Soon after the Kremlin annexed Crimea in 2014, the former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski gave a speech in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to warn about the enduring nature of Russia’s imperial ambitions.
Across many decades, first the Soviet Union, then Russia held competitions for a new national anthem. For much of that time, as new lines came and went, they kept essentially the same music. “This country might change the words, the lyrics, the vocabulary,” he said, “but it will never change the tune.”
A central, unresolved question since the Soviet Union collapsed has been whether Russia can reform to support an open democratic society, or whether its imperial mind-set means the West, led by the United States, is doomed to eternal confrontation with an illiberal Kremlin.
The advent of a second Trump administration prompts that question anew, particularly as the president has waded impulsively into the treacherous waters of forging a deal with President Vladimir V. Putin to end the Ukraine war.
For over a century, every global crisis has sparked a debate in the United States between two classical schools of geopolitical thought, pitting idealists, ardent supporters of foreign intervention, against realists, who mistrust lofty crusades.
Idealists maintain that other nations should mirror the American democratic model. Geopolitical stability comes through alliances forged by like-minded nations that champion liberal values including human rights, open markets and the rule of law. Traditional idealists, like former President Bill Clinton, believed that autocratic regimes could be softened through the lure of global trade and participation in international institutions like the now defunct Group of 8.
Realists hold that national interests propel the outcomes of global politics, especially war, with countries competing ruthlessly for power and resources in order to guarantee their own security. They favor a more conservative approach that assumes the balance of global freedom is unlikely to shift.
Since at least the end of the Cold War, idealists have predominated in U.S. foreign policy, but the invasion of Ukraine finds an evolving coincidence of views in a new, more adversarial direction, complete with new names like “neo-idealism” and “regime realism” to reflect this uncanny convergence.
Put simply, neo-idealists, following the international relations expert Benjamin Tallis, pursue a more militant cast to their idealism, pushing the idea that a regime like Russia’s, showing no inclination to curb its aggressive ways, can’t be a cooperative partner. Regime realism, a notion developed by the Johns Hopkins historian Hal Brands, while not rejecting the anarchic pursuit of power as the main motivator for any nation, concedes that some work to preserve and even promote democracy is warranted.
But many thinkers in both schools now hold that global trade pacts that were aimed at reassuring autocratic countries like Russia and China that their security was not at risk were always doomed to fail. “The real problem was that safety from external attack isn’t the only thing rulers want,” Brands explains in The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars and the Making of the Modern World (Norton, 296 pp., $29.99). “They want glory, greatness and empire; they want security not just for their nations, but for themselves,” he writes. “This is where the conflict emerged. By maintaining, even expanding, its sphere of influence, Washington was preventing Moscow and Beijing from creating their own.”
Since the war in Ukraine began, Putin has often cast Russia as the victim rather than the aggressor, claiming that he was forced to invade as a measure to keep NATO out of Ukraine. Yet the former K.G.B. agent — whose Kremlin offices are decorated with statues of expansionist czars — seems to have retrofit a NATO threat onto his longstanding imperial ambitions. Early in his reign, he professed little concern about the spread of NATO, while, as Brands suggests, he has long been obsessed with trying to control Ukraine. He set about re-establishing Russian control in the country as early as 2004, when he campaigned directly in its presidential election for a pro-Kremlin candidate.
In The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine (PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $30), the former National Security Council adviser Alexander S. Vindman runs through the last several decades of American foreign policy. He argues that the United States has long abandoned its values in dealing with the Kremlin.
Amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington tended to ricochet repeatedly between the hope that Russia would become a responsible world actor and the fear that its collapse might leave its vast nuclear arsenal in rogue hands. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington became preoccupied with what Vindman calls an improbable worst-case scenario — that Moscow would make good on threats to go nuclear — and sent Ukraine insufficient arms.
Defending a democratic Ukraine is crucial to the project of global freedom, he contends, and Putin’s influential brand of illiberalism cannot be confronted on friendly terms. Despite his book’s title, Vindman, a self-described neo-idealist and admirer of Tallis, spends much of “The Folly of Realism” criticizing old-school idealists. The American foreign policy establishment, he writes, must reject “a sentimental faux idealism” that is “comfortable imagining adversaries as potentially cooperative.”
In hindsight, some American leaders did seem overly effusive about the prospect of bringing Putin into the fold. In 2001, President George W. Bush notoriously said that looking into Putin’s eyes gave him a sense of his soul, finding the Russian leader “very straightforward and trustworthy.”
President Clinton, in his 2004 autobiography “My Life,” concluded that more than a billion dollars in American aid to dismantle nuclear weapons, among other objectives, was a lot cheaper than a Cold War rerun. Plus, Clinton recalled, “Putin was compact and extremely fit from years of martial arts practice,” suggesting that the new Russian president was tough enough to manage the country’s “turbulent political and economic life.”
The United States Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration is busy dismantling, was a main vehicle for funneling American help to Russia. But this support began to crater after Russia’s financial crisis in 1998, a time when many impoverished Russians began to sour on democratic reforms.
Washington considered one of the most important developments during those years to be the departure of two trains from Ukraine to Russia on May 31, 1996, carrying away the last of the country’s strategic nuclear warheads. This move was part of a treaty signed with the promise of security guarantees from Russia, the United States, Britain and, later, China and France.
That moment is especially painful for those now on the front lines in Ukraine. “The treaty is not worth the paper it’s written on,” says Lt. Yulia Mykytenko, the Ukrainian commander of a drone reconnaissance unit and the first-person narrator in the journalist Lara Marlowe’s How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine (Melville House, 290 pp., $29.99). “Every country in the world will learn the lesson,” says Mykytenko. “If you have nuclear weapons, nobody messes with you. If you give them up, you get invaded.”
Such laments have drawn little sympathy from within MAGA world. Trump and many of his allies hold that the United States has no real national interest at stake in Ukraine and wasted tens of billions of dollars arming it — never mind that American weapons manufacturers received most of the money. For Trump, Ukraine is Europe’s problem.
Newly in office, Trump elicited some surprise by saying that Moscow would face new sanctions if it did not work to end a “ridiculous war” that was “destroying Russia.” But, a couple of weeks later, as the Kremlin dangled lucrative investment deals for U.S. businesses, the president extended a hand to Putin, called Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and suggested that Russia should keep the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine that it has seized in three years of war. Republican legislators who had once been vocal supporters of Kyiv softened their tone.
This would no doubt alarm players with personal ties, like Vindman, who was born in Ukraine and fired by Trump in 2020 for his involvement in a House impeachment inquiry. But even outside observers like Brands suggest that Ukraine is a crucial piece of the global order. The country has been pivotal in every great-power conflict for more than 100 years, he writes.
Far from the more value-neutral approach of traditional realism, regime realism, for Brands, means acknowledging the danger in the imperial ambition of autocratic and illiberal countries. Russia and China, harnessing renewed wealth to regenerate their militaries, have allied themselves with Iran and North Korea to roll back the American-dominated order, a struggle Brands calls “the defining feature” of current global politics.
Both Brands and Vindman argue for the United States to maintain robust military pressure against such regimes. American might prevailed in World War I, World War II and the Cold War, Brands argues, so why abandon a winning strategy? Do not “junk the liberal order,” he writes; “strengthen that order against the actors trying to bring it down.”
The new wave of realists and idealists now sit united in opposition to the current occupants of the White House. Trump “often seemed more hostile to the liberal order America was defending than he was to the tyrants testing it,” Brands notes. Not buttressing Ukraine to outlast Russia risks telegraphing that “decadent democracies will fade before their autocratic foes,” he writes.
Lieutenant Mykytenko feels the same. She has had a grueling war. Even before the full-scale invasion in 2022, she lost both her husband and her father. Her husband, a fellow officer, died in a firefight while she was deployed nearby. Her father self-immolated in protest of his government’s feeble response to the annexation of Crimea.
Still, she returns to battle, she argues, because there is so much at stake: “If Putin is allowed to win, Ukraine, a country of 44 million people, will cease to exist. The security of Europe and the entire world will be in question.”
That question overshadows the other one. Instead of wondering whether democracy might ever transform Russia, a more unsettling prospect now is whether democracy will endure as a model at all. Neo-idealists and regime realists share the hope that the world can marshal the force needed to counter a rising illiberal order, a struggle led by the United States for more than 100 years. But with Trump cozying up to Putin, and with the American president’s own party reluctant to confront him, all eyes turn to Europe, and its nascent effort to rearm, as the only potential candidate to galvanize the struggle.
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