NATO: The Fuel of the Ukraine Crisis? There is frequently a stark contrast between the mythology of how the international system is supposed to operate and the reality of how it actually operates. For decades, U.S. officials have insisted that Washington’s objective is to protect and promote a “rules-based international order.” One purported feature is that nations are not to initiate force against other nations. Countries also should have every right to join regional diplomatic, economic, or even military organizations without interference from neighboring states.
NATO and the Ukraine Crisis
The latter principle is a major source of the conflict between Russia and NATO over the status of Ukraine. In the years leading up to Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western policymakers insisted that Kyiv had every right under international law to join NATO regardless of Moscow’s wishes. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made that point quite emphatically in late 2021.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his colleagues saw matters quite differently. As early as Putin’s February 2007 address to the Munich security conference, Putin stressed that any effort to add Ukraine to NATO would cross a “red line” as far as an intolerable threat to Russia’s security was concerned.
Numerous Russian officials repeated that warning in the years leading up to the 2022 invasion, but U.S. and NATO leaders remained oblivious to the mounting signs of trouble.
Despite the horrid destruction and loss of life in the ongoing war, NATO’s European members continue to insist that any peace accord ending the fighting between Ukraine and Russia must contain two features. One is that Moscow will return all conquered Ukrainian territory to Kyiv.
The other sacrosanct provision is that Ukraine must retain the right to join NATO. Given the extent of Russia’s military gains, both demands are completely detached from reality.
Indeed, the insistence that a country has the “right” to join a military alliance hostile to its larger, more powerful neighbor ignores the most basic elements of international power politics. According to international law, Cuba and the Soviet Union theoretically had a “right” to station ballistic missiles on the island in 1962. Not surprisingly, U.S. officials and most of the American public had no tolerance for such a notion.
Indeed, Washington appeared ready to wage a nuclear war to prevent that outcome—international law be damned. It is a reflection of U.S.-NATO arrogance that Western leaders today apparently assume that Kremlin officials will tamely accept a looming threat to the security of their country.
The Rules Based Order Challenge
Washington’s overall contention that the United States and its allies support a rules-based international system is increasingly dismissed in the rest of the world as a self-serving fraud. The decision by most countries outside of Washington’s orbit, to defy U.S. pressure and refuse to impose sanctions on Russia for its actions in Ukraine, confirms the extent of their cynicism.
The official stance taken by Western officials that NATO is a purely “defensive” alliance also warrants derision. Even a cursory survey of NATO’s behavior since the end of the Cold War confirms that it has become a decidedly offensive alliance.
The military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s were clear cases of the Alliance operating with an offensive, not a defensive, mission. NATO planes and missiles attacked Bosnian Serbs in the Republika Srpska and Serbian government forces trying to put down the Muslim insurgency in Kosovo, even though neither entity had attacked—or even hinted at wanting to attack—a NATO member.
The same was true of the massive assault by planes and missiles on Libya, as part of a NATO campaign to unseat Muammar Qaddafi. Even when a major military operation was not officially designated as a NATO mission, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the vast majority of the forces involved came from NATO countries.
Individually, leading Alliance members also have committed numerous acts of aggression. Washington’s own actions in such places as Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, and Grenada, are prominent items on the list. France’s repeated military interventions in Chad and other African territories are hard to justify as “defensive” measures.
Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus and the ongoing occupation of nearly 40 percent of that country’s territory is an especially flagrant, continuing case of aggression.
Given that track record, it is hardly surprising that neither Russia nor any other potential adversary respects the argument that they have nothing to fear because NATO is a purely defensive alliance committed to upholding a rules-based international order.
In conducting relations with Moscow, U.S. and European leaders need to acknowledge that the concept of spheres of influence remains highly relevant regarding interactions among major powers.
Russian President Putin addressing the nation.
Western policymakers must not only recognize but admit publically that they have violated that fundamental principle in their conduct toward Russia. Such realism is an essential precondition for repairing relations with Moscow, producing a workable peace settlement in Ukraine, and ending an especially dangerous crisis. Clinging to self-serving, dishonest myths about a rules-based international order will benefit no one.
About the Author: Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter
Ted Galen Carpenter, is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at 19FortyFive. He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
