How to retreat from Ukraine

The United States in its days as a hyperpower made a series of moves to extend our perimeter of influence deep into Russia’s near-abroad. Some of those moves appear to be sustainable: The expansion of NATO to include countries of the former Warsaw Pact was itself a risk, but at the moment those commitments seem secure. But the attempt to draw Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, the partway-open door to Ukrainians who preferred westward-focused alliances, was a foolish overcommitment even when American power was at its height.

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Note that this is not a question of what Ukrainians deserve. Russia is an authoritarian aggressor in the current crisis; Ukraine is a flawed democracy but a more decent regime than Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy. When we gave Ukraine security assurances under Bill Clinton, opened the door to NATO membership under George W. Bush and supported the Maidan protests under Barack Obama, we were in each case acting with better intentions than Moscow in its own machinations.

But in geopolitics good intentions are always downstream from the realities of power. Whatever its desires or ours, the government in Ukraine has simply never been in a position to fully join the West — it’s too economically weak, too internally divided and simply in the wrong place. And the actions of the Bush and Obama administrations — and for all of Trump’s personal sympathies for Putin, some Trump administration acts as well — have left us overstretched, our soft-power embrace of Kyiv ill-equipped to handle hard-power countermoves from Moscow.

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