To Save Ukraine from a Defeated Russia’s Revenge, Disband NATO
Everyone has been surprised by the success of Ukraine’s offensive in the north — everyone, that is, except me. Back in May, I opened a piece with this line that seems pretty prophetic right about now:
It’s looking more and more like Russia isn’t just losing the elective war it decided to start in Ukraine, but has in fact already lost it.
I closed that piece with the following, which may still seem premature to the people who questioned my declaration of Russia’s defeat (I’m looking at you, AK79), but which is looming larger and larger for me:
That leads me to the scary question waiting on the far side of a Russian defeat: what will Putin do in anger or frustration?
Russia has already shown how nihilistic and spiteful it can be. It has repeatedly terrorized civilians to try to break Ukraine’s will. It has lashed out with indiscriminate missile strikes, when Ukraine’s military has advanced successfully. It has threatened to precipitate another Chernobyl at Zaporizhzhia. Its leaders and cheerleaders have been talking about dropping a tactical nuke on western Ukraine since things started going poorly.
The question of what Russia might do in defeat isn’t just about a possible desire to “save face.” Thinking of it in such trivial terms is an insult to the Russians (and our own intelligence). Take their strategic aims at face value instead: the end of a unipolar world, the reduction of what they see as the NATO threat. How do they still achieve those ends, if they can’t subjugate Ukraine?
Imagine for a second that Russia loses the Donbas and Crimea. These both seem very possible at this point, for the same reasons the collapse around Izyum seemed plausible to me four months ago: Russia’s army is corrupt, incompetent, demoralized and under-supplied, while Ukraine has shown they know how to make every smart missile count. If Russian soldiers won’t fight anymore, what’s to stop Ukraine from continuing to collapse Russia’s lines until they reach the end of Ukrainian soil?
And in the event of a total collapse of Russia’s conventional military, why wouldn’t Russia drop a nuke on Ukraine to prevent NATO from eventually inducting the country? There are powerful incentives for Russia to do so, and as this war has shown, the disincentives “The West” can deploy are limited and covert. “The West” has no pretense to retaliate against a nuclear strike on a non-NATO country, at least not under the current ground rules of mutually assured destruction. It doesn’t do any good to send more short-range HIMARS to Lviv and Kyiv, if they’ve already been turned into the new Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Would “The West” (again: whatever that term actually means) be okay if that were the ultimate outcome of Ukraine’s decision to defend itself? If so, we are as cynical as the Russians. Such an outcome (20 million dead, an even more hardened line across which two adversaries call each other “evil” and use that declaration to build up the infrastructure of endless conflict) takes the current dangerous, self-perpetuating stalemate with North Korea and Iran and makes it existential — it would take us back to the Cold War-era specter of global Armageddon. Even if Russia and “The West” don’t blow each other up, we will always be one stupid accident away from millions losing their lives for no good reason.
(Seriously. Look up the number of nuclear bomb “mishaps” during the Cold War. We even dropped a couple of hydrogen bombs on North Carolina, which even now is probably a bad idea, no matter how many awful laws North Carolina adopts. Oops — look at me waxing nostalgic about obliterating an unfriendly state. See how tempting nuclear brinksmanship can be?)
Even short of the nuclear option, what does the future hold for Ukraine and for Russia? Russia may continue to harass Ukraine indefinitely from the relative security of the DNR and LPR territories they fomented away from Ukraine. That’s hardly a positive outcome. Some in the The West are hoping for regime change, but what replaces Putin may be even more unstable and violent. Hard to imagine, but throughout the war, there have been voices arguing the Russians weren’t being indiscriminate enough. Imagine those people in charge.
There is an alternative. It seems unthinkable, but only because everyone isn’t thinking. We’re all too busy celebrating Russia’s humiliating defeat. Not that they haven’t given us every reason to want to celebrate — whatever moral failings “The West” may have committed, Russia has committed even more galling atrocities that have earned them the jeers from armchair military strategists and the general public. We’re all too locked in this stupid paradigm of “right versus wrong” and “winners and losers.”
Before her words are lost to the distant recesses of cinematic relevance, let us remember the wisdom of Gloria Clemente:
Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic mechanism, from which one extracts what one needs.
We have to resist the deceptive allure of our tribal nature and the simple narrative that we achieve victory by destroying our enemy. We have to be more creative, because the enemy are us.
“The West” should negotiate with Russia right now. End the war in Ukraine, with the borders restored to what they were in 2013. Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea are all part of Ukraine. All Ukrainian POWs are returned to Ukraine.
What do we give Russia in return for all this?
We offer to disband NATO, something we should have offered in 1992 instead of embarking on a decade of the cynical impoverishment and stratification that made Putin possible. Inevitable, even.
Replace NATO with a security organization that includes Russia and Ukraine (and anyone else who wants to join). Replace NATO Article 5 with an understanding that all members will respond to any attack against any member of the new security organization by anyone — even another member. Avoid the kind of veto clauses that have made a mockery of the UN Security Council. Put extradition treaties in place for things like war crimes. Create real, immutable principles that every country’s interests are served by following, not subverting (the way both “The West” and Russia have subverted international law, particularly but not exclusively, in the 21st century).
Russia isn’t wrong that the unipolar world is hypocritical and counter-productive (even if they’re right for very wrong reasons). Their proposed replacement — the rule of unbridled force — is equally hypocritical and counter-productive. Russia’s looming defeat opens an opportunity to do something fundamentally more edifying, and it isn’t just Ukraine’s best path out of endless conflict and into an abiding peace.
It’s the world’s best shot at it.
It’s just a question of whether we have the courage to recognize the opportunity and turn away from the far more familiar impulse to bash the Russians’ skulls in. I get why it appeals, but I also get why it’s as nihilistic an outcome as the one the Russians envisioned when they were prepared to decapitate the Ukrainian state at any toll of innocent blood.
If we really care about Ukraine — if we aren’t simply using them as a disposable proxy in a bid to humiliate a convenient foe — we need to think ahead. If we really care about ourselves and the future of life on this planet (evidence would suggest we don’t, but I do), we have to think laterally.
Even if the negotiations go nowhere, they can at least give Russia somewhere to focus its energy beside retribution. International law with real integrity is also the only incentive that might truly curtail Russia’s territorial ambitions within the bounds of the old Commonwealth of Independent [sic] States.
By the time Ukraine wins, it will already be too late. We’ll just have to hope at that time that the Russians will be content to lick their wounds quietly. Given their entitlement and the utter arrogance they’ve shown their “little brothers” and as reports come in that Russia is destroying the electric grid in Kharkiv in Donetsk as their troops flee to Luhansk, that hope seems very faint.
