About a month and a half ago, I wrote an article on the crisis in Ukraine. The point of that piece was to sum-up the main lessons of the fiasco. The lessons I wrote about then were a grab-bag of historical, political, and economic extrapolations.
Now, towards the end of January, the crisis is still ongoing. Indeed, it is worsening, with NATO troops entering the picture for the first time, diplomatic negotiations seemingly hopeless, and war scares shivering across the continent. Putin’s Russia seems determined to get its way, and the Western response seems simultaneously confused and obstinate.
Regardless of how this turns out, Europe’s confidence in peace has taken a battering, certainly the worst during my lifetime.
Unsurprisingly, the crisis has produced a plethora of pages, as observers, analysts and columnists scramble for explanations and prescriptions. By far the best I’ve read, however, is this article from Foreign Policy, by Harvard IR Professor Stephen Walt. It acknowledges Putin’s malign actions and character but places far more blame on the misguided liberal internationalism of post-Cold War U.S foreign policy. Walt pulls no punches, just read the title: “Liberal Illusions Caused the Ukraine Crisis.”
At first glance, the article seemed coarse, the product of a hawk’s mindset. It even starts with a textbook appeal to realism, suggesting that it is the only viable approach to global politics. But, taken as a whole, it is a nuanced and intelligent piece. And the crux of his argument, the point that really pulled me in, was simple: a lack of critical self-examination, a lack of basic empathy, has led Western leaders and diplomats to wildly misjudge the situation in Ukraine.
More specifically, Western policymakers have been unwilling or unable to take Russia’s perspective, to understand the basic legitimacy of Russia’s grievances – all we see is Putin. Make no mistake, this isn’t Russian apologia. Walt is perfectly clear on that front, stressing that “the Russian leader deserves no sympathy, as his repressive domestic policies, obvious corruption, repeated lying, and murderous campaigns against Russian exiles who pose no danger to his regime make abundantly clear.”
No, the article is not inviting us to forget and forgive; it is inviting us to think harder about what all this looks like from Moscow.
NATO, after all, is pretty much an anti-Russia alliance. And Ukraine is the soft underbelly of Russia, as well as probably the most strategically-significant territory in the region. Could we therefore take seriously, for just a moment, Russian displeasure at seeing the alliance subsume Ukraine? Walt points out that the U.S has claimed the Western hemisphere as its near-exclusive domain. And if we intervened in a tiny country like Nicaragua to protect this domain, why wouldn’t Putin intervene in a massive country like Ukraine to protect his?
We claim the moral high ground, but don’t think seriously about the occasions where we have fallen short. Considering that Western countries have orchestrated dubious foreign interventions quite recently, are we really shocked that Putin questions the West’s motives? What guarantee could we ever provide that Ukraine would never be turned against Russia? Russia is no angel, but from their perspective neither are we. Ignoring that reality is dangerous because it leaves us blindsided when, say, a foreign power annexes territory or stirs up proxy wars.
Of course, Ukraine was probably going to become a geopolitical issue at some point, if only because of the question of EU membership. But if Western foreign policymakers had thought about Ukraine from a Russian perspective, they might have proceeded more cautiously, with a view to the long game, and avoided such overt crisis.
I’ll be honest, a month and a half ago I hadn’t quite thought about Ukraine as an opportunity to cultivate empathy. Walt’s argument has me convinced otherwise: empathy is the first virtue of geopolitics. Without empathy, a diplomat is left grasping at shadows, destined to be outpaced by events and actors they do not understand.
This is not about sentiment either; you don’t have to like someone to empathize with them. In the case of Russia, we may neither like nor approve of the current regime, but when making foreign policy decisions about their backyard, our very first step should be to see the world through their eyes, not ours. This is no guarantee of peace, but it is more likely to produce sound analysis.
Now there is Ukraine. I hope that the conflict resolves peacefully, with concessions and de-escalation leading to some mutually-acceptable détente. Realistically, the time for empathy has come and gone. At this stage, our best bet is that frantic negotiations produce an acceptable accord, steadying the waters until a longer-term solution is found.
It is a dangerous world, though, full of hungry powers with political systems different from our own. Now there is Ukraine; but tomorrow, who knows?
Walt ends his article with another appeal to realism, stating that until U.S foreign policymakers “temper their liberal hubris and regain a fuller appreciation of realism’s uncomfortable but vital lessons, they are likely to stumble into similar crises in the future.” I would put it slightly differently. The only way to navigate a dangerous world with any consistency or foresight is with geopolitical empathy at the helm.