None of this means Russia has the right to dominate Ukraine. If America’s regional bullying is wrong, Moscow’s cruder version — which currently consists of troops massed on Ukraine’s border — is even worse. But the problem with the Biden administration’s willful naïveté about U.S. policy toward Latin America is that it fosters a willful naïveté about the way international politics actually works.
Of course, Ukraine has the right to forge an independent foreign policy. But foreign policy isn’t an exercise in abstract morality; it involves questions of power. And the United States and its European allies lack the power to deny Russia a say over Ukraine’s future because they are not willing to send their sons and daughters to fight there. Implicitly, the Biden administration has already conceded that: NATO has no plans to admit Ukraine anytime soon because doing so would commit the United States and Europe to Ukraine’s defense. And there’s no chance the United States and Europe will make that commitment if it could mean fighting Russian troops.
So long as Moscow is ready to threaten war, it can keep Ukraine out of NATO. The Biden administration just doesn’t want to admit that publicly, for fear of demoralizing the Ukrainian government and encouraging Mr. Putin to make even greater threats. As Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon have suggested, the best solution may be artful diplomatic language that allows Moscow to claim it has blocked Ukraine from entering NATO and the United States and Ukraine to insist that it could still join in some distant, theoretical, future.
America’s highest priorities should be preventing a wider war and ensuring that Ukraine remains a free society at home. A deal that tacitly acknowledges Russia’s veto over Ukraine’s military alliances is worth swallowing in order to achieve that, since in practice, Russia already wields that veto. It’s far better than a full-scale Russian invasion, which would expose the limits of America’s commitment to Ukraine and turn the entire country into a battlefield.
But this kind of compromise, which acknowledges the brute facts of geopolitical power, is harder when officials in Washington pretend that only tyrants like Mr. Putin expect a say over the behavior of their weaker neighbors. The United States must stop lying to itself. The more willing the Biden administration is to admit that it, too, expects a sphere of influence in its corner of the globe, the better able it will be to ensure that Russia’s sphere of influence doesn’t destroy Ukraine or plunge Europe into war.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.
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