The outcome now is indisputable. We, the U.S. and NATO, lost our proxy war in Ukraine, a war that will go down in history as one of our worst foreign policy disasters, even worse than our ignominious withdrawal from our 20-year war in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are dead, far more wounded and maimed. 1.72 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or declared missing in action since the war began. Ukraine’s energy and transportation infrastructure has been decimated. Cities and villages leveled. The U.S. and NATO fought to the last Ukrainian soldier, with no skin in the game. Sorrow blankets the land. Russia is substantially stronger politically, economically, and militarily with stronger ties to Iran, North Korea, and China.
The paucity of NATO’s military forces, capabilities, and industries has been exposed. Conservative political upheaval is growing across Europe. NATO’s viability and utility have been further diminished, having proved useless for deterring Russia for over a decade, its combat equipment decimated by Russian forces on the battlefield. Some $350 billion of U.S. taxpayer money given gratis to Ukraine—with no audit trail—proved a foolish investment, enriching the corrupt Zelensky regime, the U.S. defense industry, and served no purpose other than protracting the war and filling graveyards with brave men and women. Lest we forget, it was all borrowed money increasing U.S. annual deficits and the U.S. debt, which now exceeds $37 trillion.
Considering the immense scope of this avoidable human tragedy, the war demands a candid, unbiased examination of why this war started and why NATO, using Ukraine as its proxy, failed to achieve victory on the battlefield. Over the coming weeks, many explanations will undoubtedly emerge. It is unlikely that any will address the root cause of the war or elucidate the reasons for NATO and Ukraine’s military failure. This two-part essay aims to shed light on these critical issues, hoping that future generations of U.S. political and military leaders entrusted with the responsibility of committing our sons and daughters to war, have a clear understanding of the disastrous consequences of incompetence in both domains.
It Began with A Broken Promise
The path to Russia’s war against Ukraine began with a broken promise made by political leaders of the US and NATO over 30 years ago. On February 9, 1990, just three months after the end of the Cold War and demolition of the Berlin Wall, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his aides to chart a way forward after the Cold War and establish a lasting peace between Europe and what became the Russian Federation. During discussions surrounding the reunification of Germany, Premier Gorbachev made it unmistakably clear that “NATO expansion is unacceptable”, and its eastward expansion beyond Germany would be perceived as an existential threat to Russia’s national security. Secretary Baker acknowledged Gorbachev’s concern and assured him that “neither the President [George H.W. Bush] nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place” and that the United States understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction”. Not an inch.
Gorbachev made a grave mistake. He should have had Baker put that declaration in writing and amend the NATO charter accordingly.In less than a decade, U.S. and NATO political leaders reneged on this promise. In 1999, NATO extended membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland pushing NATO further east towards the Russian Federation, formed eight years earlier. NATO political leaders ignored Russia’s warning that this expansion would be perceived as a direct threat to Russia’s national security. The lesson for Russia? You cannot trust the word of the United States nor its subservient NATO members.
In his article, Why NATO Expansion Explains Russian Actions in Ukraine, Tom Switzer described the inherent danger this expansion spawned. “During the 1990’s debate over whether Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic should become alliance members, many military and foreign-policy experts argued that NATO expansion would lead to big trouble with Russia. It would create the very danger it was supposed to prevent: Russian aggression in reaction to what Moscow would deem a provocative and threatening Western policy…The list of opponents to NATO enlargement from three decades ago reads like a who’s who of that generation’s wise men.”
One of these esteemed foreign policy experts was former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, the architect of American Cold War strategy of containment that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1997, he prophetically warned “Bluntly stated…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking”. Kennan was right. His foresight was ignored. By 2020, eleven additional nations joined the NATO alliance pushing NATO and NATO’s military capabilities further east to Russia’s western border.
Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
Coupled with the eastward expansion of NATO, on June 13, 2002, the U.S. abruptly withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it signed with the Soviet Union in 1972. The ABM Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union (later the Russian Federation) barred both superpowers from deploying national defenses against long-range ballistic missiles and from building the foundation for such defenses. The treaty was based on the premise of mutual assured destruction, the belief that stability was ensured by each superpower having confidence in its ability to destroy the other, and the likelihood that if either power constructed a strategic defense, the other would build up its offensive nuclear forces to overwhelm it. The superpowers would therefore find themselves in a never-ending offensive-defensive arms race as each tried to assure the credibility of its offensive nuclear force. The treaty did, however, allow both sides to build defenses against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The ABM Treaty was negotiated and signed concurrently with the Interim Agreement on strategic offensive arms (commonly known as SALT I), the first in what became a series of U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control agreements that first capped, and later reduced, the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. Both countries considered the treaty a cornerstone of strategic stability which it was for thirty years.
Two years later, the U.S. deployed its first anti-ballistic missile system to Ft. Greely, Alaska. Five years later, the U.S., on behalf of NATO, entered negotiations to place ten (10) additional anti-ballistic missile systems in Poland and an ABM missile radar system in Czechoslovakia expanding its ABM shield eastward towards Russia’s doorstep. Russia regarded this decision by the U.S. to deploy its global anti-missile defense system into Poland and Czechoslovakia as the most serious external threat to Russia’s security system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Adding fuel to the fire, a year later, NATO began serious discussions aimed at admitting both Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance. From Russia’s perspective, U.S. and NATO intentions were unambiguous.
NATO’s Change in Character
Meanwhile, while this expansion occurred, new reasons were forged by the political leaders of NATO member nations to justify and sustain NATO’s existence. Moreover, NATO morphed from a strictly defensive military alliance as it had been for forty years, into an offensive military alliance far removed from the purpose it was originally formed to achieve—and did achieve—deterring the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe after World War II. Yet, the treaty and its purpose were never changed.
The first evidence of this change in character emerged within a decade of the Soviet Union’s collapse. From March-June 1999, NATO launched an offensive air campaign attacking the armed forces of Serbia over a period of 78 days until Serbia agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and end its conflict with Kosovo Albanians. Political leaders of NATO nations, without the direct authorization of the United Nations Security Council, justified this war ostensibly to end and prevent egregious human rights abuses. Article 5 of the NATO treaty was not invoked. It was ignored. Not a single NATO country was attacked by Serbia.
Two years later, on September 11, 2001, a group of al-Queda terrorists commandeering four commercial airliners, attacked the U.S. killing over innocent citizens. Within days, NATO invoked Article 5, the first and only time in its history. A month later, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan to achieve three objectives: find and kill Osama-bin-Laden, the al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of the attack, dismantle al-Qaeda, and overthrow the Taliban regime that had harbored al-Queda. Two years later, in August 2003, NATO assumed command and the mission of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. This offensive military operation marked the first deployment of NATO forces outside Europe and North America.
By 2006, NATO forces were engaged in intensive combat to defeat Taliban insurgents across the entire nation. All thirty nations of NATO contributed forces to this effort in some capacity, fighting or supporting. ISAF continued combat operations to defeat the Taliban until December 2014 when the U.S. withdrew most of its forces. Thus ended eleven years of NATO-led combat operations—for naught. The Taliban were not destroyed. In August 2021, U.S. forces executed an incompetent, humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan followed immediately by the unexpected and rapid collapse of the Afghan National Security Force, a force whose capability and will to fight had been grossly inflated and mis-represented by U.S. commanding generals for years. Taliban forces stormed across the nation and retook control of Afghanistan. 3,606 NATO soldiers were killed during operations from 2001-2021, thousands more were grievously wounded: 68% of the casualties from the U.S, 12% by the United Kingdom, 4.5% by Canada, and the remainder from other NATO nations. The cost of the war was almost $1 trillion dollars, the majority paid by U.S. taxpayers on borrowed money, and achieved nothing.
Given NATO’s history of unmet assurances, the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and NATO’s evolution from a defensive alliance to a more assertive military force, Russia had legitimate grounds for concern over NATO’s potential expansion into Ukraine.
