How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine (June 2025)

(...) Putin continued to cooperate with NATO, albeit begrudgingly, while echoing Yeltsin’s criticisms of NATO expansion. But the more Putin objected, the more determined Vice President Dick Cheney became to press forward with expansion.

Cheney’s antagonism to Russia long predated Putin. As the Soviet Union was dissolving in 1990—so suddenly and smoothly that the process seemed almost miraculous—Cheney, then secretary of defense, believed that was not enough. He sought to hasten its unraveling by stoking the rivalry between Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and the subordinate Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic President Boris Yeltsin, hosting the latter at a major Pentagon reception. In fact, Cheney had already concluded that the goal should be the dismemberment of Russia itself, lest it ever again pose a threat to the world. This vision of a world without Russia, with its seductively utopian promise of permanent peace in Eurasia, appealed to others in Washington.

Cheney’s thinking on Russia reflected the same maximalism as the controversial Defense Planning Guidance prepared under his oversight in 1992. That document advised that the United States should act—unilaterally and preemptively, if necessary—to deter or suppress the rise of any power that might challenge its global predominance. The logic behind its vision of infinite hegemony sustained by eternal vigilance was irredeemably quixotic. Patrick Buchanan deplored the guidance as a “formula for endless intervention” and a “blank check given to all of America's friends and allies that we’ll go to war to defend their interests.” William Pfaff, writing three decades before the Ukraine war would expose the appalling incapacity of America’s defense industry, noted critically that the guidance “tries to substitute military primacy for the industrial and economic predominance the United States enjoyed between 1945 and 1975 but now has lost.”

(...)

Dick Cheney remained a consistent—if not always well-informed—advocate of expansion. Undeterred by the debacle over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Cheney’s staffers attempted to browbeat National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill into changing her assessment when, in a briefing to President Bush on Ukraine and Georgia, she conveyed the intelligence finding that the potential for conflict with Russia was high.

Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley scheduled a National Security Council meeting to take up the issue of Ukraine and Georgia. With less than a year left in office, Bush was looking to deliver on his “Freedom Agenda,” the quasi-mystical belief that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands” and that America had a divinely ordained mission to spread democracy to “every nation and culture.”

That agenda was floundering in Iraq and Afghanistan, but bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO might at least partially redeem it. Hadley therefore had the Ambassador to NATO and former Cheney deputy Victoria Nuland speak to the meeting via teleconference from Brussels. Nuland assured Bush that the Georgians and Ukrainians had successfully battled corruption and reformed their politics and economies and therefore deserved membership. She then said of membership, “If they want it and meet the criteria, how can the United States be the ones saying no?”

According to Nuland’s simple, clear, and misguided rationale, the question of whether the United States should bind itself by treaty to war on behalf of two sovereign states was now a procedural one. The final decision was already beyond the purview of the elected representatives of the American people.

George W. Bush went along with Nuland, seconding her logic that American sovereignty had to be subordinate to the mission of democratization: “If these two democratic states want MAP (Membership Action Plans), I can’t say no.” Gates and Rice advised caution at the meeting but offered no dissenting counsel despite their misgivings. Rice rationalized her temporizing by telling herself that Bush had made his decision “on principle,” and that it was his commitment to doing “what was right” that she so admired.

If Nuland’s logic was arguably fallacious, her assessments of Georgia and Ukraine were misleading, if not deliberate misrepresentations. Public opinion in Ukraine was overwhelmingly against NATO membership, with multiple polls showing 55 percent to 70 percent opposed and only 20 to 25 percent in favor. As Nuland herself later put it, NATO at the time was so unpopular that it was a “four-letter word” in Ukraine. To get around this popular opposition, the Americans arranged for Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and chairman of the parliament to sign a letter requesting membership. That act outraged many Ukrainian voters. The prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, began to go wobbly. Worried about reelection, she said that Ukraine had no need for NATO. The US secretary of state had to intervene personally to get Tymoshenko back on track.

Rice anticipated that a battle royale would ensue at the NATO summit in Bucharest scheduled for April 2008. Only fourteen of NATO’s twenty-six members were ready to support Ukraine’s membership. Germany and France were leading the resistance, but standing behind them were Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Norway. Even Great Britain, normally so dutiful toward Washington, was wavering. But Rice had her orders from Bush. Where logic and argument could not prevail, sanctimonious scolding had to. When the German foreign minister laid out his reservations about the candidacies of Georgia and Ukraine, Rice stepped aside to allow Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, a former journalist and firebrand from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, to silence his counterpart by browbeating him over German responsibility for World War II. How could a German respond?

The second day proved equally tense as Bush personally pressured German Chancellor Angela Merkel to give in. Eventually, Merkel agreed to a compromise statement that affirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would become members and simply refrained from setting a precise date.

Washington had asserted its will: NATO would expand, skeptical allies, diffident Ukrainians, and recalcitrant Russians notwithstanding. As Rice put it, “Moscow needs to know that the Cold War is over and Russia (sic) lost.” America’s secretary of state apparently took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis so literally as to believe that time had stopped in 1991 and the Russian Federation, as a successor to the Soviet Union, was obliged to remain a supplicant in perpetuity. 

The Bucharest decision combined the mystical idealism of Bush’s freedom agenda with the pseudo-Machiavellian maximalist primacy expressed in Cheney’s 1992 Pentagon Planning Guidance. (...)

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 R_P wrote:

I know, it's almost like Putin is the hit squad whose sole purpose was to scare people into buying US protection.

Joni Askola hits the nail on the head again. 

Putin can't afford to negotiate directly with Zelensky. He is so lost. 

And just in case anyone is still harbouring any doubts about what side the States have taken..

Ha, you know it's going bad for the Russians when they are now (via Trump) trying to force a peace deal on the Ukrainians. 

Deep breaths...
Why Trump gets it right on Ukraine peace
In Alaska he found reality: he is now embracing an agreement without demanding a ceasefire first, which would have never worked anyway.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

Novel idea. I like it.  Let's do it.

From a cool Finnish dude who speaks in very clear and simple terms. Click on the link for the thread:

1/10 THREAD: Before the Alaska Talks begin, here are a few facts about the war in Ukraine worth remembering.

russia is failing strategically — despite the immense suffering it continues to cause.

Let’s break down why, after 3.5 years of full-scale war, russia is still losing👇

Lindsey Graham haz a sad

Trump's Ukrainian wet dream

Neo-Birchers easily get all huffy/frothy, so here's something more soothing from a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Ukraine Can Still Win (*)
Western Half Measures Have Prolonged the War, but Decisive Action Now Could End It

When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, many in Washington expected a rapid settlement to the war in Ukraine. On the campaign trail, Trump had boasted he could end the conflict in 24 hours. Although few analysts believed that specific promise, many speculated about the possible terms and timeline of an impending deal. The investment bank JPMorgan Chase, for example, claimed an agreement could be reached by June. (...)

 R_P wrote:
Wow, "growing sentiment"?  That settles it, they should definitely surrender. I mean..."growing sentiment" in other countries (however undocumented and nebulously-defined) trumps the actual conditions on the ground, the support of allies, the late but growing support from the US, and the stubborn commitment of the Ukrainians themselves to resistance to the ongoing invasion. 

You seem to have a lot invested in Ukraine losing this war. The 20% or so of Ukraine's territory that Russia controls (down from a peak of 27%, and disregarding the portions of Kursk oblast that Ukraine has periodically captured) must be a real disappointment. And wow, Pokrovsk? That mighty metropolis that once housed 67,000 people before Russia shelled it mostly to rubble. That is, capturing Pokrovsk would be like Trump capturing Prince George, BC in his campaign to make Canada the 51st state.

Maybe it's the million-plus casualties Russia has lost attacking its much weaker neighbor. Seems like quite a toll for the meager result, but anything for the tsar, no?

Maybe it's just the frustration of Russia's oft-stated imperial ambitions over the rest of Europe. Putin deserves the Russian empire back! Frustrating that ambition is so unfair.

Anyway, I hope you find a way to cope with this denial of the proper state of the world, with an authoritarian regime in charge of most of Europe. Ah, the good old days. Pine on.

Ukraine faces demographic crisis: 40% of working-age population lost