Post-War Ukraine (and NATO implications)

I want to write something about the aggressive war Russia is prosecuting on its neighbor Ukraine. Here's a separate thought, related to but separate from what I want to write about the conflict more broadly.

There is no question, based on the war's current trajectory, the US will have a lot of influence in post-war Ukraine--its society and government, which will be facing the project of rebuilding a nation. I hope that soft power leverage is recognized and respected, not wielded nor misused. If and when the Ukrainian military wins, expels Russian occupant forces from their territory, I bet there will be no doubts that the United States supplied the means by which they were able to stay in, and win, that brutal fight.

When that time comes, pax Ukraini, the United States should act like a superpower that allowed a foreign nation to secure its independence. It should recognize that it has not conquered Ukraine vis a vis the Russians, even if the common view of this is as just such a proxy war. American elites should not treat Ukraine as a new eastern playground of people who will automatically do what's in the best interest of the American military/financial powers.

I'm thinking of how the Atlantic colonies in America won their independence with French assistance, without becoming a set of French client states. Perhaps it was convenient that France soon was embroiled in its own revolutionary precarity by the time the newly free and independent states in America had their feet underneath.

There is a lingering bitterness from the collapse of the Soviet economic-political system, and the West should try hard to avoid leaving that kind of aftertaste again. I mean the feeling that foreign capitalists made out well, while the people of formerly-Soviet nations suffered, as a result of the USSR collapse, famously called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Together with the expansion of NATO, I can see why the West looked less than gracious in "victory" at the end of the Cold War. I use quotes because in reality there are no finish lines.

In the eyes of the West (that is, to regular Americans, Europeans, and their political leaders), the war in Ukraine was unprovoked and is a criminal war. The facts support this view. Putin is pushing a competing narrative, however, and Western powers ought to consider it so they don't feed into it. In Putin's eyes, Ukraine is an artificial state. First, Ukraine is essentially borderland. It has never been a center of power in its own right. The territory was invaded, occupied, reconquered, and ruled from afar, from the Romans to the Kievan Rus, Ottomans, Russian Tsars, Nazi Germans, and Soviets dictators. Finally, since 1991, Ukraine is an independent nation. While Americans recognize independent statehood as the opportunity for self-government, and thus a productive political development, Putin sees Ukraine today as no less subjugated -- independent in name only -- beholden now/increasingly to the decadent West that is neoliberal, postmodern, and progressive. 

Athwart these advancing forces, which he sees as some kind of unholy alliance with Ukrainian nationalism, Putin wants to protect what is literally and historically Russian borderlands. To defend not-quite-Russian territory. He wants it to remain Russian in character, by its proximity, spatial and cultural relationships, with the dominant Russian state next door. Putin rejects Ukrainian identity because he doesn't like what the Ukrainian people have sought in the exercise of their national agency. Namely, closer relations with the European Union rather than economic partnerships with Russia. 

Donald Trump said the United States was stupid in Iraq because we didn't "take the oil" after conquering the territory (2003). All I'm saying is that Americans should not do the equivalent of "take the oil" in Ukraine through the soft-imperialism of financial and supranational agreements, tempting as that may be to finance/developers, do-gooder NGO types, and western diplomats.

This justification is often given for Putin's attack on Ukraine, that he was provoked into enlarging Russia (first Crimea, then Donbas, the Baltics, Poland, etc.) by NATO's expansions into former Soviet bloc nations during the 1990s and 2000s. I reject that because it falsely blames Putin's offensive invasion on Western decisions made prior and elsewhere. But just because that dynamic (Western pushiness) doesn't explain the war in Ukraine, doesn't mean it wasn't true. It is true that historically, Russia has prized its borderlands as providing a margin of security between the Russian centers of society/power (e.g., Moscow, St. Petersberg) and marauding foreign empires (Mongols, Japanese, Ottomans, Germans, French, Scandinavian). At the end of WWII, leading US diplomatic thinkers warned that the US would not be able to rush into central and eastern Europe for this reason, a fact we lived with until the 1990s when eastern European nations joined the US-led military alliance (NATO).

I did not intend to opine here on the question of Ukrainian membership in NATO, but I guess that's the logical end point for a discussion of Ukrainian governance after defeating the Russian invaders. Because of the understanding I've tried to describe above, I am skeptical of membership/expansion being a good idea. The Baltics are member states, and that is a done deal. Russia will never occupy them, and they brought NATO hardware right to the Russian border. Russia has legitimate security concerns that we can be mindful, respectful of. Ushering the Ukraine into NATO would be disrespectful of those persistent, consistent priorities in the eyes of many. And it's not like whether Ukraine is in or out would shift the balance of power, because NATO is overwhelmingly the most powerful military alliance on the planet, ever to exist. So I think the argument against enlarging NATO with Ukraine is strong. But there are two counterpoints: One, Russia has breached whatever understanding gave it the right to articulate having legitimate security interests in its surrounding countries when it invaded the big neighboring country in an attempt to annex it and stamp out its national identity. And two, Ukraine has certainly proven itself to be a worthy ally. I'd definitely want the Ukrainians fighting on my side if the US had to invoke Article 5.