Back to the generation gap over Russia and Ukraine. It sounds bizarre today but in the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration was considering expanding NATO to include merely Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—barely anyone at that time was proposing admitting Ukraine—titans of American foreign policy cried out in opposition. George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered America’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America’s Cold War historians, noted that, “historians—normally so contentious—are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”
The critics lost that argument; Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. But a decade and a half later, as NATO rolled further east, another set of foreign policy greybeards warned against admitting Ukraine. In 2014, Henry Kissinger, the personification of the American foreign policy establishment, argued, “The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country.” If “Ukraine is to survive and thrive,” he insisted, “it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.” Instead of joining NATO, Ukraine “should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland” in which it “cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility toward Russia.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in his time as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor was known as a Cold War hawk, nonetheless embraced the Finland model as well. Ukraine, he insisted, could have “no participation in any military alliance viewed by Moscow as directed at itself.”
Kennan, Friedman, Moynihan, Gaddis, Kissinger, and Brzezinski—these aren’t members of Code Pink. Yet if you espouse their views today you’ll instantly be accused of appeasement. What happened? Some might argue that since Kissinger and Brzezinski made their argument for Ukrainian neutrality eight years ago, subsequent events have proved them wrong. In 2014, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, swallowing Crimea, fomenting a rebellion in parts of the country’s Russian-speaking east and so alienating Ukrainians that they now support joining NATO. By this logic, Finland-like neutrality has become impossible because Ukrainians want and need protection against the Russian threat. But you can flip that argument on its head. By showing he’s willing to launch a war to keep Ukraine from allying with the West, Putin has proved Kissinger and Brzezinski right. He’s shown that NATO can’t admit Ukraine because with NATO membership comes the obligation to send US and European troops to fight Russia in places like Donetsk and Luhansk. That’s not something any US president (or German, French, or British leader) will do. And since the last eight years have shown that NATO membership for Ukraine is effectively dead, Finland-like neutrality is the best remaining option.