The post-Cold War order, which began in 1989, ended in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and said it had no right to exist as an independent nation. Faced with the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II, the biggest questions are
- How much will this new world order resemble the Cold War?
- How effective will the Russian war effort be in Ukraine?
- Can Russia decapitate the Zelensky government and establish a puppet regime? Can they hold hostile territory in the long term against armed guerrillas, fighting for their homeland? Will a lingering conflict, and the endless funerals it brings, undermine Putin’s rule?
- Can we avoid a direct, deadly, and unpredictable engagement between nuclear powers?
- Will the costs the West imposes on Russia be high enough to deter China from taking Taiwan?
Russia’s invasion is not just an effort to retake Ukraine, which was once part of the Soviet Union. It is an effort to use military force to overturn the post-Cold War settlement, reached in the early 1990s. In fact, the invasion cannot be understood without first understanding what that settlement looked like and why Russia wants to overturn it, despite the high costs. In the 1980s, when Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany, the Soviet Union had become an arteriosclerotic state. It was unable to keep up with the US in high-technology arms, unable to legitimate its rule with Marxist-Leninist ideology, which its people no longer believed, and unable to afford the cost of maintaining its empire in Eastern Europe. When its subordinate partners in Eastern Europe, known as the Warsaw Pact, faced popular uprisings, Moscow had always sent in troops to restore their puppet regimes. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Kremlin decided it could no longer afford to send in the Red Army. That decision meant the revolts in Eastern Europe would succeed, the communist regimes would topple, and the Soviet Union would no longer dominate its neighbors. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Region after region within the USSR peeled away and declared independent statehood. Crucially for today’s politics, that meant independence for territory that had once been fully incorporated in the USSR: Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, and the “stans” in central Asia. Some of these new states maintained close relations with Moscow. Others veered toward the West, culturally, economically, and militarily. East Germany was merged into West Germany and the combined state remained within NATO. The Western alliance also extended its reach further east. That included Poland, once a member of the Warsaw Pact, and the Baltic States, which the Soviet Union seized after Stalin’s secret pact with Hitler. For these states, NATO membership was both a symbol of westernization and a security guarantee, with the vital provision that an attack on one NATO member was an attack on all. NATO’s expansion under the Clinton administration was less a well-thought-out strategic plan than an expected low-cost effort to bring democratizing states into the trans-Atlantic world order. It was considered nearly costless because no one believed Russia was still a security threat or would consider NATO’s expansion threatening. The European Union was simultaneously extending membership to the same countries. In short, the West and the US-led world order was expanding geographically, not by force but by invitation. Russia was never included in that expansion, though it might have been had it democratized, transformed its economy, and demonstrated peaceful intentions toward its neighbors. Instead, Russia was offered a cooperative arrangement with NATO but never considered for full membership. Moscow later claimed that the George H.W. Bush administration had privately agreed that NATO would never expand eastward. Not one inch. The Bush administration denies it. In any case, the issue was never discussed between President Bush and his Russian counterparts or embodied in any written agreement, formal or informal, as you would expect of such a major undertaking. Later, Russia would claim that NATO’s expansion was both a betrayal and threat. Nor was Russia offered membership in the EU, which would have required successful democratization, as well as a thorough-going transformation of its economy. NATO and the EU posed a threat to Russia, but not a military one. The principal threat was that thriving, prosperous democracies on Russia’s doorstep were a standing rebuke to its own failures. That rebuke undermined the Russian’s regime’s legitimacy and, potentially, its stability. The dual failure of Russia’s efforts to democratize and modernize its economy left the Kremlin with major problems. To legitimate its rule, the post-Soviet regime has relied on traditional Russian nationalism.
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