A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine

A DISASTER OF

OUR OWN MAKING:

HOW THE WEST

LOST UKRAINE

BRANDON J. WEICHERT

NEW YORK • LONDON

2024

© 2024 by Brandon J. Weichert

All Rights Reserved.

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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Information for this title can be found at the

Library of Congress website under the following

ISBN 978-1-64177-409-3 and LCCN 2024032479.

For Angelo Codevilla,

who taught me how to really see the world.

You tragically left us when we most needed you.

Your wisdom is greatly missed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Foreword by Curt Mills of The American Conservative

Introduction: The Hubris of NATO

Chapter 1: From Cold War to Cold Peace

Chapter 2: How Did We Get Here?

Chapter 3: NATO: Not One Inch to the East … Just Kidding!

Chapter 4: The Cabal

Chapter 5: Bill Clinton’s Empty Promises to Ukraine

Chapter 6: George W. Bush Goes for Broke on Ukraine

Chapter 7: It’s All About Crimea

Chapter 8: Obama’s Blunder

Chapter 9: Viktor Yanukovych Comes in from the Cold, Gets Kicked to the Curb

Chapter 10: Little Green Men Land in Crimea

Chapter 11: Hillary Clinton, Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire

Chapter 12: America Becomes a Battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine War

Chapter 13: This War Wouldn’t Have Happened Under Trump

Chapter 14: The Phone Call from Hell

Chapter 15: Biden Blunders into World War III

Chapter 16: World War III or a Phony War?

Chapter 17: NATO’s Parthian Shot

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

BORNE BACK CEASELESSLY INTO THE PAST

by Curt Mills

RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, the forty-fifth president of the United States once bemoaned, overtaxed from answering questions on the subject.

The gargantuan gangster’s paradise that is Russia—famously a participant in nearly half the world’s twenty-four time zones—has been the uninvited duet partner of American politics over the last decade. Though an engrossing and sibylline civilization, many Americans are simply exhausted from discussing it.

For Western uber-hawks, the recent months of war in Ukraine has failed to be much of a follow-up to the sugar rush of apparent vindication provided by Russia’s botching of the first year of battle. For foreign policy restrainers, the stalemate (or something far worse) out East is another coming rhetorical and theoretical win—but also evidence of the distance they must march to acquire true power for their perspective.

For the once and future president, the libelous yet widespread belief he is in cahoots with the Kremlin continues to blot both his legacy and psyche. For left-liberal true believers, Vladimir Putin’s seeming invincibility augurs the coming of a global Alt Right.

How did we get here?

Brandon J. Weichert is a cartographer of familiar, but dangerous terrain. Discussing the history of the elective, creeping expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the collapse of communism and the total victory of the West is to venture into a land where many deal falsely.

In his jihad against the forty-second president, the late provocateur Christopher Hitchens famously observed of Bill Clinton’s triangulations that the Arkansan had no one left to lie to by the end of his reign. That diagnosis is generally applied to the last president of the twentieth century’s domestic dealings, and his personal conduct.

But Weichert innovates by fleshing out the implications of Clinton’s character on the world stage, singling out a forgotten episode for discussion. Weichert highlights the small matter of Kiev’s nukes after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Clinton badgered the new Ukrainian state to disarm.

The West, with its superior technological prowess, could have contributed to this Ukrainian push for alternative command-and-control capabilities that, over time, would have ensured that Ukraine had a reliable, robust nuclear deterrent, our author writes.

We are now in an era where previous, non-market participants such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Japan, are sniffing around the worldwide nuclear bazaar. But Weichert urges us to consider a counter-history where balance of power realism was explored closer to its zenith. Says Weichert: The Clinton administration saw only what was right in front of them. They pressured and cajoled Kiev into giving up what was probably the only thing that ultimately could have prevented the kind of conflict that now rages between Russia and Ukraine. And: By 2023, Ukraine’s sacrifice of their independent nuclear arsenal on the altar of global disarmament was obviously an awful decision.

Clinton is an easy target, but George W. Bush is easier still.

At the start of Putin’s rule [on the last day of 1999], he made Russian laws comport with European Union standards and ensured that Russia became a partner to NATO, Weichert reports. Even after the saber-rattling and mistrust of the 1990s—which included NATO intervention against Serbia, the historic Russian protectorate the defense of which set off World War I—a much-greener Putin was of an open (and perhaps sounder) mind.

The real kicker during this time was the way Putin described Ukraine’s potential accession into the NATO alliance as a ‘positive development,’ Weichert spells out in bold. What’s more, while Putin was never one for liberal democracy of the kind the West practiced, there is little doubt that the Russian strongman began his journey as leader of Russia being at least friendly with the general concept of democracy.

Gone today is the Tamagotchi era of good feelings we experienced at the turn of the century. Colder realities reign. The same way the Americans viewed Soviet missiles in Cuba or how U.S. officials would view a Mexico that joined a Russian military alliance today, is how the Putin government views a Ukraine that is in NATO’s orbit.

But the big kahuna in this story is an item of arguable lore. Yet Weichert is a believer.

In lazy tellings, Washington and London are most often presented as lockstep brat’ya po oruzhiyu—brothers in arms. Like many marriages, it is unhappy in its own way. In his memoir, the forty-first president George H.W. Bush wrote that his counterpart, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was principled’ but very difficult and talks all the time."

Weichert would say that was true to form:

Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, American and Western leaders began grappling with the prospect of fundamental geopolitical changes (and challenges) emanating from Eastern Europe. … For her part, Prime Minister Thatcher aimed to keep ‘the Warsaw Pact [as a] fig leaf for [Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev].’

President Bush was not galvanized. He took matters into his own hands. Or at least, he entrusted the portfolio to his own Sovietnik, the iconic James Baker (then secretary of State).

At a summit in Ottawa, Baker supposedly hatched what, in some circles, has become derisively known as the ‘cocktail napkin agreement.’ The basis of that informal agreement was James Baker’s promise that, if Gorbachev pulled Red Army forces from East Germany, then NATO would not move eastward one inch.

We are reliant on perhaps Zapruder-tier evidence, but Weichert says alternative explanations enter the realm of fantasy.

Baker is quoted at that meeting as assuring Gorbachev that, ‘neither [President Bush] nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place’ and that Americans 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.’"

What went wrong?

For many foreign policy realists, George H.W. Bush’s administration remains the last, great example of American sobriety in decades. (Others see vindication now from the Trump years and a promise for the future.) The intervening twenty-four years, then, were a hijack job.

These policy leaders, the neoconservative-neoliberal cabal, shared a universal disdain for Russia and a desire to effectively bust post-Cold War Russia apart into its constituent components. It wasn’t enough to have deprived Moscow of its empire (which needed to happen). Instead, the neocon-neolib element abandoned all pretense of proportion and reason and embraced a maximalist approach that was designed to collapse Russia itself.

If such thinkers are ever called to account, Weichert would be more sparing and diplomatic in his judgment than many. Others would leave European security solely to the Europeans.

When Putin barged further into Ukraine in 2022, Weichert denounced the invasion in scalding terms and compared it to the folly of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. That this hawks-of-hawks cadre on the Ukraine war have now firmly isolated themselves from a writer as fair-minded as Weichert speaks to their escalating, dangerous isolation from reality.

What is to be done? Only conducting a reality check, says our author.

Russia does not need to negotiate. They can just wait out the Ukrainians, he diagnoses starkly. The Kyiv forces are already crumbling before the sustained pressure Russia is exerting on Kiev’s forces on the frontlines. With American aid slowed, critical gaps in Ukraine’s ailing defenses will be revealed, leaving Moscow’s forces with a key moment of opportunity. That is, unless the Americans and the rest of NATO come rushing in to fight.

Total war, or perhaps, total collapse? These are the options the U.S. is staring down after thirty-five years of being on a primacist bender in Eurasia?

Weichert is clear about what America must not do: escalate over Crimea, specifically, which he says is a clear Russia red line. If crossed, the Kremlin will contemplate using the bomb on the field. And the Americans and their NATO allies keep ignoring Russia. … They do not understand that Russia is prepared for any contingency.

Weichert sees a Prime Mover.

NATO is now the vehicle of instability in Europe. It has expanded five times in thirty-three years, even after it had assured post-Soviet Russian leaders that it’d not do so. The war in Ukraine is entirely the result of NATO expansion.

Most commendable for a policy expert, Weichert is not allergic to real politics. In fact, if [Donald] Trump is reelected, we may get lucky enough to either freeze the operations of NATO or disband the organization altogether—in favor of a defensive alliance that doesn’t engender the kind of war it was supposed to be preventing.

CURT MILLS is Executive Director of The American Conservative in Washington, D.C. He is a foreign policy and campaign writer. He has reported for Politico, the National Interest, and The Spectator, and is a former Robert Novak journalism fellow. He writes on X at @curtmills.

INTRODUCTION

THE HUBRIS OF NATO

THE GOD-KING has betrayed a fatal flaw: hubris. Those words were spoken by one of the Greek Spartan warriors when describing the Persian king, Xerxes, the villain in Zach Snyder’s 2006 film, 300. Hubris is an excellent word to keep in mind when speaking of human conflict. The word hubris is derived from the ancient Greek word hybris which means excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.

For a deeper understanding of the word hubris, we should consider the meaning of the term, nemesis. Those of us weaned on the unhealthy admixture of Hollywood films and cheap comic books think of the word nemesis means villain or, a bad guy. Darth Vader, Khan Noonien Singh, and Thanos are all examples that come to mind when Americans hear the word nemesis. But that just shows our weak understanding of the word.

The true meaning of nemesis is simply, the inescapable agent of someone or something’s downfall. Interestingly, the Oxford online dictionary has an additional listing for nemesis. According to Oxford, a term synonymous with nemesis is retributive justice. By the way, a retributive justice system is one in which offenders are punished rather than rehabilitated.¹

In other words, hubris leads to punishment for the person or group that has displayed hubris.

The current war between NATO-backed Ukraine and the Russian Federation today is chock full hubris. Wars, according to the father of the study of history, Thucydides, are generally fought for three reasons: fear, honor, and interest.² But who, or better yet, what, started the war in Ukraine? In between our exhortations of a global democracy and human rights for all, we in the West believe that we know the answer. The reason Europe has been plunged into a major war in Ukraine is because the Russians and, specifically, the villainous Vladimir Putin, woke up one day, and wanted to slay Captain America and his fellow Avengers in Europe.³

Some version of this childlike morality play is the version of events playing in the background for most Americans and Europeans when they think of the war—if they think about it at all. And I can assure you that most of the leaders in the West would prefer their populations didn’t think much about the ordeal tearing Ukraine apart.⁴ One must wonder how that comports with their comic-book telling of events. After all, true heroes fight in the light while villains are the ones who prefer to skulk about in the darkness.

One can place hubris somewhere between Thucydides’ understanding of fear and honor. It is a key element among the causes of warfare, both in Thucydides’ time and in our own.⁵ In fact, the theme of unchecked pride and ambition inspired the greatest of Greek writers, such as Aeschylus and Sophocles, and it was often a key element of classic Greek tragedies. Here again, the wisdom of the ancients surpasses our own understanding in the present.⁶ In this conflict, however, the Americans and their NATO allies have been the ones most often displaying hubris. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War in 1991, this hubris has been creating the conditions for the current war in Europe.⁷

Of course, the Russians have had a role to play as well. They are not innocent in this affair. Rarely in history are there clear good guys versus bad guys scenarios. This is another fictional worldview that American pop culture has inculcated in the masses. Still, some bear greater responsibility than others for the unfolding disaster in Ukraine such as those who possessed greater agency to impose their twisted visions for the future on the world. And in the aftermath of the Cold War, when Russia was laid low, there was little Moscow could do to implement any of its notions concerning imperial policy for the former Soviet states.

It must be understood that the Russia of today, for a variety of reasons is not the Soviet Union of yesteryear. My late colleague, Angelo Codevilla, put it best when he assessed that:

Russia is no more willing to conquer Europe than it is able. Willingness and ability had stemmed from the communist political apparatus that ruled the USSR and projected itself throughout the world. Sister communist parties and front groups made significant portions of foreign countries—especially European ones—positively eager for Soviet domination. The Soviet armed forces, already in control of Eastern and Central Europe, were well equipped to take, if not to hold, the rest. Now, the political infrastructure—the party that decided things in Moscow and the communist-friendly apparatus in Europe—is gone. Nobody in the West envies Russia. Russian influence in Europe now stems from Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas and from the opportunities for corruption that this entails.⁸

SINCE THE END of the Cold War, Russia’s population has contracted significantly. It has also become riven with ethno-religious tensions within its borders. From Russia’s southern periphery, masses of Muslims have emigrated to Russia. Today there are so many Muslims living within Russia’s borders that Moscow is now the European city with the largest Muslim population.⁹ As a result, over the last 20 years—notably during Russia’s conflict with Chechnya in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Islamic extremist violence has increased exponentially within the country. Meanwhile, in Russia’s underpopulated (though resource-rich) Far East, waves of illegal Chinese immigrants have overwhelmed Russian territory.¹⁰ This, too, is changing Russia fundamentally. Codevilla predicted that Moscow might expel the Muslim regions entirely from their federation or simply fence them off.¹¹ For my part, I have long speculated that Russia is set to lose its Far East to a resurgent China by the end of this century.

As for Russia’s post-Cold War military, it had been a shambles until very recently. If anything, the Ukraine War has forced Russia to adapt quickly and implement much needed reforms to their sclerotic system in order to remain combat effective. My colleague Lee Slusher, a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. government with extensive experience handling the Russia portfolio, believes that Russia has fared far better than Western media sources are claiming in the ongoing Ukraine War. In fact, according to Slusher, Russia’s military has outperformed the NATO-backed Ukrainians at every turn in the conflict—and will continue to do so, the longer that the horrible conflict rages.¹²

Regarding the modern Russian military, Codevilla believed that the force was configured for area-denial rather than for projection of power. The Russian military establishment, unlike that of the tsars and of the Soviets, emphasizes technology to economize manpower that, for the first time, is scarce and precious in Russia. Russia’s reliance on nuclear weapons recalls nothing so much as the 1950s Eisenhower doctrine of ’more bang for the buck.’¹³ Russia as a more defensive-minded power is, of course, something that the mainstream Western elite refuse to see. After all, Russia did invade Ukraine. But, as the February 2024 Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interview showed: Russia viewed Ukraine (at least Eastern Ukraine and Crimea) as existing within its borders.¹⁴ And as this work will demonstrate, Moscow was at least willing to accept Ukraine as an independent state, so long as it did not consider joining NATO. The deteriorating state of Russia’s demography lends further credence to Codevilla’s claims that Russia is defensive-minded by necessity rather than choice.

Sadly, it was NATO members—specifically the Americans and their British partners—who agitated for the current situation. There exists a group of mid-level, politically connected policymakers within the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. who have been there from the end of the Cold War until the present. It was these elements in the U.S. government who set the current policies toward Russia in the wake of the Cold War. Former President Donald J. Trump derisively referred to this group as the Deep State. Some have described this cabal as being part of the Administrative State. Still others have called this group the uniparty. Gary Dorrien named this relatively obscure element of powerful bureaucrats in our national security state the Democratic-Globalists.¹⁵ They are the neoconservative and neoliberal leaders who worked for both Republican and Democratic Party presidents following the Cold War and who share a maximalist vision of protecting U.S. interests abroad. This group also has undying enmity toward Russia.¹⁶ And, as you’ll read, they adhere to a quasi-religious commitment to NATO expansion.

This neoconservative-neoliberal cabal possesses one key attribute, what the Greeks in Zach Snyder’s 300 called a fatal flaw. They have a strong case of hubris. The people who belong to this group write lovingly of the need for an American empire (abandoning any pretense of America’s republican founding). They speak dismissively of our allies. The democratic-globalists believe in a borderless world dominated by financial interests, with the United States sitting atop the system, always seeking out the next great threat, and preempting those threats, no matter how small or weak they are before those supposed threats can materialize.¹⁷ Thus, threats such as Russia, which after the Cold War was a broken down, desiccated husk of a once-great country, becomes a de facto villain.

When the hammer-and-sickle came down for the final time over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, no one could have imagined that a war between NATO and Russia would come after that momentous event. Peace, we were told, was at hand. The U.S. president during the final moments of the Soviet Union’s existence, George H.W. Bush, assured uneasy Americans that the rule of law would replace the law of the jungle in some magnificent new world order.¹⁸ The neoliberals predicted the end of history at the end of the Cold War. All major differences and conflicts would be subordinated to the economic and political realms. Warfare, as we understood it, was over because all major ideological questions had been resolved with the ultimate victory of liberal democratic capitalism over communism.

But hubris can turn heroes into villains overnight.

Instead of viewing the end of the Cold War as a chance for America to get back to being a country unpreoccupied with foreign affairs, as many Americans at the time wanted, the democratic-globalist cabal—the permanent bipartisan fusion party, as my colleague Michael Walsh has described them—seized it as an opportunity to exploit Russia’s weakness and amplify U.S. power. And while that all may sound good on paper (indeed, it was written down in a wild document that became known as Rebuilding America’s Defenses by a now defunct think tank known as the Project for the New American Century), the reality was much more complex.¹⁹

In fact, a great debate raged at the dawn of the post-Cold War era. People like former Reagan administration UN ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and former Nixon administration speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, argued that the United States needed to become a normal country in a normal time. The United States needed to pay much closer heed to the problems at home and distance itself from the rest of the world. Kirkpatrick argued that, a good society is defined not by its foreign policy but by its internal qualities. As Kirkpatrick assessed, foreign policy becomes a major aspect of a society only if its government is expansionist, imperialist, aggressive, or when it is threatened by aggression.²⁰

On the other side of the debate were thinkers like the late Charles Krauthammer and former George H.W. Bush administration official, Bill Kristol. Countering Kirkpatrick’s astute arguments were the impassioned calls from Krauthammer in the pages of Foreign Affairs for Washington to exploit what he called America’s unipolar moment. Krauthammer supposed that by enhancing America’s relative power in the aftermath of the Cold War, the United States could retain its dominant global status and prevent any new Soviet Union-like threat from arising in the future.²¹

Rather than begin the process of looking inward to enhance American life and ignore the siren song of excessive foreign entanglements, Washington’s policymakers heeded Krauthammer’s calls. For a while it seemed like the plan was working. An aggressive policy of breaking down all global trade barriers was undertaken. Meanwhile forceful democracy and human rights promotion became America’s sine qua non in foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. The elite who believed this claptrap also assumed that by liberalizing trade with China, they would bloodlessly cause China to change its communist regime in favor of a democratic government that supported capitalism. In fact, the only thing accomplished by increasing trade with Beijing was enriching the Chinese—making China, and not the United States, very wealthy and powerful.²²

As for Russia, weakened and adrift after its defeat in the Cold War, the Americans would ensure the old bear could never threaten its neighbors again by encircling the defeated Russia and pressuring it until it broke apart into smaller countries that could then be more easily controlled. In fact, the greatest obstacle to the Western grand strategy of breaking Russia apart forever (if one can even call what we have pursued in Russia a grand strategy) has been Vladimir Putin’s regime. In 2022, writing at the blog for the London School of Economics, Robert Wade describes his belief that NATO maneuvered Russia into attacking Ukraine so as to have a pretext to implement its long-standing fantasy of overthrowing the Putinist regime and replacing it with something far more amenable.

Thus, the neoconservative-neoliberal obsession with regime change in every so-called autocratic state around the globe, the kind of plan that was instituted in Iraq in 2003, is very much still in effect with the much larger, nuclear-armed Russia today. Wade assessed that, As the Afghanistan insurgency [during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s] against the Soviet military helped to bring down the Soviet Union, the Western strategists hope that the Ukrainian insurgency against the bogged-down Russian military will help end the Putin regime.²³ Of course, at no point in these discussions has the neocon-neolib cabal questioned what happens if someone nastier than Putin replaces him?²⁴ What’s more, if any nation in this fight is akin to the Soviet Union, it is, unfortunately, the United States which has painfully overextended itself in Ukraine and is now losing—with that likely defeat having immense implications far beyond the borders of tiny Ukraine.

U.S. power projection in Europe has been conducted via multilateral institutions, notably NATO (the European Union has also been a conduit for U.S. power). NATO, which had basically become the equivalent of a headless chicken the moment the Soviet Union was vanquished and the Cold War ended, was only more than happy to embrace the neocon-neolib cabal’s ideas. It was entirely self-serving. After all, NATO had become a massive, multilateral bureaucracy in search of meaning. What would it do now that its favorite enemy, the Soviet Union, was no more? A rational person might have argued that it was time for NATO to disband, for European security to be left to the Europeans and the Russians, and for the Americans to go home. But that wasn’t to be.

NATO, a true hero of the Cold War, has become the villain in the post-Cold War era. In searching for its new purpose, NATO settled on repurposing its old raison d’être. Sure, the Soviets were gone. Although, the Russians remained. The incorporation of many former Eastern European Soviet states ensured that a post-Cold War NATO would take on the preferences or, rather, the fears and resentments of the nations that were at that point most recently oppressed and tortured by the Russians. Historical resentments between Russia and Eastern European states run deep. It was not only during the Cold War that these countries hated each other. Their dislike goes back centuries, as you will read in the second chapter of this work.

To compound matters, as you will soon read in this book, NATO had vowed not to expand beyond their 1991 borders. This was an important development because the Red Army had famously and unilaterally withdrawn its forces from Eastern Europe based largely on informal guarantees made by American and Western leaders vowing not to expand NATO closer to Russia’s borders. In the post-Cold War era, though, the cabal running Washington realized that post-Soviet Russia was far too weak to do anything other than complain about NATO reneging on its promises to Moscow. Thus, this cabal went about remaking the world (or trying to) as they saw fit.

After more than thirty years of this hubris, the results of their failures are seen and felt on every continent. These failures will resonate throughout the age. Further, their stated goal of maximizing American security by enhancing its global dominance has actually done more to weaken the United States than anything Russia, China, Iran, or al Qaeda could have done to America.²⁵ As I write in 2024, we are at the precipice of these policies reaching the nadir of their failure in the form of a likely nuclear third world war with Russia over Ukraine. None of this was necessary and much of it could have been avoided or, at least, mitigated if America and its NATO partners had simply lived up to the promises they made at the end of the Cold War to ensure peace.

But hubris rarely adheres to reason. And, as the ancient Greeks showed us repeatedly, it leads to the destruction of the one who displays hubris. Like ancient Athens, the United States has become an aggressive democracy bent on domination. Internally, America is a den of political and social instability. Externally, the United States has spent the post-Cold War era forcing itself upon other nations that would have been better left alone.

Like ancient Athens with their Delian League, America spent the last thirty-three years compelling smaller states that were little more than vassals—notably in Europe—to stay inside the NATO and EU circle. Just as with the Delian League, NATO has become nothing more than a means to extend America’s power far beyond its borders. And, as Athens did, America has pushed itself too far: It is overextended, and now faces the wrath of a coalition of rivals whose only common trait is a deep aversion to the world that the United States has been trying to