangerous and competitive world that is taking shape today will naturally help engender transatlantic unity \u2013 just as the threat posed by the\u00a0<\/span>Soviet Union contributed to NATO’s cohesion during the Cold War. Yet the political ills that have been plaguing the West, even if they are out of the headlines, have not gone away.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s invasion is certainly a wake-up call for the West, but the prospect of a new Cold War will not by itself cure the United States and Europe of illiberalism and political dysfunction. In fact, the war in Ukraine will likely have economic spillover effects that foster political blowback. Accordingly, America and Europe face a double challenge: they need to continue getting their own houses in order even while they stand together to resist Russia\u2019s war of aggression against Ukraine.<\/p>\n

From Yalta\u00a0to NATO Enlargement\u00a0to Ukraine<\/h3>\n

The war in Ukraine has brought to the surface underlying tensions between the West\u2019s ideological ambitions and global geopolitical realities. These tensions were for the most part in abeyance amid the bipolarity of the Cold War, when geopolitical expediency guided the strategy of containment. Indeed, the Yalta agreement struck by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and GV Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II was the ultimate realist compromise, leaving much of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination. <\/span><\/p>\n

Roosevelt and Churchill were wisely yielding principle to pragmatism by providing Soviet Russia a buffer zone on its western flank. Such strategic restraint paid off handsomely; it contributed to stability during the long decades of\u00a0 the Cold War, buying time for a patient policy of containment that ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union. <\/span><\/p>\n

NATO\u2019s eastward expansion then began in the 1990s, the heady era of unipolarity when the West was confident that the triumph of its power and purpose would usher in the universalization of democracy, capitalism, and a rules based international order. The Clinton administration embraced a grand strategy of \u201cdemocratic enlargement,\u201d a key plank of which was opening\u00a0 NATO\u2019s doors to Europe\u2019s new democracies and formally welcoming the states of the defunct and discredited Warsaw Pact.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

NATO\u2019s eastward enlargement has yielded both moral and strategic gains. The West capitalized on the opportunity to reverse Yalta;\u00a0NATO members could reassert their moral authority by integrating Europe\u2019s newest democracies. The allure of meeting the political standards for entry into the Western alliance helped guide more than a dozen countries through democratic\u00a0 transitions. Opening NATO\u2019s doors also yielded geopolitical gains, providing the alliance strategic depth and increasing its aggregate military strength. The defense guarantee that comes with membership serves as a strong deterrent to Russian adventurism \u2013 a prized commodity given Moscow\u2019s renewed appetite for invading its neighbors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But despite these principled and practical benefits, the enlargement of NATO also came with a significant strategic downside.<\/p>\n

It laid the foundations for a post-Cold War security order that excluded Russia while bringing the world\u2019s most formidable military alliance ever closer to the Federation\u2019s borders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was precisely for this reason that the Clinton administration initially launched the Partnership for Peace, a security framework that enabled all European states to cooperate with\u00a0NATO without drawing new dividing lines. But that alternative fell by the wayside early in January of 1994, when President Bill Clinton declared in Prague that \u201cthe question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members but when and how.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

The stage was set for the first wave of expansion, which brought the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into NATO in 1999, followed since by four additional bouts of enlargement. So far, NATO has admitted fifteen countries (encompassing some 100 million people) that were formerly in Russia\u2019s sphere of influence.<\/p>\n

Moscow’s Disapproval<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Kremlin has objected to NATO enlargement from the outset. As early as 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin warned that Russians across the political spectrum \u201cwould no doubt perceive this as a sort of neo-isolation of our country in diametric opposition to its natural admission into a Euro-Atlantic space.<\/em>\u201d In a face-to-face meeting with Clinton in 1995, Yeltsin was more direct: \u201cI see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed […]. Why do you want to do this? We need a new structure for pan-European security, not old ones! […] For me to agree\u00a0 to the borders of nato expanding towards those of Russia \u2013 that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moscow\u2019s discomfort has only grown since Putin took the helm in 1999 and reversed Yeltsin\u2019s flirtation with a more liberal brand of governance. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin declared that NATO enlargement \u201crepresents a\u00a0serious provocation.<\/em>\u201d He went on to ask: \u201cWhy is it necessary to\u00a0put military infrastructure on\u00a0our borders during this expansion?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Soon thereafter, Russia began concrete efforts to stop further enlargement, including by intervening in Georgia in 2008. In 2012, Moscow allegedly attempted to organize a coup in Montenegro to block its accession to the alliance, and then worked to prevent North Macedonia\u2019s membership (according to various sources, such as BBC World News and the European\u00a0 Leadership network). These efforts were to no avail; Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017 and North Macedonia followed suit in 2020.<\/p>\n

Now Putin has invaded Ukraine \u2013 motivated, at least in part, by his determination to block its pathway to NATO.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To be sure, Moscow\u2019s horror at the prospect of Ukraine\u2019s membership in the alliance arose at least in part from wistful nostalgia for the geopolitical heft of Soviet days, as well as from a degree of paranoia about a \u201ccolor revolution<\/em>\u201d coming to Russia and mystical delusions about the unbreakable civilizational links between Russia and\u00a0Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\n

Looking back and forward after a year of war in Ukraine. Both Ukraine and NATO excelled in year one, dealing Russia sharp strategic defeat. Year two may be more difficult; time to marry continued progress on battlefield with diplomatic endgame. <\/p>\n

https:\/\/t.co\/blmevQm5XF<\/a><\/p>\n

— Charles Kupchan (@CharlesKupchan) February 24, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n