I don’t know what’s coming in Ukraine or what the U.S. should do beyond think first of its national interests. The trick is defining those interests for this moment and with these players. We have to get it right and the stakes feel high, but there seems a paucity of new thinking. I find myself impatient with confidently expressed declarations that we have no interest in a faraway border dispute, that Russia and Ukraine have a long and complicated history, and in any case the story of man is a tale of organized brutality, so get a grip. That’s not . . . right. A major land war in Europe? The first since World War II? We have no interest in what might be the beginning of a new era of brute-force violations of sovereignty? One involving our allies, with which we have treaties?
The arguments on the other side sound careless, rote: Get tough, push back, ship weapons, show Putin who’s boss. That sounds like politicians saying what they’ve said for 70 years, and at this point not out of conviction but because they have no new moves, barely a memory of new moves.
None of our political leaders are thinking seriously, or at least thinking aloud in a serious way.
It is hard not to be skeptical of sanctions as a deterrent to Russia. Aren’t we sort of sanctioned out? Does Vladimir Putin really fear them? Hasn’t he already factored them in? And wary of other responses: U.S. troops on heightened alert, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization reinforcing Eastern Europe with ships and fighter jets. Doesn’t this carry the potential of a spark that turns into a fire? This is the moment a writer would add “especially in the nuclear age.” I’d say especially in this later and I fear less rigorous part of the nuclear age. Forty-five-year-old field commanders are 76 years removed from Hiroshima and have likely never read John Hersey. They don’t carry a natural and fully absorbed horror about a launch caused by confusion, miscalculation, miscommunication. I sort of explain life to myself by assuming everyone’s drunk. That could literally be true of any given Russian general marching through the steppes.
So let me say at least one constructive thing: that we don’t worry enough about nuclear weapons. We have lost our preoccupation with them. For leaders who remembered World War II, it was always front of mind. Now, less so. Which is funny because such weapons are in more hands now than ever before. The world we live in, including the military one, seems more distracted than in the past, less rigorous and professional.
We’re used to being lucky. Luck is a bad thing to get used to.
If I read Mr. Putin right, he wants the fruits of war without the war, in line with the leaders of the Soviet system whose end he still mourns. A difference is those leaders were impressed by us and factored that into their calculations. Mr. Putin isn’t. A lot of people aren’t impressed by us anymore. The long-term answer to that is not to beat our breasts and shout “USA!” but to become more impressive in terms of our economic strength, political leaders and character as a people. But we are in the short term.
Which gives rise to the question: Shouldn’t the United Nations be involved? “Major land war,” “violation of state sovereignty”—isn’t this what the Security Council is for? As I write I hear echoes of Adlai Stevenson in the Cuban missile crisis. Stevenson asked the Soviet ambassador to the council, Valerian Zorin, if Moscow had missiles in Cuba: “Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no?” Then his staff produced huge photos of the missiles, which convinced the world who was right and who was wrong.
If Mr. Putin is going to invade a sovereign nation, shouldn’t he at least be embarrassed and exposed in the eyes of the world? Shamed? Nikita Khrushchev was. The whole Soviet system was.
I want to close with something I’ve been thinking about. American presidents in crises always fear being called weak. They fear this more than they fear being called unwise. But recent years have given me a greater appreciation for a moment when a president in crisis didn’t fear it, or didn’t let his fear govern his actions, and it involves Ukraine.
It was August 1991. The Soviet Union was in its astounding day-by-day fall. George H.W. Bush had just met in summit with Mikhail Gorbachev and then went on to Kyiv, where he spoke to a session of what was still then the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine.
It was a great moment in the history of freedom. A totalitarian empire was falling; the Warsaw Pact nations had already broken free. Bush had some human sympathy for those like Mr. Gorbachev, who were seeing the system they’d known all their lives crash down around them. He had affection and respect for those reaching for democracy. But he had a deep and overriding concern: There were thousands of strategic nuclear warheads long ago placed by Moscow in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and more than 20,000 smaller tactical nuclear weapons. They had to be dealt with. So it was not only a joyous moment; it was a delicate, dangerous one.
In his speech, Bush said Ukraine was debating “the fundamental questions of liberty, self-rule, and free enterprise” and Americans followed this with “excitement and hope.” Become democratic, Bush said, and we will help and assist you. But don’t tear yourself apart with long-repressed internal resentments, or external ones. “President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika and democratization point towards the goals of freedom, democracy and economic liberty.” Bush urged Ukraine to appreciate what Russia was trying to do. Between the lines he was saying: History is already overcharged; don’t bust the circuit-breakers, don’t further destabilize what is already unstable. Don’t let “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred” take hold. He was also signaling to Mr. Gorbachev: We’ll do everything we can to keep your dissolution as peaceful as possible. Unspoken, he was saying: We’ll help you with the missiles.
It was a thoughtful speech, sophisticated and inherently balanced save for one too-hot phrase—“suicidal nationalism.”
It got a standing ovation. Then the dread pundits descended, chief among them New York Times bigfoot William Safire, who thought Bush missed the revolutionary moment. Bush sounded unexcited about freedom, even “anti-liberty,” Safire wrote in November 1991, calling it the “‘chicken Kiev’ speech.”
With that memorable phrase Safire did real damage to Bush, making him look . . . weak. Fussily prudent. Less than a year later, Bush lost his bid for re-election. People found him not of the moment, out of touch.
I thought my friend Safire right then. Now I think we were mostly wrong. The Soviet republics did break off and forge their own paths, and with Western help the nukes were deactivated and sent back to Russia, where they were dismantled. It was one of the great and still not sufficiently heralded moments of the Cold War, and it was done by a political class that was serious, and even took a chance on speaking seriously.