The current paradigm on the war in Ukraine sees Russia, more specifically Russian leader Vladimir Putin, as the sole aggressor. The start point was February 24 (2022), the moment Russia invaded Ukraine. That invasion makes Russia an aggressor and Putin a dictator. The invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.”
By Paul Cliteur
In the current paradigm, there is only one explanation for the war, one cause for the aggression: the aggressive temper of the Russian dictator. Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union, so Putin must go. We must stand united behind Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians.
Even if the Americans no longer support Ukraine and the Ukrainians unreservedly, we, Europe, must do so unitedly. ReArm Europe. This is the only way we can resist dictators. Didn’t we do the same with Hitler? And didn’t we learn how wrong it is to engage in “appeasement” (Chamberlain)?
This is pretty much what most European politicians think. This paradigm is discussed daily on mainstream European talk shows, with slight variations by “experts.” And there is the “consensus” in science.
At least, that is how it is presented.
However, since Trump’s inauguration last month, the current paradigm has experienced some opposition from the current U.S. president and his administration. President Trump is breaking with the policies of his predecessor, Biden. And that includes a break with the proposition that Ukraine should be allowed to be part of NATO. Even the extension of NATO’s borders to its borders with Russia is now suddenly under discussion.
Why? Benjamin Abelow’s handy little book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and Nato Policies Led to Crisis and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (2022), begins with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Which holds: “Any foreign power that places military forces near U.S. territory knows it is crossing a red line” (p. 1).
The Monroe Doctrine has been an established and unquestioned basis of U.S. foreign policy for two hundred years. Violating the doctrine is a “reason for war.” Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, it has been clear that it is out of the question for Russian weapons, for example, to be stationed in Mexico or Canada. Or in Cuba, as we have known since the Cuba crisis (1962).
That brings us to the question: so why should the Russians tolerate that with NATO weapons or American weapons (NATO=American, by the way) in Ukraine? The answer to that question is: it makes no sense to deny the Russians what the Americans are allowed to do. Any other answer would demonstrate a reprehensible kind of partisanship.
Since Feb. 24, 2024, this point by Abalow seems to have been getting through somewhat. Suddenly, mainly on social media, people are now speaking out who no longer follow the current “mainstream perspective.” Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs are the most significant, retired scholars with respectable records. The former is affiliated with the University of Chicago, and the latter is affiliated with Columbia University.
However, opposition to the mainstream perspective goes further than Mearsheimer and Sachs. One can think of American diplomat and historian George Kennan (1904-2005). Let me comment briefly on his ideas.
George Kennan opposed NATO expansion
George Kennan wrote in 1997, the same year Zbigniew Brzezinszki’s book came out, in a piece in The New York Times, “In late 1996, the impression was allowed, or caused, to become prevalent that it had been somehow and somewhere decided to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders.”
So, Kennan wrote about whether NATO can expand to Russia’s borders. May it? As is well known, Putin answered “no” to that question. Even now, during the peace negotiations with Trump, his answer is still “no.” And “no,” all Putin’s predecessors also said. It was the general feeling in Russia from the 1990s or 1991 when the Soviet Union imploded.
But almost all Western politicians cloaked themselves in vagueness for thirty years. Or they said (like Mark Rutte, the current Secretary-General of NATO) that it can’t happen now, but “someday” it will. Everyone did feel it was walking on eggshells because it was susceptible to the Russians.
It's like Russian missile placement in Mexico would be “sensitive” to the Americans. Despite Russian sensitivities, the expansions continued. One former Soviet republic after another joined NATO, much to the annoyance of the Russians. That expansion process began as early as under Clinton, starting in 1991.
The discussion on this issue has been ongoing for more than 30 years now. In a sense, this issue begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Francis Fukuyama’s essay on “The End of History” (1989), followed four years later by The End of History and the Last Man (1992).
Fukuyama taught that we were at the end of an ideological struggle. Communism and fascism had been vanquished; liberalism was the only ideology left. But so that also implied that America had won the ideological battle. America was the only remaining superpower.
Fukuyama himself did not draw that conclusion, but it is not entirely incomprehensible that others, so-called “neoconservatives,” concluded that liberalism should be exported to other states as well. And why not the Soviet Union itself?
This stimulated a kind of American hubris (“hubris”) that interventions everywhere should be possible, and countries should be “freed” from the old shackles of communism. This, in turn, led to an advance of NATO, ever closer to Russia's borders.
A bit of a spanner in the works of “expansion optimism” was thrown into the works by Samuel Huntington, who in 1993 came up with the essay “The Clash of Civilizations,” later elaborated in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). According to Huntington, the world would not come under the seizure of one ideology because the world was divided by about eight civilisation types.
According to Huntington, exporting liberal democracy from Western culture to Islamist culture would not be easy. However, true globalists would not be deterred from their beliefs. You should be able to implement the Western model of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights anywhere.
According to professor and political commentator Jeffrey Sachs, this optimistic Western belief in progress started with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997). That book identifies Eurasia, particularly Ukraine, as the terrain in which the superpowers will battle for hegemony.
Although Brzezinski does not belong to the neoconservatives, one can give his book a neoconservative interpretation. And that is: let superpower America assert its influence. Let the United States advance in former Eastern Europe to Russia's borders. Russia may well be “surrounded” by Western countries (NATO).
However, Kennan said 1997 that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” This statement goes against all the expansion fantasies of the dominant direction in American politics.
In particular, Jeffrey Sachs points out that expansionism has become a part of the deep state—that is, of the civil service and of the institutions. Expansion continues regardless of the president elected by Americans.
It began under Clinton and continued until Trump—until Trump II (i.e., until February 24, 2024, or, if one wants to take the off-the-cuff conversation between Trump and Zelensky as a starting point, February 28, 2025).
One year after Kennan first stated his position in The New York Times, that newspaper’s columnist, Thomas Friedman, called him for further comment on his position on NATO expansion. Friedman reported on the conversation on May 2, 1998.
Kennan was 94 years old when Friedman had him on the phone. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate had given its approval to NATO expansion. What did Kennan think of that? Kennan replied he was disappointed. He saw this as the beginning of a new Cold War.
He considers pushing NATO’s borders further “a tragic mistake.” He also stressed that making this provocation toward the Russians was unnecessary. “No one was threatening anybody else,” Kennan maintains to Friedman. NATO expansion “was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate with no real interest in foreign affairs.”
Kennan also criticises the superficiality of the Senate debate, the senators' lack of knowledge about the history of diplomatic relations, and the weakness of their geopolitical analysis.
Kennan considers the idea that Russia would be ready to attack the West illusory: “I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime.” We will argue with the people who accomplished the greatest bloodless revolution in the 20th century: the decision to dismantle the Soviet Union.
The Russians will inevitably react to these American actions (“Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia”). And, of course, based on that reaction, those in favour of expansion will then say, “See how hostile Russia is.” But what people forget is that America itself provoked that hostility.
Much of what Kennan said before Friedman in 1998 remains relevant even now. George Kennan died on March 17, 2005 (at the respectable age of 101). With his opposition to NATO expansion, he remained a voice in the desert.
After Kennan, American professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs became the protagonists who warned against enlargement. Mearsheimer with a 2014 article whose title leaves nothing to be desired: “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.” And Jeffrey Sachs has numerous appearances that have gained wide distribution via the Internet. See the conversation with Twan Houben on Indepen.
For years, Kennan, Mearsheimer, and Sachs were loners. In Europe, they still are. In European media, the narrative of Russian autocratic leader Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of the innocent nation-state of Ukraine still reigns.
Anyone who, like Kennan, Sachs, or Mearsheimer, says anything different about it is dismissed as a victim of Russian propaganda or (more maliciously) as a “Putin pimp.” However, the election of Donald Trump on Nov. 5, 2024, has given Kennan’s, Mearsheimer’s, and Sachs’ points of view a vast whirl. Suddenly, some interest is emerging in what happened in the period before Feb. 24, 2022, the
The moment when the Russian military attacked Ukraine.
Let us hope for peace.
