Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine

“to ignore the missteps on America’s part that led to Ukraine’s tragedy would be to risk repeating the folly in the future. Haslam’s book is a warning that we should have learned from the ancients: hubris often leads to nemesis.”

The subtitle of Jonathan Haslam’s important book Hubris could be “the folly of the victors.” After the U.S. victory in the Cold War, successive American presidential administrations and their Western allies pursued policies that laid the groundwork for Europe’s largest war in seven decades. Haslam shows that the roots of the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 reach back into the early-to-mid 1990s, when the Western powers led by the United States engaged in what Haslam rightly describes as an “unconstrained outburst of triumphalism” that recklessly ignored Russian interests and fears and helped to bring about the worst aspects of Russian nationalism and imperialism.

Haslam, professor emeritus of the history of international relations at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Specter of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II,  writes that the West’s principal folly was NATO enlargement, which was pursued relentlessly by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama (and to a much lesser extent by Trump) despite repeated Russian protests and despite what Haslam calls “the best specialist advice within and outside government.”

That specialist advice included, most notably, George F. Kennan, the American diplomat and historian who served in our embassy in Russia, authored the “containment” doctrine, directed the State Department’s Policy Planning staff in the early Cold War years, and wrote seminal works on the diplomatic folly that led to the First World War. In 1997, Kennan wrote a piece for the New York Times predicting that NATO enlargement would be the most fateful error of post-Cold War diplomacy. It would, Kennan wrote, provoke Russian leaders and revive Russian aggressive impulses.

But Kennan was not alone. Fifty Russia specialists, including former ambassadors and respected strategists of both political parties, signed a public letter urging then-President Bill Clinton to forego NATO enlargement. Clinton ignored the letter and the advice of several Russia experts (including some in the Pentagon) and moved forward with the first round of NATO enlargement which brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. Haslam is scathing in his denunciation of Clinton’s amateurish foreign policy, which also included taking NATO to war in the Balkans for humanitarian purposes, a move that was sure to stoke more concern in Moscow.

The champion of NATO enlargement was George W. Bush. During his presidency, the countries of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the alliance. Moreover, in 2008, Bush announced that NATO would soon be inviting Georgia and Ukraine to join. Ukraine, as several Russia experts pointed out, was the red line of all red lines when it came to Russia’s leaders and people (not just Vladimir Putin). George Kennan had once written that Russia views Ukraine in the same way the United States views Pennsylvania.

Bush compounded his provocation by waging a global “War on Terror” and pledging to spread democracy throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. In Russian eyes, the alliance that had defeated the Soviet Union was now engaged in fighting wars in the Middle East (Iraq) and Southwest Asia (Afghanistan) while pushing the borders of the alliance closer and closer to Russia. Under Obama, Albania and /Croatia were added to NATO, a process that started in the Bush administration. Then under Trump, Montenegro and North Macedonia joined the alliance.

Over the course of three decades, after the Kremlin lost 14 Soviet republics, NATO doubled in size. And this occurred, as Haslam shows, despite repeated promises by U.S. and Western officials (U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister John Major) in the early 1990s that NATO would not move one inch closer to Russia. “The multiple reassurances were . . . never forgotten by the Russians,” Haslam writes. “Every new accession to NATO came as a needling reminder of what had been so sincerely promised and so casually tossed away.”

The Obama administration just made things worse, according to Haslam, by embracing the so-called “Arab Spring” and covertly interfering in Ukraine’s affairs. This was the “Maiden Revolution,” engineered by neoconservatives within the Obama administration (principally Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs). The Obama administration and the European Union, Haslam writes, helped Ukrainian opposition forces overthrow the elected pro-Russian Ukrainian government in 2014. From Russia’s perspective, Haslam explains, “[t]he whole purpose of the coup was to fasten Ukraine’s elite to the West by means of its integration with the EU . . . followed by its eventual inclusion within NATO.”

Russian forces then seized the Crimea. Haslam does not excuse Russia’s aggression, but he does carefully place it in its proper historical context. Trump, Haslam notes, tried to improve relations with Russia, but the Russia collusion hoax, which was promoted by many of the same officials who had promoted NATO enlargement and who vilified Putin as the next Hitler, put an end to those efforts. Those officials resumed power in Washington under President Biden. Putin once again invaded Ukraine, and the Biden administration deepened our involvement and NATO’s involvement in this brutal war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Haslam is no Putin apologist, but he will undoubtedly be subjected to such claims by those unwilling “to see the plank” in their own eye. Putin is a ruthless dictator, and imperialism is part of Russia’s DNA. But to ignore the missteps on America’s part that led to Ukraine’s tragedy would be to risk repeating the folly in the future. Haslam’s book is a warning that we should have learned from the ancients: hubris often leads to nemesis.