Once Upon a Time There Was an Essay

How a modest policy idea ended up as a long-form essay in Australia

The same day that this Substack column first appeared, January 4, an essay of mine on the roiling question of Ukrainian membership in NATO appeared coincidentally in the Australia-based e-magazine Quillette. It is my first essay in this publication which, to be honest, I have not ever read on a regular or even semi-regular basis. I am aware that Quillette has a variable reputation. Leftwing types don’t like it, and so label it rightwing, of course. That makes it more appealing to me, not less, even though I am not a programmatic conservative and have never been a Republican. Several thoughtful people I more or less respect even when I disagree with them—Andrew Sullivan, Richard Dawkins, and a few others—have described it as “refreshingly heterodox.” That appeals to me even more and, besides, the subject of my essay is a country mile or two distant from the range of topics around which Quillette’s controversial image attaches itself.

But still: Why would I choose such a venue for an essay really aimed at a U.S. policy-interested audience? Because I had despaired of finding a U.S.-based venue to take it on. So let me do two things in today’s Raspberry Patch Post: briefly tell the story of how this essay came to be placed where it is, for it bears some insight, perhaps, on what has been happening to higher-brow policy journalism in the United States; and then add some substance about the subject matter to hand that would not fit well in the Quillette essay, for the subject is truly vast, mottled with several forms of uncertainty (known unknowns and unknown unknowns both, to paraphrase the late Donny Rumsfeld). It is thus worthy of both extended pondering, and a cozy but demanding humility. If you don’t care to read about how the essay got to where it got, just skip down to the substance, which you’ll find under the subhead “History and Irony.”

I never made my living being an expert on Europe. Insofar as my studies and experience marked me as an expert on any region it was the Middle East, sometimes called the Near East, sometimes called “hell’s firewood.” Never mind that. The thing is, any practically minded expert on U.S. foreign and national security policy, no matter his or her specialty, becomes something of a Europe expert by default. Why is that? Because historically U.S. foreign and national security policy has been overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Forays into the periphery of this focus have generally been understood in a what-does-it-mean-for-Europe cast of mind. Even the Vietnam War, and the Korean War before it, were largely understood in terms of a global canvas in which Europe, with Russia on its eastern flank during the Cold War, stood in the center, and everything else revolved, metaphorically of course, around it. Over the years U.S. military capabilities, alliance systems, diplomatic resources, and trade relationships all reflected the Eurocentric premise, and however much changed matters are objectively in recent decades, for cultural reasons and reasons of perduring habit Europe is still foremost in most people’s conceptions of the agenda. Live long enough and some of us, even Middle East studies types, feel able and sometimes even obliged to write on Europe.

It may start as an urge linked to more familiar turf. So in my case many years ago I wrote a small book on Western Europe’s Middle East Diplomacy and the United States (1983). But once I became a thought magazine executive editor and then twice an editor, and was pushed to become more of a generalist by the very nature of the job, I cautiously ventured further Europeward. I sometimes felt as though if I were making my way along the path laid out, from periphery to center, in the marvelous and revealing mid-18th century Tiepolo ceiling fresco in the Residenz of the Schoenborn prince-bishops in Wurzberg, Germany. (You really should go see this if you’ve yet to do so.) So it seemed perfectly within reason for me to write about the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, as I preferred to call them, and later in the mid-to-late 1990s about the NATO expansion debate.

Of course I had considerable help in all this from experienced genuine experts in these domains. I tried and usually succeeded, I think, in respecting my elders and did so without regard to partisan identifications. When I look back at these excursions into European subjects I do not experience regret. On the contrary, I think these essays and comments have well stood the test of time, and have once again illustrated that those somewhat on the edges of hotly debated subjects have the advantage of being better able to avoid the stultifying groupthink mental numbness that typically plagues them. So when the NATO Vilnius Summit took place this past July, and I beheld with near disbelief the outcome, I figured, well, why not do it again, just one more time maybe?

I was aroused to write because I spotted in the Vilnius affair a blatant contradiction that, it seemed, somehow eluded all the august officials involved in the Summit. While the actual summit communique was circumspect, the clear impression left was that Ukraine would be invited to join NATO in one year’s time, at the next Summit here in Washington. The usual year-long get-up-to-speed process was waived so that Ukraine could be brought in quickly when it came time for that. The assumption was that by then active combat will have ceased, whether with some formal agreement or not, so that the Allies would not be committing themselves in Washington to instant participation in an ongoing shooting war, with all the attendant escalatory dangers that implied when fighting a foe armed with thousands of nuclear warheads.

But wait a minute, I said to myself, if the Russians are horrified by the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and meriting an Article V guarantee, why would they allow combat to stop, even if they were getting the piss kicked out them? They could still fire missiles into Ukraine to keep the pot boiling, and they retained the option to escalate to so-called battlefield nuclear weapons if they came under extreme duress. Remember: At the time, Ukraine’s vaunted summer offensive had yet to fizzle and fail. Had not the Allies talked themselves into a self-negating posture? Ukraine joins NATO when active combat ceases but active combat isn’t likely to cease because Ukraine in NATO is the last thing the Russians want to happen. So instead of being a goad to negotiations to end the war, or at least to get a ceasefire or an armistice in place, NATO’s declaratory posture and body language would far more likely result in getting Russia to double down, avoid any deals, and consider military escalation if it came to that.

In the immediate wake of the Vilnius Summit I searched in vain for anyone making what seemed to me to be an obvious point. Did this surprise me? Well, yes. So I rolled up my proverbial sleeves, tried to think of a better way to both end the war sooner than later and protect Ukraine from further Russian aggression in the longer term—but without doing anything to freeze the enmity in U.S.-Russia relations looking to the post-Putin era. By about July 20 out came about 2,000 words.

I sent these words to a friendly editor, with whom I had worked several times before, at The Bulwark. He liked it. It was, um, different and yet, um, logical. He’s a good editor and a smart fellow, and had some useful comments to help me improve the draft. And he said, in an email of course: Good, now wait a while and let’s see how to get this in. Happy news. I waited. And waited. And waited. I tried not to pester this editor fellow because having been an editor, and a busy one sometimes, I was Golden Ruling my own experience back at him with an avowal not to be a pest. And so I waited. And waited. And wrote one or two very short email teasers, as in “nu?” And then we were well into August, and I finally realized that with The Bulwark doing its duty as a never-Trump beacon pretty much every day and night—more power to them—my draft had fallen by the wayside without my having actually been told as much. Silence an be loud.

So I turned next to American Purpose, the follow-on magazine to the by then defunct The American Interest, on whose editorial board I serve. By then, however, I had created a parallel draft as I continued to devote thought to the matter. So in addition to my 2,000, 2,500 word draft, I now had something more like a typical long-form essay of about twice that length. It was better. More thoughtful. More detailed on the policy end. So I wished to give American Purpose a choice of lengths. To my surprise, I learned that the editor—my successor at The American Interest for the fairly short period in which it continued to exist—had gone to Europe, Prague specifically, to babysit a radio while it found a new permanent director. He left a very competent acting editor in charge pending his return, but the magazine was pretty much shutting down for August, I was told. Long-forms were really not possible with a reduced staff. But I’d grown to like the long-form better than the short version. The subject is so complex, had so many facets, has reams upon reams of relevant history, hosts so many uncertainties……2,500 words just could not really contain it all, even telegraphically.

So I turned to my old employer—pre-summer 1995—in Philadelphia: the Foreign Policy Research Institute and its flagship magazine Orbis. But meanwhile, an old friend of mine, with whom I had discussed the subject briefly, suggested I send what I had to Foreign Affairs. The editor there, he told me, is an honest guy looking for new ideas, and this friend of mine, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO—while not agreeing with me—told me that my thinking qualified. We were all wrestling with what to do; not an easy problem, he agreed.

I thought about it, but demurred. I did not know this editor, who followed Gideon Rose—someone I knew well for many years. I did not like the editing to which my writing had earlier been subjected at Foreign Affairs. But more important, being largely a journal of record, Foreign Affairs cares about credentials as well as content. I had none. I had no paying job, no active affiliation anywhere, and of course, as already noted, no reputation as a Europe guy. I figured it would be a waste of everyone’s time to try. I still like the fellow who made the suggestion, and I still like him as a friend, even though I criticize him almost by name in the Quillette essay. I realize that this twinning is very old-fashioned. Imagine: You can disagree with someone on policy ideas and yet still really like and respect that person for his honesty and integrity, and thoughts of splenetic ad hominem attacks never enter anyone’s mind. Why mention this? Good heavens: Do you really have to ask?

Anyway, I gave my associate at FPRI the same choice I would have given American Purpose: take the short version if you like, or send the long one to the editor of Orbis (someone I once hired at The National Interest to be my executive editor). Well, it was summer, and the ball got dropped. Yes, I use passive voice here deliberately to avoid specifying an active noun, in this case a person. One fellow thought the Orbis editor had the con, but the Orbis editor never got the memo. Weeks passed, and by now the shorter version, which sort of depended on readers having an active memory of what had happened in July in Vilnius, was becoming obsolete for practical purposes.

It then occurred to me try the Texas National Security Review (TNSR). I knew the titular editor from State Department/Policy Planning days. He’d once invited me to give a talk at the Clements Center he ran in Austin; that was fun in many ways. TNSR does publish long-form essays, and I know most of its editorial board members. So I sent off just the long-form essay. To my delight, an editor there liked the gist, and I thought maybe my quest for a publishing venue was finally over. Time didn’t matter so much anymore since the longer version was better protected against quick obsolescence for having a deeper context. I was, as our British friends are wont to say, chuffed.

Alas, I got baited-and-switched: My opus was turned over to War on the Rocks—TNSR and War on the Rocks being two parts of the same business—and I was told to cut the piece half…..then it would be edited and posted. Nope. Sure, I could cut it in half. Easy. After all, I already had a cut-in-half version, as you, dear reader, already know. But I just didn’t want to do that, so I told the fellow that I sent my work to TNSR precisely to avoid having to settle for a foreshortened version of a complex subject. So thanks, but no thanks.

I was being twice sincere. I was and I remain grateful to the TNSR and War on the Rocks folks, because in the process the editors sent my longer version out to a reader. The reader, anonymous then and anonymous still, liked the draft but posed a few questions. One of the questions spotted an unclear passage in my draft, and even the others led me to strain to produce a better couple of paragraphs. What ended up in Quillette, almost entirely as it was with the title of “The Vilnius Fiasco,” is better for the help of at least two editors along the way. This is how things are supposed to work. Editors are (mostly) wonderful people.

When the TNSR thing fell through, as just described, I was nearly ready to just forget the whole thing. Meanwhile I had been nosing around in the literature since Vilnius expecting, eventually, to be scooped. But as best I could tell—and not that I read everything—I wasn’t. So I did not forget the whole thing because I remembered that back in July when my basic idea was just a 150-word email, I had shared it with an editor friend in Paris, who is the brains as well as the beauty behind Cosmopolitan Globalist. I am on the board there, too. “Interesting,” she pronounced my ideas. She needed to write on Vilnius herself, and she did, and I could see that my ideas and hers were different enough in mood, lets call it, that “interesting” might actually have meant “you’re nuts” or “gee, I used to like you” or “well I see your logic but I wish it wasn’t logical” and so forth and such. After the TNSR fall-through, I raised the matter again, without, however, actually sending off my long-form draft. Got no answer. Sometimes silence is very loud.

Ah, but this Paris friend had connected me to the editors at Quillette some months before over a matter that went nowhere. We know how associational memory works: stuff just pops right up when you least expect it. Leaves you speechless sometimes. Or, as David Mitchell put it in Cloud Atlas: “Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.” (That would be page 168 if you’re keeping score.) Yes; but when my power of language returned, off went the draft to Quillette, and you know the rest.

So six and a half months after the basic idea came to me I finally found a home for it. Ideal home? No, probably not, since Washington-type eyes are the ones I have wanted to attract. But better some home than no home, I suppose. In a so-called career now spanning more than half a century I’ve published 134 print essays, 395 electronic long-form essays, 28 review essays, and 246 columns and shorter comments, not to mention 26 book chapters and some single-authored books to boot. Save for the books, no writing effort exacted more time and general frustration than the Quillette caper. I’m not sure what this means, either about the trajectory of American policy-related journalism—about which many others I know have recognizably similar stories to tell lately—or about my possibly rusting skill set. Let’s leave it at that, for now.

OK, next: Part II of this post, just below. The best way to read this, I think, is as a part of the Quillette essay that would not fit there. So if you’re willing to take direction, start reading “The Vilnius Fiasco” from the top and keep at it until you get to the end of the second subhead; then read what is below; and then go back to Quillette and read subsection III and then the very short subsection IV. If you aren’t willing to take direction, let’s face it: I can’t make you.

History and Irony

Diplomats are not the only people who occasionally display imperfect insight into history, or try to impose overly simple templates on recalcitrant realities. The ongoing academic debate over Ukraine and NATO also disappoints. Some notable exceptions aside, most of the commentary from the out-of-government sidelines sounds like a regurgitated NATO expansion debate, none the better perfumed for being 20-plus years moldering in the belly. To one side are too many unreconstructed neocon moralists and to the other are too many head-in-the-sand revisionist/isolationists. Both express positions so resolutely muscular that no compromise or nuance need be suggested to them with any hope of genuine engagement. That is a giveaway: As Maureen Dowd once noted, “It is a sad truth in politics that looking strong makes up for thinking weak.”[1]

Some notably asinine statements have attended this so-called debate. For one example, expressed invariably in the “I-told-you-so” past perfect tense, some (to remain politely unnamed) have argued that had Ukraine been brought into NATO earlier, even with the initial 1999 expansion, the Russians would never have dared seize Crimea let alone have launched the current nach westen war. This does make sense by analogy to the infamous January 12, 1950 Acheson press conference in which the Secretary of State explicitly placed South Korea outside the U.S. security ambit. But it also requires total amnesia concerning the state of Ukrainian politics from the mid-to-late 1990s and into the early years of this century. Between the Tymoshenkos, Yanukovichs, Yushchenkos and the rest of that ilk NATO could not possibly have taken in such a rambling wreck of oscillating mayhem. To paraphrase a former President, of whom more below, “It’s the politics, stupid.”

The correct argument at the time, put well back then by Michael Mandelbaum among others, was that NATO expansion up to but not including Ukraine would, ironically, provide protection for countries that did not need it but increase the diplomatic exposure and security dangers of countries that did need it but couldn’t have it--notably Ukraine. Many made that argument, even some Democrats generally sympathetic to the Clinton crowd, but that seemed not to help the aforementioned President and the principals of his Administration to understand it.

As things have turned out, that was not the only irony attending NATO expansion. Two simple questions illustrate the point.

First, would Poland, say, have invested less or more in its own defense capabilities had it lacked an Article V guarantee between its accession to NATO in 1999 and February 24, 2022? It’s hard to say, but all else equal it would probably have invested more as a hedge against its sense of somewhat greater security uncertainty.

Second and more pointedly, during the early stages of the current Russo-Ukrainian War, before the corrupted ineptitude of Russian conventional forces became clear, would Polish decision-makers have considered sending troops into Ukraine to stand with that country’s defenders, reasoning that if Ukraine were quickly subdued Poland might be Russia’s next target? It would have made some sense, but since that decision would have dragged NATO, the United States with it, into active combat, it never even made it to the table.

So, Poland and other post-Warsaw Pact-era NATO members likely have somewhat less robust military capabilities and less security policy independence today than might have been the case without NATO membership, but with a more fully fleshed out Partnership for Peace arrangement then already budding out. Who predicted that in the 1996-99 period?

As for the “never Ukraine” revisionists, these folks are often pilloried by neocons as “realists,” but “academic realists”--something narrower and different--is what is actually meant. Rightly so, since no formal approach is less realistic than one that by definition rules out the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy judgments--a premise obviously and particularly untenable right now. Academic realists are in more or less permanent violation of Mencken’s axiom.

If academic realists want to make a troubling argument it need have nothing to do directly with NATO or the NATO expansion drama of the mid-to-late 1990s. Russian imperial recidivism did not need NATO expansion to awaken it (there is no need to teach a snake to suck eggs, as we like to say), although expansion certainly made selling new imperial adventures to a Russian body politic nursing a major status humiliation a lot easier. The selling was mainly disingenuous, true, since as the Clinton Administration was adding promises it was subtracting significantly from U.S. regional military capabilities; but Russian politicians have performance skills no less proficient than do Western ones.

What that reawakening did need was a KGB-lite kind of regime that has since morphed into the kleptocratic-mafia state that launched the February 2022 attack on Ukraine. So the proper revisionists’ question ought to be, to what extent did foolish policy during the first genuinely post-Cold War U.S. administration--the first Clinton Administration--help produce that kleptocratic-mafia regime?

The answer is subject to scholarly disagreement; what isn’t,huh? But it’s the rarely asked question that’s important--rarely asked because, it seems, the impatient, cognitively unfocussed and dot-connecting-challenged culture of the moment inhibits systematic, historically informed thinking about pretty much everything. In my view, the answer is that exporting Jeffrey Sachs-style shock therapy from the banks of the Charles River to the banks of the Moskva unleashed a chaotic faux privatization frenzy on a society with little experience and no institutional basis in law (or banking and finance) for managing a market economy. That prefigured the outcome as those who could stole what they could from the defunct state, and then endeavored to lock in their loot for the sake of their families’ future. Afterwaves of well-meaning but clueless USAID geeks then provided some comic relief but, alas, no results worth writing home about. Thus was the path dependency road paved with morally unimpeachable intentions, merely poorly thought out (and highly abstract) ones--as usual in the annals of American foreign policy blunders.

This is not the place to rehearse the state of immediate post-Soviet Russian politics or to recall key U.S. policy choices in that seminal period. Establishing a market-oriented democratic order in post-Soviet Russia was never going to be easy; but the particular kind of Russian regime that Putin leads was not inevitable, and U.S. policy bears some responsibility for the fact that it came about anyway. How much responsibility experienced experts can debate; but, suffice it to say, the Russian klepto-mafia regime was not born of an immaculate local conception.

That responsibility, however weighty one judges it, rests not only with the Clinton Administration’s errors. The erosion of Russia’s fragile democratic naissance took time, continuing during the Bush 43 Administration, distracted as George W. Bush was by the so-called War on Terror, and the early years of the Obama Administration during which the President seemed peeved at having to invest quality attention in any foreign policy/national security issue. U.S. Ambassadors to Russia from Tom Pickering to Bill Burns to Mike McFaul have plenty of stories to tell about what it was like trying to raise the priority of the Russian portfolio. It is disingenuous to argue that Russia’s return to full-frontal autocratic habits was inevitable: In retrospect, all calamities caused by antecedent inattention and ignorance seem inevitable, especially to those who were inattentive and ignorant.

As is the case with NATO’s rhetorical posture now, there was a better way for policy to develop then, back in 1992-93. Richard Nixon, a person I still vigorously disliked even in his mostly harmless dotage, gave sagacious advice to the U.S. government. Channeling Churchill’s “in victory, magnanimity” Nixon urged generosity and patience. He saw opportunity at a molten time to put U.S.-Russian enmity behind us, but worried that the legacy of the Cold War would come to haunt all concerned unless we jointly determined to get past it.

It's a counterfactual, true; no one knows what might have happened had the Bush 41 Administration quickly forgiven the massive Russian debt and Clinton Administration principals then taken Nixon’s advice to heart for the next eight seminal years of post-USSR Russo-U.S. relations. The latter of course was never likely: Partisan Democrats newly flushed with power do not typically take advice from disgraced Republicans. Alas, the Clinton Administration turned out to be neither generous nor patient; it pocketed the famous “peace dividend” and left off investing in relations with a new Russia not yet set in its post-Soviet ways. That was the key error of U.S. policy at the end of the 20^th century, not NATO expansion per se, the consequences of which would have remained theoretical had not Russian politics taken the course it did.

Who now in the current debate even raises this ur-point of the causal chain that led to the Russo-Ukraine war? I hear near total silence….which tells us all we need to know about how historically sentient the current debate really is. The truncated time perspective of the debate is acute on every side, and so rapidly descends into meaninglessness for any practical purpose. Diplomats can expect little help from the academy, alas, even when in need of it.

A few concluding odds and ends, if I may.

It’s worth emphasizing that serious people made some of the mistakes just mooted. Serious people, not encyclopedically ignorant buffoons like Donald Trump. This stuff is hard, much of it inherently hard, as anyone who has been close to these kinds of decisions knows. Decision-makers usually don’t have the time or the fullest knowledge they need to make what end up as portentous judgments, and often enough they don’t even know which decisions (or non-decisions) will end up having that label stick to them in the fullness of time.

Problem sets, more over, are often moving targets. An idea that makes sense Monday morning can make a lot less sense Thursday afternoon. In the Ukraine case, thinking about what to do seemed to lean one way when the fear was that Ukraine would quickly collapse, another way when Ukrainian forces started ripping the Russians a new arsehole, and yet another way when the summer offensive flopped and rolled. Some experienced heads now think that the Biden Administration is about to twist Ukrainian arms to deliver Ukraine to a negotiating table bedecked with pre-potted concessions before the election season gets too far down the track. We know this is possible when suggestions to do such a thing appear in Foreign Affairs, written by the head of the sponsoring Council on Foreign Relations. As the closest we’ve had in recent decades to a prophet once put it, “You don’t need a weathervane. . . .” I hope not, and hope further that if that happens anyway Ukraine will not enter NATO as a reward—or consolation prize, depending on how you look at it—for knuckling under to American pressure. Obviously, President Zelensky will try to exact some price for Ukrainian obeisance, if he must.

If he succeeds, what will happen then? No one knows for sure, but imagine that we suffer a new MAGA administration and after some months after the inauguration, once the snow is melted and the mud has dried up, the Russians strike up the war again. How could they resist, for without resolute American leadership NATO members will bicker among themselves about what to do, will predictably misplace their balls and backbones, and ultimately be forced to make excuses for why the Alliance do not respond effectively. NATO will have been shown to be a “paper tiger”—remember that one?—and that’ll be the end of it for all practical purposes: perhaps the key goal of Russian foreign policy for many, many years will have been achieved. If you’re looking for the worst possible outcome of the current fighting short of escalation to a nuclear war, this is pretty much it. Free advice: Joe, don’t drag the Ukrainians to that dirty table, and don’t let Ukraine into NATO when better ways to help it exist.

Or consider a less dire but also now less likely scenario: The Russian leadership, for whatever reasons—bankruptcy, social unrest, brain drain, the “power vertical’s” paranoia about domestic challenges, and so on—decides it wants to call the combat quits, at least for a while, but demands as a price for its agreement to cease fire that Ukraine declare that it will not become a NATO member and/or that the Alliance will not invite it. If the war halts under those conditions, a Ukrainian and/or NATO agreement to that condition will be viewed universally as a major Western concession to Russia. Had NATO not put itself so far out on its skis in Vilnius, this would not be such a vulnerability or such a problem. Sometimes, often in fact, when diplomats set up their dominoes in certain ways they are bound to fall in those ways, whether wisely or, in this case, not.

It’s easy to criticize from hindsight; not that hindsight guarantees perspicacity, far from it. Sometimes it’s too easy, and I don’t mean my judgments here to be glib—since I have no way of knowing for certain if I could have done any better under the circumstances. Ukraine/Russia is a very hard problem, and it is irresponsible to see it or speak of it in any other light. It is also an important, potentially radiating problem that, just to remind everyone, cannot be divorced from the most parlous politics the United States has experienced arguably since the days of Bloody Kansas.

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[1] Dowd, "Janet, Louis and Bill," New York Times, December 10, 1997, p. A35.