OPINION:
In a speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference before American and European political elites, Russian president Vladimir Putin – after favorably quoting Franklin Roosevelt on world peace – warned his audience about the danger of a “unipolar” order led by the United States.
“It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day, this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within,” said Mr. Putin, who would temporarily cede the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev the following year.
Although most former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics had joined NATO before Mr. Putin condemned unipolarity, it was not unrealistic to expect that the U.S. and Russia might still forge a cooperative relationship. Mr. Putin was no “proto-democrat,” yet “[President] Bush’s and Putin’s partnership had a firm basis,” writes the Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage in “Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.” The subtitle indicates the author’s thesis that the war for Ukraine’s survival had global roots as Russia clashed with “the West.”
“Decent relations with the United States would augment stability within Russia, and they were of a piece with the needs of a globalized Russia, needs that included access to technology, investment, and markets. In a world dominated by terror and counterterrorism, there was considerable room for U.S.-Russian collaboration” writes Mr. Kimmage of the early aughts.
So where did things go so terribly wrong? Within every war rages a battle over its origins, which should not be conflated with immediate causes. The latter is easier to explain: Mr. Putin, seeking to dominate a country whose independence he denies, launched a war of aggression on Feb. 24, 2022. More consequential is understanding why Russia’s ruling circle refused to countenance Ukraine joining the West. More urgent is grasping why the U.S. and Russia could not overcome a fundamental dissonance in their competing worldviews. Thus, even though a decent partnership remained possible as Mr. Bush gave way to Barack Obama while Mr. Putin sat in the background behind Mr. Medvedev, colliding perspectives as much as colliding policies drove events. For Mr. Putin, the struggle to control Ukraine was a struggle against Western hegemony.
Mr. Kimmage, whose narrative prose is a delight to read, persuasively argues that Mr. Putin in Munich demanded Russian autonomy rather than a wholesale restructuring of the “rules-based order.” After all, Mr. Bush had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to defend U.S. interests. Then in 2008, Mr. Bush called on NATO to accept Ukraine and Georgia, former Soviet republics whose alignment was of great importance to Russian interests. It stands to reason that the Kremlin did not appreciate Mr. Bush’s lecturing after it went to war in Georgia later that year. Mr. Putin opposed the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011. Four years later, he intervened with brute force in Syria’s civil war. None of these clashes made war in Ukraine inevitable, but they did sour U.S.-Russia relations – a dangerous development when it came to wielding influence in a country of paramount civilizational importance among Russian nationalists.
If you are looking for a comprehensive treatment of NATO’s decades-long enlargement up to Russia’s borders, you will not find it here. Rather, Mr. Kimmage treats the NATO debate as an index within these broader colliding perspectives. And in this schema where Mr. Kimmage elevates the importance of core Russian interests – real or perceived – without endorsing them, Ukraine (with its longshot bids to join NATO and the E.U.) plays a supporting role stuck between two power blocs. Yet the author ably handles the most important inflection point on the crooked path to war: not Mr. Bush’s vague offer of future NATO membership in ’08, but the revolutionary move by Ukrainian citizens in 2014 to oust president Victor Yanukovich after he backed out of a major trade deal with the E.U. This is where the academic historian also brings an insider’s perspective. After the Maidan Revolution, Mr. Kimmage held the Russia-Ukraine portfolio on the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department until the end of 2016.
Russia responded to Mr. Yanukovich’s demise by biting off a chunk of Ukraine. President Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a mere “regional power,” a statement that reflected the American tendency to treat Russian matters as passé. Mr. Obama’s successor “did not care about Ukraine,” says Mr. Kimmage. President Trump “believed that the annexation of Crimea and incursion of Russian soldiers elsewhere in Ukraine were of no consequence to the United States.” The author contends that Mr. Trump’s Ukraine-related impeachment in late 2019 also influenced Mr. Putin’s sense that the U.S. was too decrepit and divided to block him: “Putin was glad to equate polarization under Trump with the decrepitude of democracy per se: the Trump commotion was the purest form of democracy.”
“Collisions” is an impressive work of concision. In fewer than 300 pages Michael Kimmage illuminates a pattern in the “wars of Soviet succession.” Post-Soviet Russia used massive violence to reassert its power and influence in regions that historically fell within Moscow’s orbit, denying its neighbors the autonomy it demanded for itself: in Chechnya, Georgia, the Donbas, and now the rest of Ukraine. Mr. Putin’s Russia has engaged in cyber warfare, election interference, the assassinations of journalists and dissidents, and, most recently, is ultimately responsible for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. If the past three decades appear less murky now, Russia and, as a consequence, Eastern Europe’s immediate future looks dark.
• Martin Di Caro hosts the “History as It Happens” podcast at The Washington Times.
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Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the nature of Russia’s involvement in Georgia in 2008. Russia fought to assist Georgian separatists.
Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability
By Michael Kimmage
Oxford University Press, March 22, 2024
pp. 296, $29.99
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