Russia’s war in Ukraine is the most disruptive conflict that Europe has seen since 1945. While many in the West see it as a war of choice by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says that NATO’s 2008 decision in favor of eventual Ukrainian membership brought an existential threat to Russia’s borders, and still others trace the conflict back to the Cold War’s end and the failure of the West to support Russia adequately after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
How can we discern the origins of a war that might last for years?
World War I occurred more than a century ago, yet historians still write books debating what caused it. Did it start because a Serbian terrorist assassinated an Austrian archduke in 1914, or did it have more to do with ascendant German power challenging Britain, or rising nationalism throughout Europe?
Illustration: kevin sheu
The answer is: “All of the above, plus more.”
However, war was not inevitable until it actually broke out in August 1914; and even then, it was not inevitable that four years of carnage had to follow.
To sort things out, it helps to distinguish between deep, intermediate and immediate causes. Think of building a bonfire: piling up the logs is a deep cause; adding kindling and paper is an intermediate cause; and striking a match is a precipitating cause.
Even then, a bonfire is not inevitable. A strong wind might extinguish the match, or a sudden rainstorm might have soaked the wood. As historian Christopher Clark said in his book about the origins of WWI in 1914, The Sleepwalkers: “The future was still open — just.” Poor policy choices were a crucial cause of the catastrophe.
In Ukraine, there is no question that Putin lit the match when he ordered Russian troops to invade on Feb. 24. Like the leaders of the great powers in 1914, he probably believed that it would be a short, sharp war with a quick victory, somewhat like the Soviet Union’s takeover of Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. Airborne troops would capture the airport and advancing tanks would seize Kyiv, removing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and installing a puppet government.
Putin told the Russian people that he was conducting a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine and prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s borders, but given how seriously he miscalculated, we must ask what he was really thinking. We know from Putin’s own writings, and from various biographers such as Philip Short, that the intermediate cause was a refusal to see Ukraine as a legitimate state.
Putin lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union, which he had served as a KGB officer, and, owing to Ukraine and Russia’s close cultural affinities, he considered Ukraine a phony state. Moreover, Ukraine had been ungrateful, offending Russia with its 2014 Maidan uprising, which removed a pro-Russian government, and its deepening of trade relations with the EU.
Putin wants to restore what he calls the “Russian world,” and, as he turned 70 yesterday, he has been thinking about his legacy. Earlier leaders, such as Peter the Great, had expanded Russian power in their own time. Given the weakness of the Western sanctions that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Putin seems to have asked himself: Why not go further?
The prospect of NATO enlargement was a lesser intermediate cause. While the West did create a NATO-Russia Council through which Russian military officers could attend some NATO meetings, Russia expected more from the relationship, and while then-US secretary of state James Baker told his Russian counterpart in the early 1990s that NATO would not expand, historians such as Mary Sarotte have shown that Baker quickly reversed his verbal assurance, which never did have a written agreement behind it.
When then-US president Bill Clinton discussed the matter with then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, there was grudging Russian acceptance of some NATO expansion, but expectations on both sides differed. NATO’s decision at its 2008 summit in Bucharest to include Ukraine and Georgia as potential future members simply confirmed Putin’s worst expectations about the West.
Still, while NATO’s decision in 2008 might have been misguided, Putin’s change of attitude predated it. He had helped the US following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech shows that he had already soured on the West before the Bucharest summit.
The possibility of NATO expansion thus was merely one of several intermediate causes — one made less salient soon after the Bucharest summit by France and Germany’s announcements that they would veto Ukraine’s NATO membership.
Behind all this were the remote or deep causes that followed the end of the Cold War. Initially, there was a great deal of optimism, in both Russia and the West, that the Soviet Union’s collapse would allow for the rise of democracy and a market economy in Russia. In the early years, Clinton and Yeltsin made a serious effort to develop good relations.
However, while the US provided loans and economic assistance to former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar’s government, Russians expected much more.
Moreover, after seven decades of central planning, a sudden transformation into a flourishing market economy became impossible. Efforts to force through such rapid changes could not fail to produce enormous disruptions, corruption and extreme inequality. While some oligarchs and politicians became wildly rich from the rapid privatization of state-owned assets, most Russians’ standard of living declined.
At a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in February 1997, the governor of the city of Nizhny Novgorod, Boris Nemtsov (later assassinated), reported that no one in Russia was paying taxes, and that the government was behind on paying wages.
Then, in September 1998, the liberal Russian lawmaker Grigory Yavlinsky told a dinner at the Harvard Kennedy School that “Russia is completely corrupt and Yeltsin has no vision.”
Unable to cope with the political fallout of deteriorating economic conditions, Yeltsin, then in declining health, turned to Putin, the unknown ex-KGB agent, to help him restore order.
None of this means that the Ukraine war was inevitable, but it did become increasingly probable over time. On Feb. 24, 2022, Putin miscalculated and lit the match that started the conflagration. It is hard to see him putting it out.
Joseph Nye is a professor at Harvard University and a former US assistant secretary of defense.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has formally announced his intention to stand for permanent party chairman. He has decided that he is the right person to steer the fledgling third force in Taiwan’s politics through the challenges it would certainly face in the post-Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) era, rather than serve in a caretaker role while the party finds a more suitable candidate. Huang is sure to secure the position. He is almost certainly not the right man for the job. Ko not only founded the party, he forged it into a one-man political force, with himself
RSS