Ukraine, NATO enlargement, and the realism to not "do stupid stuff"

The Ukraine crisis has highlighted some of ways foreign policy "realists" understand the world differently from the "neoconservatives" so influential among US Republicans and the "liberal internationalist" outlook that is more dominant among Democrats.

The realists in the 1990s were symbolically shouting into the wind about the plans for NATO enlargement, YOU SHOUD THINK THIS THROUGH MORE CAREFULLY1

While the liberal internationalists were taken with the mission of expanding liberal democracy and neoliberal economics in the world, the neocons were drunk on Cold War triumphalism and hellbent on wrecking large parts of the Middle East, starting with Iraq. But both regarded Russia as essentially a defeated power that could not present any major challenge to US geopolitical plans in any foreseeable future.

Christian Hacke in a 2014 analysis looked at the practical developments since the formal enlargement began in 1999 Der Westen und die Ukraine-Krise: Plädoyer für Realismus Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 64:47-48 (17.Nov.2014):

In the West, at the beginning of the 1990s, there was initially no talk of an expansion of NATO. The Republican US administration under George Bush senior (1989–1993) was still reluctant to make such requests. It was not until the liberal-internationalist administration of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) that enlargement was concretized. In the USA, the historian George F. Kennan led the ranks of realist critics, in Germany, Helmut Schmidt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, as well as diplomats and scientists, made no secret of their concerns. But the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999 and those of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004 were carried out in further disregard of Russian security interests. When the US also pushed for the admission of Georgia and Ukraine at the NATO summit in 2008, it further challenged Russia. [emphasis added; my translation from the German]

Hacke then goes on to refer to the judgment expressed by Über-Realist John Mearsheimer in Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin Foreign Affairs Sept/Oct 2014 (Abridged German version: Putin reagiert: Warum der Westen an der Ukraine-Krise schuld ist. IPG 01.09.2014):

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO.

Possibly the most important aspect of the realist outlook is that it encourages policymakers to think in cautious terms about the likely reaction of other players in the international system. In the classic civil-military division of labor in governments, it's an axiom that it is the job of the military to take account of the capabilities of potential adversaries while it's the job of civilian leaders to make judgments on the other countries' intentions. There's a similarity to the realist outlook, which emphasizes that both factors should be pragmatically understood.

In contrast to the liberal-internationalist view, the "realist" can sound amoral and cynical. Because there is a certain missionary element to the liberal-internationalist approach that is particularly visible in cases of "humanitarian intervention." Neocons also strike a certain kind of moral pose, too, though there's is more along the lines of what's right is what the US wants to do, and to hell with what any foreigners might think. And neocons are happy to borrow liberal-internationalist rhetoric about spreading democracy and supporting human rights.

The wars of the last 20 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya provide plenty of material to judge how much democracy, morality, and human rights benefitted from those conflicts. Bad decisions and militarized foreign policy can lead to immoral actions including lots of unnecessary killing. So their actual moral superiority to realism is certainly subject to question.

Hocke responds to the moralistic criticism of the realist outlook in the context of NATO expansion in his 2014 article:

What is new since the 1990s is that the West believes that authoritarian rulers are falling away from their faith and mutating into democrats. It is not Putin who lives "in another world", it is the democratic politicians who live in a dream world with regard to Putin if they believed that he had become a "flawless democrat" [a reference to a particularly ill-advised comment about Putin by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2004]. Not pseudo-democratic trickery, but Realpolitik sobriety and an understanding of limited balance of interests and distance would have been necessary in dealing with Russia. Instead, sultry rhetoric of commonality dominated. Most Western politicians had lost their realistic sense of touch when dealing with Russia. Now, in the Ukraine crisis, they are forced to discover for themselves the Realpolitik laws of power politics. [my translation from the German]

When we think back to the large expansion of NATO that was formalized in 2004, which included incorporating the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, we can also see that plain arrogance played a huge part in the shared assumptions of the liberal internationalist theorists and neocons in that immediate post-9/11 era. They just didn't believe Russia could or would push back in any effective way.

Even if the Obama-Biden Administration didn't always apply the rule adequately, notably in the Libya intervention to take just one example, their supposed guideline of "don't do stupid stuff" is something that US policymakers have often given too little attention, during the Cold War and since.