Foreign Policy Realism Is the Only Possible Solution to the Ukraine Invasion
How moralism repeatedly leads US foreign policy into blunders and crises
What I am about to write isn’t going to win me any popularity contests. I haven’t felt this outside the American zeitgeist since the start of the Iraq War, where so many of the liberal writers I admired were gung-ho for invasion and promoting arguments as to why removing Saddam Hussein was crucial to global security in the post-Cold War world.
But I think I am right about this, so here goes.
Let me say this at the outset. This is not a piece about blame or justification. You won’t see me glorifying what Russia has decided to do here. Indeed, from a standpoint of Russian foreign policy, this may be a blunder, purchasing a hard to sustain occupation that will require significant expenditures of Russian blood and treasure, while the rest of the world imposes sanctions on the country. And morally, it’s atrocious- the international community rightly views transborder aggression and waging aggressive war as significant violations of international law (whatever one wants to say about US hypocrisy on that issue).
By the way, I shouldn’t have to say that. I should be able to just make my argument. But for the reasons I am about to discuss, a lot of Americans have a bad habit of charging anyone who makes realist arguments about foreign policy and warfare with “justifying” the bad acts of other countries. It’s a time-honored tactic that dates back to Joe McCarthy and his insinuation that anyone who supported a conciliatory policy towards the Soviet Union was a Communist. But given that’s the world we live in, I have to say what I just said, and I did.
On to the argument, then. I think there are two general strands of American foreign policy that go way back: a sort of rhetorical idealism (I don’t think it’s actual idealism, because, we don’t apply it consistently) and realism. Indeed, in general, the way we act in the world is to do realistic things and cloak them in the rhetoric of idealism.
If you think about this, it’s baked into the founding of the country. The founders used lofty democratic rhetoric to justify creating a slave republic. And we have been doing this ever since. Our wars are almost always sold on human rights grounds (interestingly, the one exception to this was the Civil War, where Lincoln downplayed slavery and talked up the realpolitik notion of preserving the Union). World War I was “making the world safe for democracy” (the aftermath of the war created some major undemocratic states). World War II was fighting against warlike, racist Germans and purportedly savage Japanese. Korea and Vietnam were protecting fragile democracies from the Soviet menace. The Gulf War was “liberating” Kuwait (an undemocratic emirate with few civil liberties). Iraq was “saving the Iraqis from this brutal dictator”.
So that’s always been the formula. But something happened at the end of the Cold War that I believe warped things since then: idealism took a victory lap. We were told that the reason the US won the Cold War was Reagan’s steadfast resolve in calling it an Evil Empire and telling Gorbachev to “tear down that wall”. Reagan’s moral suasion worked, we were told. Never mind that in fact Reagan’s policies were similar to his predecessors (including plenty of conciliation and dealmaking) and further never mind that the USSR was going bankrupt and would have imploded no matter who was President and what he was saying about the Soviets.
Rhetorical idealists love “resolve”. Jefferson Davis told his confederates, when they were about to lose the Civil War, that as long as they had “resolve” their dream would never die. Lyndon Johnson kept on saying all we needed was “resolve” to win in Vietnam, even as his aides were telling him it was unwinnable. “Resolve” was always something of a joke, like the famous scene of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
But after the end of the Cold War, suddenly a lot of people who ought to know better, on the left and the right, started believing their own BS on the subject of “resolve”.
Some things happened in the post-Cold War period that strengthened the resolve of these New Idealists. First, we won the Gulf War in a walkover. Vietnam and Korea were over! No more long struggles. The US could send its troops where it wanted to and kick butt and take names, and Russia was no longer powerful enough to check us.
Then came the Balkans, where we slowed an ethnic cleansing campaign with bombings. Russia did object to the second round of bombings in Kosovo, and they constituted illegal transborder aggression under international law. But NATO did them anyway. This is another part of our story- how NATO, which has no legitimacy as a determinant of the use of force under international law (only the UN Security Council can authorize transborder aggression), became a “substitute UN” because it allowed the US to conveniently override Russian objections to what it was doing.
But the Balkans campaign was semi-successful- we did slow the ethnic cleansing and certainly saved some Bosnian and Kosovar lives (although really we left Kosovo something of a mess, which may have led to deaths in the long term). And the New Idealists were again triumphant.
I would have thought what came next might have discredited the New Idealists. We invaded Afghanistan as a response to 9/11, and while we eventually summarily executed Osama bin Laden (in Pakistan), we did not in any way live up to our idealist rhetoric. We ended leaving Afghanistan in the hands of the same faction that controlled it before, the faction the second President Bush said he was saving Afghanistan’s women from.
And what do I have to say about Iraq? It was sold on idealist and realist grounds, as a way to both save Iraqis from a tyrant and protect the world from the spread of dangerous weapons. (And, of course, also, on the lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.) It turned out to be a complete catastrophe, and really left the New Idealists with a lot of egg on their faces.
But they plowed forward- NATO and the United States intervened in Libya, a transborder aggression in violation of international law and without Russia’s consent, and left that country a total mess. (Some of the Republican attacks on Hillary Clinton over Benghazi were dumb, but the basic notion that Hillary Clinton made a major foreign policy blunder in trying to change the regime in Libya shouldn’t be in doubt.)
The New Idealists didn’t get what they wanted in Syria, but it’s worth noting that we still have troops there and they are still causing chaos.
The point is, as you can probably see, that this notion of rhetorical idealism in American foreign policy leads to some very bad results. And it’s easy to see why. Idealism asks you to pick the side of right over wrong, without regard for any of the conditions on the ground that might allow wrong to triumph over right. Afghanistan is the easiest place to see this: the Taliban are terrible! They oppress women and girls, force them out of their jobs and their schools. I wouldn’t want to be governed by them, and neither would you.
And yet- they have real support in Afghanistan, and have had more success in putting together governments than any other faction. So when you decide (as the United States did) to make an idealistic push against Taliban governance, you end up sowing chaos, because none of the factions supported by the United States had the support that the Taliban did, and the only way they could really have put together a government would be if the United States used brute force to prop it up. This was a similar dynamic to what happened in South Vietnam- support for the Communists in the South was strong enough that every non-Communist government fell because either it was not strong enough to maintain control or tried to impose its rule by force and lost credibility with the public, who then joined the Viet Cong en masse and resisted.
It’s worth noting that the New Idealism really isn’t that idealist. I think it’s a lot more cynical than it lets on. Saudi Arabia is the obvious example of this- they sold us oil, and they also funded 9/11, and later murdered and cut-up a dissident journalist who worked for the New York Times. Not only do we not try to change their regime, but we ally with them and protect them and even cover up for their involvement in 9/11 by classifying reports that sent it out. Obviously, there are reasons we do this- we want cheap oil, obviously, but also we are very afraid of the sorts of people who might take over Saudi Arabia if that government fell. Nonetheless, that’s a realist position, not an idealist one.
We are also not idealists about China. Let’s not even get into the Uyghurs, or Hong Kong. Let’s talk about Tibet. China did to Tibet exactly what Russia is now doing to Ukraine. And the US does not even rhetorically support Tibetan independence. Our trade with China is too important. They are a global power. Etc. We aren’t actually idealist. We deploy idealism when it suits us for realist reasons.
And now we get Ukraine. And despite all the demonstrated failures of the New Idealism, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in Libya, we are awash in New Idealist rhetoric. Putin is Hitler! He’s invading a sovereign state! Why shouldn’t Ukraine get to choose who it wishes to ally with? Ukraine is a democracy and Putin is a dictator (both these things are not entirely true, but I digress)! We can’t concede anything to Putin. You can’t negotiate with tyrants. It’s Munich all over again. (It’s always Munich all over again to the New Idealists.) We must stand strong with Ukraine, not give an inch, and punish Russia with debilitating sanctions.
Well, OK. So now, let’s say we refuse to talk to Putin, punish him with debilitating sanctions, and… he does what he wants in Ukraine. That doesn’t seem to be a far-fetched scenario, considering he already did that when he annexed Crimea. I’m not predicting sanctions never work (there’s one great counter-example in South Africa where they did, but it was a unique situation), but they usually don’t work, and they certainly didn’t work in Crimea.
What do you do then if the sanctions don’t work? Well, you could go to war, and get a lot of Americans killed. And by the way, Russia might win that war. This is underappreciated, but the United States does not in fact have the omnipotent capability to win any war. Ask the Iraqis about that. Russia would have a significant territorial advantage in a shooting war, because they would need only a short supply chain back to Russia and the US would need to be flying stuff in. (Contrary to NATO rhetoric, the vast majority of NATO’s military capability resides back in the United States.) And the Russians need merely play defense, not offense. Again, I’m not saying they would win, but they might, and obviously if they did, the world and Europe would end up much worse for it because they would need to make a serious capitulation to Vladimir Putin.
I think that even most New Idealists know better than to get into a war, at the very least because there would be next to no public support for it in the US. So what does that leave? It leaves lots and lots of sanctions. Cuba has resisted a US economic embargo for 60 years. North Korea and Iran resist supposedly crippling US sanctions. How long do we go on with sanctions before the policy is declared a failure? And what’s the endgame? Sanctions forever?
And if it is sanctions forever, it seems to me at that point you need to answer my question about Tibet. Why are we not sanctioning China, forever, until it recognizes Tibet’s independence? They are systematically ethnically cleansing the province and waging a massive, successful, war of cultural imperialism against Tibetan culture. And yet, our Presidents toast Chinese Premiers in summits. What gives?
What gives is realism. Realism is difficult, because we like to think of ourselves as good people, and as good people, the rhetoric of justice is much more attractive to us than the rhetoric of reality. Indeed, this is especially true in foreign policy- who wants to think of one’s own country as nothing more than one more resource-maximizing agglomeration, trying to arrange the pieces of the chessboard in the way most favorable to its own interests? We like to think of ourselves as great humanitarians, the Shining City on the Hill. But what does that get rhetoric get Tibetans, or Saudi dissidents, or ordinary Cubans living in poverty on the island?
Realism is difficult, but it actually offers answers to all the questions I asked. It offers a theory of how a country should conduct its foreign policy. And importantly, it offers a way forward in the Ukraine crisis that might work and- if it doesn’t- certainly will not lead to any worse results than the endless sanctions that the New Idealists conjure up.
Here are some basic principles of realism:
There is no way to bind powerful states to a standard of “justice”. There’s plenty of justice-like material in the international law firmament, but at the end of the day, powerful states can’t actually be forced to obey them. Look at the United States and the norm against transborder aggression. There is no more basic and fundamental rule of international law than the rule that only the UN Security Council can authorize military force. Yet the US repeatedly ignores it whenever we want to do something- indeed, we don’t even really consider it. But for an even more controversial example, look at torture. The United States not only signed and ratified a treaty against torture, but actually passed statutes to bring itself in compliance with the norm. Right now, we protect numerous refugees, including even some people we would never otherwise admit into this country, from being returned to their home countries and tortured.
And yet- after 9/11, we quickly started torturing, and nothing stopped the Bush Administration from doing it. The UN didn’t, the Security Council didn’t. If the US wants to torture, it can, and will. If the US decided that it was in its national security interest to commit a genocide, it could do it, and no international body could stop it.
And the same rules apply to Russia and China. This is the sticking point, I think, for a lot of the New Idealists. They believe in a vulgar form of American Exceptionalism where the rules don’t apply to us because we are good. But that’s not how it works- Denmark is good, but the rules do apply to Denmark. The rules don’t apply to us, Russia, and China, because we are powerful.
Your paramount goal in international relations is to avoid conflict. This is actually a more limited concept than you might think. It does not mean that you should capitulate to anything and everything to avoid war, or that you should forswear it. The point is different- your endgame should always be trying to avoid conflict. Sometimes conflict might be unavoidable (once you are at December 7, 1941, you have to go to war with Japan, whatever the mistakes the Americans may have made in its policies in the Pacific that led up to that date). But the purpose of your foreign policy is to avoid conflict.
Now in a sense that might seem self-evident, but I don’t think it is. The New Idealists think conflict is just fine as long as they can view the United States as on the “good” side of the conflict. Indeed, avoiding conflict can be bad- it’s Munich all over again and there we are capitulating to dictators.
But Munich aside (and Munich is misunderstood and is probably better understood as Britain buying time so that it might actually not lose a war with Germany), there are numerous examples of deals being made with bad actors. For instance, the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved with such a deal (we promised never to invade Cuba and to pull missiles out of Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling missiles out of Cuba). Were the Soviets good people? Was Fidel Castro? Were they in the right? Here’s the key insight- it doesn’t matter. If you are a leader, you should be in the conflict avoidance business.
And by the way, I shouldn’t have to say this, but conflict avoidance is itself moral. Which is a more moral result? Standing our ground and forcing a nuclear conflict with the USSR that gets 300 million people killed, or making a deal and pulling some missiles out of Turkey? So even I haven’t drummed all sense of idealism out of you by the end of this, you should understand that point anyway. The goal is to avoid people getting hurt and killed in conflicts between states.
The arguments people make doesn’t matter; only the result does. Back to that Cuban missile crisis deal. Part of what the Soviets had to swallow is that the Turkey missiles part of it would be kept secret, because the Turks didn’t want to advertise to the world (and Greece and the Kurds!) that they had given up their defenses. So Kennedy got to prance around the world saying how he “forced the Russians to back down”. From a Soviet standpoint, though, so what? The important things were they got the promise not to invade Cuba (thus securing their client state) and to pull the missiles out of Turkey (which threatened Soviet territory).
We live in an era where people routinely equate rhetoric with violence, and think that media coverage is more important than substance. But in foreign affairs, what people say doesn’t matter. Putin, the other day, offered an absolutely loopy and silly defense for his actions in Ukraine. So what? The only thing that matters is whether he can pull it off. Meanwhile, nobody can really say that the current situation in Israel/Palestine equates with any notion of justice. But the Israelis don’t care- they have the guns to impose it. So what if their arguments for occupation and separation don’t make any sense. What you say doesn’t matter.
So when you see liberals complaining about Republican politicians uttering pro-Putin talking points, they have lost the plot. Just as conservatives lost the plot in the Vietnam war when they lost their fruit over Jane Fonda praising the North Vietnamese. What people say does not matter. People say all sorts of silly and stupid things about conflicts between nations. The only thing that matters is what you do and what you can get others to do, and the endgame.
You have to be prepared to make deals to avoid conflict. You knew I was leading up to this. But it’s true. The entire Vietnam War could have been avoided if the US and South Vietnam had just agreed to abide by the results of a plebiscite that was proposed. Obviously, this was not agreed to because the US and South Vietnamese were afraid Ho Chi Minh would win the election.
We made a deal to end the Korean War that has stuck for 70 years. It isn’t a wonderful loving peace, but it is a peace, and it stopped a conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of Americans. Part of that deal is that North Korea can basically operate like a prison-state. In return, South Korea has become a vibrant, successful nation. Is it worth the price? Because it wasn’t “moral”. That deal condemned a whole bunch of North Koreans to famine and despotism. the New Idealists would have hated it (and the right wing condemned Eisenhower for making the deal).
The Iraq War could have been avoided if the US had accepted Saddam’s “yes” on WMD inspections.
Deals don’t always work. You will recall that I said that you don’t foreswear warfare. Sometimes it is necessary. But you try to make deals, because you try to avoid conflict. Only where conflict is avoidable do you go to war. And despite all the whining about Munich, many deals in fact hold. Some hold for 70 years or more.
Your punitive actions must serve your endgame. This may be my absolute central objection to the New Idealists. Because the reason they want to punish nations is to gratify their own sense of morality, they don’t really care if sanctions don’t work. By sanctioning Russia, we are sending our message of disapproval. Of course, we have sent our message of disapproval to Cuba for over 60 years now. But it’s important to take a moral stand. To let Vladimir Putin know that we won’t stand for this sort of thing.
But there are two problems with this. First, it doesn’t necessarily get Russia out of Ukraine. As you can see from my examples, sanctions have a low batting average. There’s South Africa on the one hand, and then there’s dozens of other economic sanctions programs on the other hand.
And second, the types of sanctions that really bite are devastating to ordinary people. People love talking about sanctioning “elites”, but Kim Jong Un lives a wealthy life- it’s his people who bear the brunt of sanctions. And it’s always that way. The Castros did just fine over the past 60 years; tens of thousands of ordinary Cubans died as a result of the US embargo. Once you start talking about tanking Russia’s economy, you aren’t hurting “oligarchs”- you are basically doing the economic equivalent of nuking Hiroshima or firebombing Dresden, killing enough Russians that maybe it will force some political change. And of course that completely contradicts the premise of New Idealism, that we are the good guys.
So how should a realist use sanctions? Basically as an inducement to get the other side to seriously talk. Imposing sanctions forever is a failure, and one that will kill a lot of Russians. Imposing sanctions as part of a strategy to get Putin to seriously negotiate is fine, so long as the US and NATO are willing to seriously negotiate too.
You won’t get everything you want. Obviously part of what is driving this crisis on the US/NATO/Ukraine side is a lot of people think that anything short of Ukraine joining NATO and the EU means that Putin will have gotten a win from his bellicose behavior. But you know what? Because there’s no cosmic justice in international relations, sometimes bad actors are able to get away with stuff. Afghanistan can’t sue the US in the world court and recover damages for all the Afghans we tortured. I don’t like that, but it’s true. And Russia may achieve some foreign policy goals in the ultimate solution to this thing. Russia may also achieve those goals in a war, or in a permanent sanctions stalemate as well. Unless you have a realistic plan where Russia will never achieve any of its goals, you have to try and figure out the best way out in the real world.
Deals have worked before. Again, the Khrushchev-Kennedy accords gave the Soviets something really valuable- a promise that the US would never again seek to overthrow Fidel Castro with an invasion. It secured the Soviets a client state 90 miles off the Florida coast. That’s huge. That’s a big foreign policy win for the USSR. And Cuba, in turn, assisted with Communist movements in Central America and Angola. (Cuba also assisted the African National Congress in South Africa, which the United States labeled “terrorist”.)
And yet, do you really think the Soviets maintaining nuclear weapons 90 miles from the United States while we imposed a permanent blockade on Cuba and killed ordinary Cubans was a better endgame? Yeah, the Soviets did something bad and got part of what they want. Welcome to foreign policy.
Now what a deal looks like and whether the Russians will agree to a realistic deal are things that have to play out over the negotiating table. It took the Vietnamese several years to negotiate the Paris Peace Accords. But you can’t go in with the preconception that any deal that, for instance, makes Ukraine less likely to side with the West in geopolitics is off the table, because such a deal might still be better than a semi-permanent occupation of parts of Ukraine while we slowly murder ordinary Russians with economic sanctions.
At any rate, those are my thoughts. Realism is the only way forward, and the reason we don’t all see this is because we have powerful psychological predispositions towards rhetorical idealism.