The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of realpolitik means that the West will need to dial back its efforts to expand the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment aimed at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great power war.
GREAT POWER competition is back. The transatlantic alliance must revise its grand strategy accordingly and downsize its idealist ambitions in favor of pragmatic realism. Throughout the crisis over Ukraine, the West’s ideological North Star—the promotion of democracy—guided statecraft, with NATO supporting and encouraging Kyiv’s aspirations to join the Western alliance. But Russian president Vladimir Putin, unwilling to let Ukraine leave the Russian fold and emerge as a democracy anchored in the West, launched a war to put Kyiv back under Moscow’s sway. Putin owns this war, with the death and destruction that it has produced.
The West’s reaction—arming Ukraine, sanctioning Russia, bolstering NATO‘s eastern flank while extending membership to Finland and Sweden—is fully justified. Yet legitimate outrage over Russia’s pummeling of Ukraine threatens to obscure the need to draw sober lessons from the war. Perhaps the most important is that the world is reverting to the rules of power politics, requiring that ideological ambition more regularly yield to strategic realities in order to ensure that the West’s purposes remain in sync with its means. This adjustment means that the West will need to focus more on defending, instead of expanding, the democratic community. To be sure, by combining its values with its power, the West has bent the arc of history away from the practice of realpolitik and toward greater freedom, human dignity, and peace. But the transatlantic community must now temper its idealist ambitions with greater strategic pragmatism to successfully navigate a world that has just shifted back toward Hobbesian realism.
The unrulier and more competitive world that is taking shape will naturally bolster transatlantic unity—just as the threat posed by the Soviet Union contributed to NATO’s cohesion during the Cold War. Yet the political ills that have been plaguing the West have not dissipated; Russia’s invasion, along with the prospect of a new cold war, is not enough to cure the United States and Europe of illiberalism and political dysfunction. In fact, the war in Ukraine has produced economic spillover effects that could further weaken political centrism. Accordingly, America and Europe face a double challenge: they must continue getting their own houses in order even while they stand together to resist Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
THIS TENSION between lofty ambition and strategic reality is nothing new, particularly for the United States. Since the earliest days of the republic, Americans have understood the purpose of their power to entail not only security, but also the spread of liberal democracy at home and abroad. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”
Paine was surely engaging in hyperbole, but successive generations of Americans have taken the nation’s exceptionalist calling to heart—with quite impressive results. Through the power of its example as well as its many exertions abroad—including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the United States has succeeded in expanding the footprint of liberal democracy. At the time of the nation’s founding, republics were far and few between. Today, more than half of the world’s countries are full or partial democracies. The United States played a leading role in effecting this transformation.
But these ideological aspirations have at times fueled overreach, producing outcomes that compromise the nation’s idealist ambitions. The founding generation was determined to build an extended republic that would stretch all the way to the Pacific coast—a goal that the nation achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the United States’ westward expansion took place under the exalted banner of Manifest Destiny, which provided ideological justification for expanding the frontier—but also moral cover for trampling on Native Americans and launching a war of choice against Mexico that led to U.S. annexation of roughly half of Mexican territory. The Mexican-American War and the bout of expansion that accompanied it came back to haunt the United States by intensifying the sectional rift over slavery and pushing the North and South toward civil war.
President William McKinley in 1898 embarked on a war to expel Spain from Cuba—one of its few remaining colonies in the hemisphere—insisting that Americans had to act “in the cause of humanity.” Yet victory in the Spanish-American War turned the United States itself into an imperial power, as it asserted control over Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the Philippines. “There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,” McKinley insisted as U.S. forces occupied the Philippines. The resulting insurgency led to the death of some 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino fighters and civilians. The United States held on to the Philippines until 1946.
As he prepared the country for entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declared before Congress that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” After U.S. forces helped bring the war to a close, he played a leading role in negotiations over the League of Nations, a global body that was to preserve peace through collective action, dispute resolution, and disarmament. But such idealist ambitions proved too much even for Americans. The Senate shot down U.S. membership in the League; Wilson’s ideological overreach cleared the way for the stubborn isolationism of the interwar era.
Just before launching the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush affirmed that “we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty … they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.” The result of the war in Iraq was far different: region-wide suffering and sectarian conflict poised to continue for generations. As for Afghanistan, Bush proclaimed in 2004: “Now the country is changing. There’s women’s rights. There’s equality under the law. Young girls now go to school, many for the first time ever, thanks to the United States and our coalition of liberators.” But two decades of exhaustive U.S. efforts to bring stability and democracy to Afghanistan fell embarrassingly short, with the U.S. withdrawal last summer giving way to Taliban rule and a humanitarian nightmare. Across these historical episodes, noble ambitions backfired with dreadful consequences.
THE UKRAINE question has similarly exposed the inescapable tensions between lofty ambitions and geopolitical realities. These tensions were, for the most part, in abeyance amid the bipolarity of the Cold War, when geopolitical expedience guided the U.S. strategy of containment. The Yalta agreement struck by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II was the ultimate realist compromise, leaving much of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination. Roosevelt and Churchill were wisely yielding principle to pragmatism by providing Soviet Russia with a buffer zone on its western flank. Such strategic restraint paid off handsomely; it contributed to stability during the long decades of the Cold War, buying time for a patient policy of containment that ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union.
NATO’s eastward expansion then began in the 1990s, the era of unipolarity, when Washington was confident that the triumph of American power and purpose would usher in the universalization of democracy, capitalism, and a liberal, rules-based international order. The Clinton administration embraced a grand strategy of “democratic enlargement”—a key plank of which was opening NATO’s doors to Europe’s new democracies and formally welcoming into the West the states of the defunct and discredited Warsaw Pact.
NATO’s eastward enlargement has fostered both moral and strategic gains. The West capitalized on the opportunity to reverse Yalta; NATO members could reassert their moral authority by integrating Europe’s newest democracies. The allure of meeting the political standards for entry into the Western alliance helped guide through democratic transitions more than a dozen countries that long suffered under communist rule. Opening NATO’s doors also provided the alliance strategic depth and increased aggregate military strength. The defense guarantee that comes with membership serves as a strong deterrent to Russian adventurism—a prized commodity given Moscow’s renewed appetite for invading its neighbors. Indeed, Finland and Sweden have left behind decades of neutrality in order to avail themselves of that guarantee.
But despite these principled and practical benefits, the enlargement of NATO also came with a significant strategic downside: it laid the foundation for a post-Cold War security order that excluded Russia while bringing the world’s most formidable military alliance ever closer to its borders. It was precisely for this reason that the Clinton administration initially launched the Partnership for Peace—a security framework that enabled all European states to cooperate with NATO without drawing new dividing lines. But that alternative fell by the wayside early in January 1994, when President Bill Clinton declared in Prague that “the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members but when and how.” The first wave of expansion extended membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, followed since by four additional bouts of enlargement. So far, NATO has admitted fifteen countries (encompassing some 100 million people) that were formerly in Russia’s sphere of influence.
The Kremlin objected to NATO enlargement from the get-go. As early as 1993, Russian president Boris Yeltsin warned that Russians across the political spectrum “would no doubt perceive this as a sort of neo-isolation of our country in diametric opposition to its natural admission into Euro-Atlantic space.” In a face-to-face meeting with President Clinton in 1995, Yeltsin was more direct:
I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed … Why do you want to do this? We need a new structure for Pan-European security, not old ones! ... For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of Russia – that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.Moscow’s discomfort only grew when Putin took the helm in 1999 and reversed Yeltsin’s flirtation with a more liberal brand of governance. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin declared that NATO enlargement “represents a serious provocation” and asked, “Why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this expansion?”
Russia soon began concrete efforts to stop further enlargement. In 2008, not long after NATO pledged that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO,” Russia intervened in Georgia. In 2012, Moscow allegedly attempted to organize a coup in Montenegro to block its accession to the alliance, and later worked to prevent North Macedonia’s membership. These efforts in the Balkans were to no avail; Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017 and North Macedonia followed suit in 2020. Now Putin has invaded Ukraine, in part to block its pathway to NATO. In his February 24 address to the nation justifying the beginning of the “special military operation,” Putin pointed to “the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia … I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.”
The United States has largely dismissed Russia’s objections. While the Kremlin has been anxiously watching NATO’s advance, Washington has viewed NATO’s eastward expansion primarily through the benign lens of America’s exceptionalist calling. Enlarging the alliance has been about spreading American values and removing geopolitical dividing lines rather than drawing new ones.
As he launched NATO’s open-door policy, President Clinton claimed that doing so would “erase the artificial line in Europe drawn by Stalin at the end of World War II.” Madeleine Albright, his secretary of state, affirmed that “NATO is a defensive alliance that … does not regard any state as its adversary.” The purpose of expanding the alliance, she explained, was to build a Europe “whole and free,” noting that “NATO poses no danger to Russia.” That’s the line that Washington has taken ever since, including when it came to Ukraine’s potential membership. As the crisis over Ukraine mounted, President Joe Biden insisted that, “the United States and NATO are not a threat to Russia. Ukraine is not threatening Russia.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed: “NATO itself is a defensive alliance … And the idea that Ukraine represents a threat to Russia or, for that matter, that NATO represents a threat to Russia is profoundly wrong and misguided.” America’s allies have mostly been on the same page. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, affirmed during the run-up to Russia’s invasion that: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”
Yet Russia saw things quite differently—and not without reason. Geography and geopolitics matter; major powers, regardless of their ideological bent, don’t like it when other major powers stray into their neighborhoods. Russia has understandable and legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop on the other side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine. NATO may be a defensive alliance, but it brings to bear aggregate military power that Russia understandably does not want parked near its territory.
Indeed, Moscow’s protests have been, ironically, very much in line with America’s own statecraft, which has long sought to keep other major powers away from its own borders. The United States spent much of the nineteenth century ushering Britain, France, Russia, and Spain out of the Western Hemisphere. Thereafter, Washington regularly turned to military intervention to hold sway in the Americas. The exercise of hemispheric hegemony continued during the Cold War, with the United States determined to box the Soviet Union and its ideological sympathizers out of Latin America. When Moscow deployed missiles to Cuba in 1962, the United States issued an ultimatum that brought the superpowers to the brink of war. After Russia recently hinted that it might again deploy its military to Latin America, the State Department spokesperson Ned Price responded: “If we do see any movement in that direction, we will respond swiftly and decisively.” Given its own track record, Washington should have given greater credence to Moscow’s objections to bringing Ukraine into NATO.
For almost three decades, NATO and Russia have been talking past each other. As Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov quipped amid the flurry of diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion, “we’re having the conversation of a mute person with a deaf person. It’s as though we are hearing each other, but not listening.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes clear that this disconnect between Russia and the West has exploded into the open, finally doing so for a number of reasons. Moscow took the entry into NATO of a band of countries stretching from the Baltics to the Balkans as a strategic setback and political insult. Ukraine, in particular, looms much larger in the Russian imagination; in Putin’s own words, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.” The 2019 split of the Orthodox church of Ukrainian from its Russian counterpart was an especially bitter pill; the Ukrainian church had been subordinated to the Moscow patriarch since 1686. Russia today is far more capable of pushing back than it was during the early post-Cold War era, bolstered by its economic and military rebound and its tight partnership with China.
Yet the Kremlin made several gross miscalculations in proceeding with its invasion of Ukraine. It vastly underestimated the willingness and capability of Ukrainians to fight back, producing early Russian setbacks on the battlefield. Moscow saw numerous sources of Western weakness—Brexit, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, ongoing polarization, and populism—leading to an underestimation of the strength and scope of the West’s response. In Putin’s mind, a combination of Russian strength and Western frailty made it an opportune moment to throw down the gauntlet in Ukraine. But Putin was wrong; the West has demonstrated remarkable steadiness as it has armed Ukraine and imposed severe sanctions against Russia.
These miscalculations help shed light on why Putin chose to address his grievances through war rather than diplomacy. Indeed, Putin had the opportunity to settle his objections to Ukraine’s membership in NATO at the negotiating table. Last year, President Biden acknowledged that whether Ukraine joins the alliance “remains to be seen.” Amid the flurry of diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion, President Emmanuel Macron of France floated the idea of “Finlandization” for Ukraine—effective neutrality—and proposals for a formal moratorium on further enlargement circulated. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO may be “like a dream.” His ambassador to the United Kingdom indicated that Kyiv wanted to be “flexible in trying to find the best way out,” and that one option would be to drop its bid for NATO membership. The Kremlin could have picked up these leads, but instead opted for war.
THE SAGA of NATO enlargement exposes the gap between the West’s ideological aspirations and geopolitical realities that has been widening since the 1990s. During the heady decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies were confident that the triumph of their power and purpose cleared the way for the spread of democracy—an objective that the enlargement of NATO would presumably help secure.
But from early on, the Western foreign policy establishment allowed principle to obscure the geopolitical downsides of NATO enlargement. Yes, NATO membership should be open to all countries that qualify, and all nations should be able to exercise their sovereign right to choose their alignments as they see fit. And, yes, Moscow’s decision to invade Ukraine was in part informed by fantasies of restoring the geopolitical heft of the Soviet days, Putin’s paranoia about a “color revolution” arising in Russia, and his delusions about unbreakable civilizational links between Russia and Ukraine.
Yet the West erred in continuing to dismiss Russia’s objections to NATO’s ongoing enlargement. In the meantime, NATO’s open door policy encouraged countries in Eastern Europe to lean too far over their strategic skis. While the allure of joining the alliance has encouraged aspirants to carry out the democratic reforms needed to qualify for entry, the open door has also prompted prospective members to engage in excessively risky behavior. In 2008, soon after NATO ignored Russian objections and promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, launched an offensive against pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia with whom the country had been sporadically fighting for years. Russia responded promptly by grabbing control of two chunks of Georgia—South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Saakashvili thought the West had his back, but he miscalculated and overreached.
In similar fashion, NATO overreached by encouraging Ukraine to beat a path toward the alliance. The 2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Moscow regime and put Ukraine on a westward course, resulting in Russia’s intervention in Crimea and the Donbas. NATO’s open door beckoned, prompting Ukrainians in 2019 to enshrine their NATO aspirations in their constitution—a move that set off new alarm bells in the Kremlin. Given its proximity to Russia and the devastation caused by Moscow’s further aggression, Ukraine would have been better off playing it safe, quietly building a stable democracy while sticking with the neutral status that it embraced when it exited the Soviet Union. Indeed, Ukraine’s potential return to neutrality has figured prominently in sporadic talks between Kyiv and Moscow to end the war.
NATO has wisely avoided direct involvement in the fighting in order to avert war with Russia. But the alliance’s unwillingness to militarily defend Ukraine has exposed a troubling disconnect between the organization’s stated goal of making the country a member and its judgment that protecting Ukraine is not worth the cost. In effect, the United States and its allies, even as they impose severe sanctions on Russia and send arms to Ukraine, have revealed that they do not deem the defense of the country to be a vital interest. But if that is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a security guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense?
NATO should extend security guarantees to countries that are of intrinsic strategic importance to the United States and its allies—it should not make countries strategically important by extending them such guarantees. In a world that is rapidly reverting to the logic of power politics, in which adversaries may regularly test U.S. commitments, NATO cannot afford to be profligate in handing out such guarantees. Strategic prudence requires distinguishing critical interests from lesser ones, and conducting statecraft accordingly.
STRATEGIC PRUDENCE also requires that the West prepare for the return of sustained militarized rivalry with Russia. In light of the tight partnership that has emerged between Moscow and Beijing—and China’s own geopolitical ambitions—the new Cold War that is taking shape may well pit the West against a Sino-Russian bloc stretching from the Western Pacific to Eastern Europe. Like the Cold War, a world of rival blocs could mean economic and geopolitical division. The severe impact of the sanctions imposed on Russia underscores the dark side of globalization, potentially driving home to both China and Western democracies that economic interdependence entails quite considerable risk. China could distance itself from global markets and financial systems, while the United States and Europe may choose to expand the pace and scope of efforts to decouple from Chinese investment, technology, and supply chains. The world may be entering a prolonged and costly era of de-globalization.
The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of realpolitik means that the West will need to dial back its efforts to expand the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment aimed at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great power war. A new strategic conservatism should seek to establish stable balances of power and credible deterrence in the European and Asia-Pacific theaters. The United States has a playbook for this world: the one that enabled it to prevail in the first Cold War.
What Washington does not have a stratagem for is navigating geopolitical division in a world that is far more interdependent than that of the Cold War. Even as it stands up to autocracies, the West will need to work across ideological dividing lines in order to tackle global challenges, including arresting climate change, preventing nuclear proliferation and pursuing arms control, overseeing international commerce, governing the cybersphere, managing migration, and promoting global health. Strategic pragmatism will need to temper ideological discord.
Washington also lacks a stratagem for operating in an era in which the West faces homegrown threats to liberal democracy that are at least as potent as the external threats posed by Russia and China. During the Cold War, the West was politically healthy; liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic enjoyed ideological moderation and centrism, buttressed by broadly shared prosperity. A steady and purposeful brand of U.S. grand strategy rested on a solid political foundation and enjoyed bipartisan support.
But the West today is politically unhealthy, and illiberal populism is alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the bipartisan compact behind U.S. statecraft has collapsed—as has the nation’s political center. Ideological moderation and centrism have given way to bitter polarization amid prolonged economic insecurity and gaping inequality. The war in Ukraine has not helped matters; Biden’s ambitious agenda for domestic renewal, already scaled back due to gridlock in Congress, suffered further as a result of Washington’s focus on the conflict. And high rates of inflation, fueled in part by the economic disruptions arising from the war, are stoking public discontent, likely costing Democrats control of Congress in the upcoming November midterms.
In Europe, the political center has broadly held. Mainstream center-left and center-right parties have lost ground to anti-establishment parties, but they have stayed ideologically centrist and, for the most part, remained in power. Yet illiberal populists continue to govern Hungary and Poland, and their fellow travelers wield political influence in most European Union (EU) member states. Indeed, Italy’s centrist government collapsed in July and the hard right may well surge in approaching elections. The United Kingdom has engaged in a stunning act of self-isolation and self-harm by quitting the EU—London remains tangled up in uneasy negotiations with Brussels over the terms of Brexit. The economic damage wrought by inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and potential energy shortages abetted by the West’s sanctions on Russia, may end up undermining the continent’s political center and weakening European and transatlantic solidarity.
As the United States and its allies contemplate mounting tension with a Sino-Russian bloc, they must ensure that they continue to redress the West’s own internal vulnerabilities. It is true that during the Cold War, the discipline that the Soviet threat imposed on American politics helped mute partisan conflict over foreign policy. Similarly, the current prospect of a new era of militarized rivalry with Russia and China is reviving bipartisan cooperation on matters of statecraft.
This return to bipartisanship is, however, likely to be short-lived—just as it was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans should not operate under the illusion that a more competitive international environment will of its own accord restore the country’s political health—especially amid the highest U.S. inflation rate in forty years. In similar fashion, even though Europe has demonstrated impressive unity and resolve during the war in Ukraine, it will undoubtedly face renewed political challenges as it copes with a huge influx of Ukrainian refugees and deals with additional economic burdens, including weaning itself off of Russian energy.
Both sides of the Atlantic thus have hard work to do if they are to get their own houses in order and reinvigorate the globe’s anchor of liberal order. Given the potential for the politics of grievance to make a comeback in the United States, the Biden administration urgently needs to continue advancing its domestic agenda. Investing in infrastructure, education, technology, health care, climate solutions, and other internal programs offers the best way to alleviate the electorate’s discontent and revive the country’s ailing political center. Europe’s agenda for renewal should include economic restructuring and investment, reform of immigration policy and border control, and more expenditure in and pooling of sovereignty on foreign and defense policy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine heralds the return of a more realist world, requiring that the West’s idealist ambitions more regularly yield to cold strategic realities. Even though the war has certainly helped revive the West and its cohesion, the homegrown threats to liberal democracy that were front and center before the war still require urgent attention. It would be ironic if the West succeeds in turning Putin’s gamble in Ukraine into a resounding defeat, only to see liberal democracies then succumb to the enemy within.