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I’d file it under “nice work, if you can get it”. If they had gotten Ukraine into NATO as a fait-accompli, I think it would have been a good move, and would leave the alliance in a pretty rock solid strategic position over the years. But the State Department badly misjudged Russia’s temperament and now they’re throwing money down a hole and having to contemplate a war that they are under-armed to fight.
This war was great for NATO no matter what. Whether Trump destroys NATO himself is a different matter that's more related to domestic negative partisanship. The war has:
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I don't think State badly misjudged Russia's temperament, at least not for lack of intel and understanding. You can read Bill Burn's diplomatic cables where he talks about Ukraine being an absolute red line for all Russians, even liberal ones.
It really doesn’t feel like they anticipated or were preparing for a war though. It took them four months of panicking and hand-wringing before the first substantial aid packages started to arrive.
I suspect this might be because they expected Russia to roll Ukraine in 72 hours. But I'm open to State just not knowing what they really should know by virtue of their job.
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I don't know which liberal Russians Bill Burn polled, the ones I've heard from were unanimous on "Russia gotta stay the fuck out of Donbass with their 'polite green men'".
I think the ones Bill Burns polled were the ones near positions of power. Have you heard of a guy named Alexei Nalvany? Not that he ever had a particularly realistic shot at power, but he was the Western-beloved liberal opposition to Putin...and in 2014 after Russia seized Crimea he said "Is Crimea some sort of sausage sandwich to be passed back and forth?" and told Ukrainians to get real, they weren't getting Crimea back. (FWIW, I believe he recanted in 2023 from prison, but at that point I think he had probably realized that he did not need to fear electoral repercussions.)
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What do you think would have happened if Ukraine had been accepted into NATO overnight on February 22, 2022?
Do you think Russia wouldn't have invaded? If you think the reason it wouldn't have worked is because it's too close to the invasion, when do you think it would have worked? 2014? 2017?
No one is going to get into nuclear Armageddon to defend Eastern Europe except maybe the British whose foreign policy establishment has been nuts for over a century and who burned their empire and wealth to the ground in order to perpetuate their nuttery.
What has happened over the last few years is well-beyond any requirement of Article 5. Despite the constant desperate framing by neocons and other anti-Russian warhawk ethnics who have weaseled their way into the machinations of the US and NATO foreign policy establishment, it does not require the other parties to declare or go to war.
Whether NATO snuck in a brigade in 2014 or 2022 makes no difference. At some point, that bluff is going to be called.
If you’re unfamiliar with the idiom, “nice work if you can get it” carries with it the sly implication that said work would be nigh-impossible or at least very difficult to get.
I’m on record here several times saying that I think it was a stupid plan because of its high likelihood of backfiring. I think if they were going to try to pull it off, it would have best to do it sometime back when Alanis Morrisette and overly baggy jeans were still popular.
Oh, fair enough!
No one was going to do that during that time period. If you had told the people of the time that in 25 years they were going to be fighting over the Oskil River with Russia, I think they would have assumed nuclear war had already happened. It took the silliness of 9/11 and the initial success of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars to make NATO think this was something which could happen.
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