The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine War

I will make two main arguments today. First, the United States is 
principally responsible for causing the Ukraine crisis. This is not to 
deny that Putin started the war and that he is responsible for Russia’s 
conduct on the battlefield. Nor is it to deny that America’s allies bear 
some responsibility, but they largely follow Washington’s lead on Ukraine. 
My key point, however, is that the United States has pushed forward 
policies toward Ukraine that Putin and his colleagues see as an 
existential threat to their country—a point they have made repeatedly for 
many years. Specifically, I am talking about America’s obsession with 
bringing Ukraine into NATO and making it a Western bulwark on Russia’s 
border. The Biden administration was unwilling to eliminate that threat 
through diplomacy and indeed recommitted itself to bringing Ukraine into 
NATO in 2021. Putin responded by invading Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.

Second, the Biden administration has reacted to the outbreak of the war by 
doubling down against Russia. Washington and its Western allies are 
committed to decisively defeating Russia in Ukraine and employing 
comprehensive sanctions to greatly weaken Russian power. The United States 
is not seriously interested in finding a diplomatic solution to the war, 
which means the war is likely to drag on for months, if not years. In the 
process, Ukraine, which has already suffered grievously, is going to 
experience even greater harm. In essence, the United States and its allies 
are helping lead Ukraine down the primrose path.

Furthermore, there is a danger that the war will escalate, as NATO might 
get dragged into the fighting and nuclear weapons might be used. We live 
in perilous times.

Let me now lay out my argument in greater detail, starting with a 
description of the conventional wisdom about the causes of the conflict.

The Conventional Wisdom

It is widely and firmly believed in the West that Putin is solely 
responsible for causing the Ukraine crisis and certainly the ongoing war. 
He is said to have imperial ambitions, which is to say he is bent on 
conquering Ukraine and other countries as well—all for the purpose of 
creating a greater Russia that bears some resemblance to the former Soviet 
Union. In other words, Ukraine is Putin’s first target, but not his last. 
As one scholar put it, he is “acting on a sinister, long-held belief: to 
erase Ukraine from the map of the world.” Given Putin’s purported goals, 
it makes perfect sense for Finland and Sweden to join NATO and for the 
alliance to increase its force levels in Eastern Europe. After all, 
Imperial Russia must be contained.

While this narrative is repeated over and over in the mainstream media and 
by virtually every Western leader, there is no evidence to support it. To 
the extent that purveyors of the conventional wisdom provide evidence, it 
has little if any bearing on Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine. For 
example, some emphasize that he said that Ukraine is an “artificial state” 
or that it is not a “real state.” Such opaque comments, however, say 
nothing about his reason for going to war. The same is true of Putin’s 
statement that he views Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” with a 
common history. Others point out that he called the collapse of the Soviet 
Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Of course, 
Putin also said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. 
Whoever wants it back has no brain.” Still, others point out that he said 
that “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more 
precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.” But as he went on to say in that 
same speech: “Of course, we cannot change past events, but we must at 
least admit them openly and honestly.”

To make the case that Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine and 
incorporating it into Russia, it is necessary to provide evidence that 
first, he thought it was a desirable goal, that second, he thought it was 
a feasible goal, and third, he intended to pursue that goal. There is no 
evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less 
intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it 
part of a greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 
24th.

In fact, there is significant evidence that Putin recognized Ukraine as an 
independent country. In his July 12th, 2021, article about Russian-
Ukrainian relations, which proponents of the conventional wisdom often 
point to as evidence of his imperial ambitions, he tells the Ukrainian 
people, “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome!” 
Regarding how Russia should treat Ukraine, he writes, “There is only one 
answer: with respect.” He concludes that lengthy article with the 
following words: “And what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to 
decide.” It is hard to reconcile these statements with the claim that he 
wants to incorporate Ukraine within a greater Russia.

In that same July 12th, 2021 article and again in an important speech he 
gave on February 21st, 2022, Putin emphasized that Russia accepts “the new 
geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR.” 
He reiterated that same point for a third time on February 24th, 2022, 
when he announced that Russia would invade Ukraine. He also made it clear 
that “it is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory” and that he 
respected Ukrainian sovereignty, but only up to a point: “Russia cannot 
feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat from the 
territory of today’s Ukraine.” In essence, Putin was not interested in 
making Ukraine a part of Russia; he was interested in making sure it did 
not become a “springboard” for Western aggression against Russia, a 
subject I will say more about shortly.

One might argue that Putin was lying about his motives, that he was 
attempting to disguise his imperial ambitions. As it turns out, I have 
written a book about lying in international politics—Why Leaders Lie: The 
Truth about Lying in International Politics—and it is clear to me that 
Putin was not lying. For starters, one of my principal findings is that 
leaders do not lie much to each other; they lie more often to their own 
publics. Regarding Putin, whatever one thinks of him, he does not have a 
history of lying to other leaders. Although some assert that he frequently 
lies and cannot be trusted, there is little evidence of him lying to 
foreign audiences. Moreover, he has publicly spelled out his thinking 
about Ukraine on numerous occasions over the past two years and he has 
consistently emphasized that his principal concern is Ukraine’s relations 
with the West, especially NATO. He has never once hinted that he wants to 
make Ukraine part of Russia. If this behavior is part of a giant deception 
campaign, it would be without precedent in recorded history.

Perhaps the best indicator that Putin is not bent on conquering and 
absorbing Ukraine is the military strategy Moscow has employed from the 
start of the campaign. The Russian military did not attempt to conquer all 
of Ukraine. That would have required a classic blitzkrieg strategy that 
aimed at quickly overrunning all of Ukraine with armored forces supported 
by tactical airpower. That strategy was not feasible, however, because 
there were only 190,000 soldiers in Russia’s invading army, which is far 
too small a force to vanquish and occupy Ukraine, which is not only the 
largest country between the Atlantic Ocean and Russia, but also has a 
population over 40 million. Unsurprisingly, the Russians pursued a limited 
aims strategy, which focused on either capturing or threatening Kyiv and 
conquering a large swath of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine. In 
short, Russia did not have the capability to subdue all of Ukraine, much 
less conquer other countries in Eastern Europe.

To take this argument a step further, Putin and other Russian leaders 
surely understand from the Cold War that occupying counties in the age of 
nationalism is invariably a prescription for never-ending trouble. The 
Soviet experience in Afghanistan is a glaring example of this phenomenon, 
but more relevant for the issue at hand is Moscow’s relations with its 
allies in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The Soviet Union maintained 
a huge military presence in that region and was involved in the politics 
of almost every country located there. Those allies, however, were a 
frequent thorn in Moscow’s side. The Soviet Union put down a major 
insurrection in East Germany in 1953, and then invaded Hungary in 1956 and 
Czechoslovakia in 1968—all for the purpose of keeping those countries in 
line. There was serious trouble in Poland in 1956, 1970, and again in 
1980-1981. Although Polish authorities dealt with these events, they 
served as a reminder that intervention might be necessary. Albania, 
Romania, and Yugoslavia routinely caused Moscow trouble, but Soviet 
leaders tended to tolerate their misbehavior, because their location made 
them less important for deterring NATO.

What about contemporary Ukraine? It is obvious from Putin’s July 12th, 
2021, essay that he understood at that time that Ukrainian nationalism is 
a powerful force and that the civil war in the Donbass, which had been 
going on since 2014, had done much to poison relations between Russia and 
Ukraine. He surely knew that Russia’s invasion force would not be welcomed 
with open arms by Ukrainians, and that it would be a Herculean task for 
Russia to subjugate Ukraine if it had the necessary forces to conquer the 
entire country, which it did not have.

Finally, it is worth noting that hardly anyone made the argument that 
Putin had imperial ambitions from the time he took office in 2000 until 
the Ukraine crisis first broke out on February 22nd, 2014. In fact, the 
Russian leader was an invited guest to the April 2008 NATO summit in 
Bucharest where the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia would 
eventually become members. Putin’s opposition to that announcement had 
hardly any effect on Washington because Russia was judged to be too weak 
to stop further NATO enlargement, just as it had been too weak to stop the 
1999 and 2004 tranches of expansion.

Relatedly, it is important to note that NATO expansion before February 
2014 was not aimed at containing Russia. Given the sad state of Russian 
military power, Moscow was in no position to pursue revanchist policies in 
Eastern Europe. Tellingly, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul 
notes that Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned before the crisis 
broke out in 2014. It was an impulsive move in response to the coup that 
overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO enlargement was not 
intended to contain a Russian threat but was instead as part of a broader 
policy to spread the liberal international order into Eastern Europe and 
make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

It was only when the Ukraine crisis broke out in February 2014 that the 
United States and its allies suddenly began describing Putin as a 
dangerous leader with imperial ambitions and Russia as a serious military 
threat that had to be contained. What caused this shift? This new rhetoric 
was designed to serve one essential purpose: to enable the West to blame 
Putin for the outbreak of trouble in Ukraine. And now that the crisis has 
turned into a full-scale war, it is imperative to make sure that he alone 
is blamed for this disastrous turn of events. This blame game explains why 
Putin is now widely portrayed as an imperialist here in the West, even 
though there is hardly any evidence to support that perspective. Let me 
now turn to the real cause of the Ukraine crisis.

The Real Cause of the Crisis

The taproot of the crisis is the American-led effort to make Ukraine a 
Western bulwark on Russia’s borders. That strategy has three prongs: 
integrating Ukraine into the EU
turning Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy and
most importantly, incorporating Ukraine into NATO.

The strategy was set in motion at NATO’s annual summit in Bucharest in 
April 2008, when the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia “will 
become members.” Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, 
making it clear that this decision was an existential threat to Russia, 
and that they had no intention of letting either country join NATO. 
According to a respected Russian journalist, Putin “flew into a rage,” and 
warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the 
eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”

William Burns, who is now the head of the CIA, but was the U.S. ambassador 
to Moscow at the time of the Bucharest summit. He wrote a memo to then-
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that succinctly describes Russian 
thinking about Ukraine joining NATO. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the 
brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In more 
than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from 
knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest 
liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as 
anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” NATO, he 
said, “would be seen … as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s 
Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep 
freeze...It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and 
eastern Ukraine.”

Burns, of course, was not the only policymaker who understood that 
bringing Ukraine into NATO was fraught with danger. Indeed, at the 
Bucharest Summit, both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French 
President Nicolas Sarkozy were opposed to moving forward on NATO 
membership for Ukraine because they feared it would infuriate Russia. 
Angela Merkel recently explained her opposition in an interview: “I was 
very sure […] that Putin is not going to just let that happen. From his 
perspective, that would be a declaration of war.”

The Bush administration, which was pushing such a decision for NATO 
however, cared little about Moscow’s “brightest of red lines” and 
pressured the French and German leaders to agree to issuing a public 
pronouncement that said unequivocally that Ukraine and Georgia would 
eventually join the alliance.

Unsurprisingly, the American-led effort to integrate Georgia into NATO 
resulted in a war between Georgia and Russia in August 2008—just four 
months after the Bucharest summit. Nevertheless, the United States and its 
allies continued moving forward with their plans to make Ukraine a Western 
bastion on Russia’s borders. These efforts eventually sparked a major 
crisis in February 2014, after a U.S.-supported uprising caused Ukraine’s 
pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country. He was 
replaced by pro-American Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. In response, 
Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and helped fuel a civil war that broke 
out in the Donbass between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian 
government.

One often hears the argument that in the eight years between when the 
crisis broke out in February 2014 and when the war began in February 2022, 
the United States and its allies paid little attention to bringing Ukraine 
into NATO. In effect, the issue had been taken off the table, and thus 
NATO enlargement could not possibly have been an important cause of the 
escalating crisis in 2021 and the subsequent outbreak of war earlier this 
year. This line of argument is false. In fact, the Western response to the 
events of 2014 was to double down on the existing strategy and effectively 
make Ukraine a de facto member of NATO. The alliance began training the 
Ukrainian military in 2014, averaging 10,000 trained troops annually over 
the next eight years. In December 2017, the Trump administration decided 
to provide Kyiv with “defensive weapons.” Other NATO countries quickly got 
into the act, shipping even more weapons to Ukraine.

In addition, Ukraine’s military began participating in joint military 
exercises with NATO forces. In July 2021, Kyiv and Washington co-hosted 
Operation Sea Breeze, a naval exercise in the Black Sea that included 
navies from 31 countries and was directly aimed at Russia. Two months 
later in September 2021, the Ukrainian army led Rapid Trident 21, which 
according to an official press-release from the U.S. Army was a “U.S. Army 
Europe and Africa assisted annual exercise designed to enhance 
interoperability among allied and partner nations, to demonstrate units 
are poised and ready to respond to any crisis.” NATO’s effort to arm and 
train Ukraine’s military explains in good part why it has fared so well 
against Russian forces in the ongoing war. A headline in a recent issue of 
The Wall Street Journal put it quite nicely, “The Secret of Ukraine’s 
Military Success: Years of NATO Training.”

In addition to NATO’s ongoing efforts to make the Ukrainian military a 
more formidable fighting force, the politics surrounding Ukraine’s 
membership in NATO and its integration into the West changed in 2021. 
There was renewed enthusiasm for pursuing those objectives in both Kyiv 
and Washington. President Zelensky, who had never shown much enthusiasm 
for bringing Ukraine into NATO and who was elected in March 2019 on a 
platform that called for working with Russia to settle the ongoing crisis, 
reversed course in early 2021 and not only embraced NATO expansion but 
also adopted a hardline approach toward Moscow. He made a series of 
moves—like shutting down pro-Russian TV stations and arresting an 
especially close friend of Putin and charging him with treason—that were 
sure to anger Moscow.

President Biden, who moved into the White House in January 2021, had long 
been committed to bringing Ukraine into NATO and was also super-hawkish 
towards Russia. Unsurprisingly, on June 14th, 2021, NATO issued the 
following communique´ at its annual Brussels summit: 
“We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine 
will become a member of the Alliance with the Membership Action Plan (MAP) 
as an integral part of the process; we reaffirm all elements of that 
decision, as well as subsequent decisions, including that each partner 
will be judged on its own merits. We stand firm in our support for 
Ukraine’s right to decide its own future and foreign policy course free 
from outside interference.”

On September 1st, 2021, Zelensky visited the White House, where Biden made 
it clear that the United States was “firmly committed” to “Ukraine’s Euro-
Atlantic aspirations.” Then on November 10th, 2021, Secretary of State 
Antony Blinken, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, signed an 
important document—the “U.S.- Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership.” 
The aim of both parties, the document stated, is to “underscore […] a 
commitment to Ukraine’s implementation of the deep and comprehensive 
reforms necessary for full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic 
institutions.” That document explicitly builds not just on “the 
commitments made to strengthen the Ukraine-U.S. strategic partnership by 
Presidents Zelensky and Biden,” but also reaffirms the U.S. commitment to 
the “2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration.”

In short, there is little doubt that starting in early 2021 Ukraine began 
moving rapidly toward joining NATO. Even so, some supporters of this 
policy argue that Moscow should not have been concerned, because “NATO is 
a defensive alliance and poses no threat to Russia.” But that is not how 
Putin and other Russian leaders think about NATO and it is what they think 
that matters. There is no question that Ukraine joining NATO remained the 
“brightest of red lines” for Moscow.

To deal with this growing threat, Putin stationed ever-increasing numbers 
of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border between February 2021 and February 
2022. His aim was to coerce Biden and Zelensky into altering course and 
halting their efforts to integrate Ukraine into the West. On December 
17th, 2021, the Russians reached a boiling point. And Moscow sent separate 
letters to the Biden administration and NATO demanding a written guarantee 
that:

Ukraine would not join NATO
no offensive weapons would be stationed near Russia’s borders, and
NATO troops and equipment moved into eastern Europe since 1997 would be 
moved back to western Europe.

Putin made numerous public statements during this period that left no 
doubt that he viewed NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat. 
Speaking to the Defense Ministry Board on December 21st, 2021, he stated: 
“what they are doing, or trying or planning to do in Ukraine, is not 
happening thousands of kilometers away from our national border. It is on 
the doorstep of our house. They must understand that we simply have 
nowhere further to retreat to. Do they really think we do not see these 
threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to 
Russia emerge?” Two months later at a press conference on February 22nd, 
2022, just days before the war started, Putin said: “we are categorically 
opposed to Ukraine joining NATO because this poses a threat to us, and we 
have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it in this 
hall.” He then made it clear that he recognized that Ukraine was becoming 
a de facto member of NATO. The United States and its allies, he said, 
“continue to pump the current Kyiv authorities full of modern types of 
weapons.” He went on to say that if this was not stopped, Moscow “would be 
left with an ‘anti-Russia’ armed to the teeth. This is totally 
unacceptable.”

Putin’s logic should be manifestly clear to Americans in the audience, who 
have long understood that we have the Monroe Doctrine, which stipulates 
that no distant great power is allowed to place any of its military forces 
in the Western Hemisphere.

I might note that in all of Putin’s public statements during the months 
leading up to the war, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he was 
contemplating conquering Ukraine and making it part of Russia, much less 
attacking other countries in Eastern Europe. Other Russian 
leaders—including the defense minister, the foreign minister, the deputy 
foreign minister, and the Russian ambassador to Washington—also emphasized 
the centrality of NATO expansion for causing the Ukraine crisis. Foreign 
Minister Sergei Lavrov made the point succinctly at a press conference on 
January 14th, 2022, when he said, “the key to everything is the guarantee 
that NATO will not expand eastward.”

Nevertheless, the efforts of Lavrov and Putin to get the United States and 
its allies to abandon their efforts to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on 
Russia’s border failed completely. Secretary of State Antony Blinken 
responded to Russia’s mid-December demands by simply saying, “There is no 
change. There will be no change.” Putin then launched an invasion of 
Ukraine to eliminate the threat he saw from NATO.

Where Are We Now & Where Are We Going?

The Ukraine war has been raging for almost four months I would like to 
make three separate points. 1) I would like to talk about the specific 
consequences of the war for Ukraine; 2) the prospects for escalation; and 
3) the prospects for ending the war in the foreseeable future.

This war is an unmitigated disaster for Ukraine. As I noted earlier, Putin 
made it clear in 2008 that Russia would wreck Ukraine to prevent it from 
joining NATO. He is delivering on that promise. Russian forces have 
conquered at least 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and destroyed or 
badly damaged many Ukrainian cities and towns. More than 6.5 million 
Ukrainians have fled the country, while more than 8 million have been 
internally displaced. Many thousands of Ukrainians—including innocent 
civilians—are dead or badly wounded and the Ukrainian economy is in 
shambles. The World Bank estimates that Ukraine’s economy will shrink by 
almost 50 percent over the course of 2022. Estimates are that 
approximately $100 billion worth of damage has been inflicted on Ukraine 
and that it will take close to a trillion dollars to rebuild the country. 
In the meantime, Kyiv requires about $5 billion of aid every month just to 
keep the government running.

Furthermore, there appears to be little hope that Ukraine will be able to 
regain use of its ports on the Azov and Black Seas anytime soon. Before 
the war, roughly 70 percent of all Ukrainian exports and imports—and 98 
percent of its grain exports—moved through these ports. This is the basic 
situation after less than four months of fighting. It is downright scary 
to contemplate what Ukraine will look like if this war drags on for a few 
more years.

So, what are the prospects for negotiating a peace agreement and ending 
the war in the next few months? I am sorry to say that I see no way this 
war ends anytime soon. This is a view shared by prominent policymakers on 
both the Western and the Russian sides. The main reason for my pessimism 
is that both Russia and the United States are deeply committed to winning 
the war and it is impossible to fashion an agreement where both sides win. 
To be more specific, the key to a settlement from Russia’s perspective is 
making Ukraine a neutral state, which means that Ukraine must divorce 
itself from the West, especially the United States. But that outcome is 
unacceptable to the Biden administration and a large portion of the 
American foreign policy establishment, because it would represent a 
victory for Russia.

Ukrainian leaders have agency of course, and one might hope that—given all 
the horror being inflicted on their country—they will push for 
neutralization to spare their country further harm. Indeed, Zelensky 
briefly mentioned that possibility in the first month of the war, but he 
never seriously pursued it. There is little chance, however, that Kyiv 
will push for neutralization, because the ultra-nationalists in Ukraine, 
who wield significant political power, have zero interest in yielding to 
any of Russia’s demands, especially one that dictates Ukraine’s political 
alignment with the outside world. The Biden administration and the 
countries on NATO’s eastern flank—Poland and the Baltic states—are likely 
to support Ukraine’s ultranationalists on this issue.

To complicate matters further, how does one deal with the large swaths of 
Ukrainian territory that Russia has conquered since the war started, as 
well as Crimea’s fate? It is hard to fathom Moscow voluntarily giving up 
any of the Ukrainian territory it now occupies, much less all of it, as 
Russia’s territorial goals today are probably not the ones they started 
the war with. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine any Ukrainian 
leader accepting a deal that allows Russia to keep any Ukrainian 
territory, except possibly Crimea. I certainly hope I am wrong, but I see 
no end in sight to this ruinous war.

Let me now turn to the matter of escalation. It is widely accepted among 
international relations scholars that there is a powerful tendency for 
protracted wars to escalate. Other countries can get dragged into the 
fight and the level of violence is likely to escalate. The potential for 
this happening in the Ukraine war is real. There is a danger that the 
United States and its NATO allies will get dragged into the fighting, 
which they have been able to avoid up to this point, even though we are 
now effectively at war with Russia. There is also the possibility that 
nuclear weapons might be used in Ukraine and that might even lead to a 
nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. The underlying 
reason these outcomes might be realized is that the stakes are so high for 
both sides, and thus neither can afford to lose.

As I have emphasized, Putin and his lieutenants believe that Ukraine 
joining the West is an existential threat to Russia that must be 
eliminated. In practical terms, that means Russia must win its war in 
Ukraine. Defeat is unacceptable. The Biden administration, on the other 
hand, has stressed that its goal is not only to defeat the Russians in 
Ukraine, but also to use sanctions to inflict egregious damage on the 
Russian economy. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has emphasized that the 
West’s goal is to weaken Russia to the point where it could not invade 
Ukraine again. In effect, the Biden administration is committed to 
knocking Russia out of the ranks of the great powers. At the same time, 
President Biden himself has called Russia’s war in Ukraine a “genocide” 
and charged Putin with being a “war criminal” who should face a “war 
crimes trial” after the war. Such rhetoric hardly lends itself to 
negotiating an end to the war. After all, how do you negotiate with a 
genocidal state?

American policy has two significant consequences. For starters, it greatly 
amplifies the existential threat Moscow faces in this war and makes it 
more important than ever that it prevails in Ukraine. At the same time, it 
means the United States is deeply committed to making sure that Russia 
loses. The Biden administration has now invested so much in the Ukraine 
war—both materially and rhetorically—that a Russian victory would 
represent a devastating defeat for Washington.

Obviously, both sides cannot win. Moreover, there is a serious possibility 
that one side will begin to lose badly. If American policy succeeds and 
the Russians are losing to the Ukrainians on the battlefield, Putin might 
turn to nuclear weapons to rescue the situation. The U.S. Director of 
National Intelligence, Avril Haines, told the Senate Armed Services 
Committee in May 2022 that this was one of the two situations that might 
lead Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. For those of you who think 
this is unlikely, please remember that NATO planned to use nuclear weapons 
in similar circumstances during the Cold War. We were planning to use 
nuclear weapons in West Germany if the Warsaw Pact overran it. If Russia 
were to employ nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it is difficult to say how the 
Biden administration would react, but it surely would be under great 
pressure to retaliate, thus raising the possibility of a great-power 
nuclear war. There is a perverse paradox at play here. The more successful 
the United States and its allies are at achieving their war aims, the more 
likely it is that the war will turn nuclear.

Let’s turn the tables and ask what happens if the United States and its 
NATO allies appear to be heading toward defeat, which effectively means 
that the Russians are routing the Ukrainian military and the government in 
Kyiv moves to negotiate a peace deal intended to save as much of the 
country as possible. In that event, there would be tremendous pressure on 
the United States and its allies to get even more deeply involved in the 
fighting. It is not likely, but certainly possible that American or maybe 
Polish troops would get pulled into the fighting, which means NATO would 
literally be at war with Russia. This is the other scenario, according to 
Avril Haines, where the Russians might turn to nuclear weapons. It is 
difficult to say precisely how events will play out in the Ukraine war, 
but there is no question there will be serious potential for escalation, 
to include nuclear escalation. The mere possibility of that outcome should 
send shivers down your spine.

There are likely to be other disastrous consequences from this war, which 
I cannot discuss in any detail because of time constraints. For example, 
there is reason to think the war will lead to a world food crisis in which 
many millions of people will die.

Furthermore, relations between Russia and the West have been so thoroughly 
poisoned that it will take many years to repair them. In the meantime, 
that profound hostility will fuel instability around the globe, but 
especially in Europe. Some will say there is a silver lining: relations 
among countries in the West have markedly improved, Transatlantic 
relations, NATO and the EU are in better shape than ever. That is true for 
the moment, but there are deep fissures below the surface, and they are 
likely to manifest themselves over time. For example, relations between 
the countries of eastern and western Europe are likely to deteriorate as 
the war drags on.

Finally, the conflict is already damaging the global economy in major ways 
and this situation is likely to get worse with time. Jamie Diamond, the 
CEO of JPMorgan Chase says we should brace ourselves for an economic 
“hurricane.” These economic shocks will affect the politics of every 
Western country, undermining liberal democracy, and strengthening its 
opponents on both the left and the right.

In conclusion, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is a colossal disaster, 
which as I noted at the start of my talk, will lead people all around the 
world to search for its causes. Those who believe in facts and logic will 
quickly discover that the United States and its allies are mainly 
responsible for this train wreck. The April 2008 decision to bring Ukraine 
and Georgia into NATO was destined to lead to conflict with Russia. The 
Bush administration was the principal architect of that fateful choice, 
but the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have doubled down on that 
policy at every turn and America’s allies have dutifully followed 
Washington’s lead. Even though Russian leaders made it perfectly clear 
that bringing Ukraine into NATO would be crossing “the brightest of red 
lines,” the United States simply refused to accommodate Russia’s deepest 
security concerns and instead moved relentlessly to make Ukraine a Western 
bulwark on Russia’s border.

The tragic truth is that if the West had not pursued NATO expansion into 
Ukraine, it is unlikely there would be a war in Ukraine today and Crimea 
would still be part of Ukraine. In essence, Washington played the central 
role in leading Ukraine down the path to destruction. History will judge 
the United States and its allies with abundant harshness for their 
remarkably foolish policy on Ukraine. Thank you.

https://www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-summer-2022-issue-no.21/the-
causes-and-consequences-of-the-ukraine-war