Understanding the Origins and Likely Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War

Answering the questions as to why Russia invaded Ukraine, why Biden's strategy is doomed to fail and what the US must do to end the conflict to prevent it from escalating to a nuclear Third World War

Russian President Putin announcing a Special Military Operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022

In order to understand the true origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War, it is important to understand that more than anything the outbreak of this preventable war in Europe represented a spectacular failure of the US national security strategy of liberal hegemony which it has pursued for most of the past three decades, including the eastward expansion of NATO, which precipitated it. During the entirety of the Cold War against the Soviet Union from 1945-1991, America was led by clear-eyed foreign policy realists from Harry Truman to George HW Bush, who instinctively understood the inherent limits and constraints of US military power and acted in such a way as to avoid getting the US bogged down in fighting unnecessary wars or at least acted to limit our military involvement in such conflicts. However, for the past few decades, with the exception of President Donald Trump, the US has been led by liberal internationalists and neoconservatives who mistakenly believe the world is defined by a unipolar world order and that the US can interfere militarily in Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence at their whim, willfully blind to the ever-increasing and existential threat posed to the US by the Sino-Russian alliance.

They have done so with little concern of major retaliation against US critical infrastructure with cyber or super Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons or blowback from Moscow or Beijing, let alone of a potential two front war, which the US would be very likely to lose, given our current state of military unpreparedness. That hypothesis is now undergoing its first major stress test with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, thus far, the results, while still inconclusive, have been far from encouraging. The US will be very fortunate if the Biden administration’s provocative foreign policy towards Russia and China does not cause the US to stumble into an unnecessary Third World War with them that will almost certainly escalate to the nuclear level, which America would not likely survive.

US leaders could stand to benefit by showing a little more strategic empathy towards Russia to help them understand why Putin invaded Ukraine and how we can better satisfy Russia’s legitimate security concerns to prevent any future Russian aggression. Russian leaders from Lenin to the present have been paranoid of the Western Powers ever since the Soviets came to power given that the Western Allied armies invaded Russia after World War One to try to help the White Armies “strangle Bolshevikism in its cradle” to borrow Churchill’s phrase, while Churchill himself attempted to have Lenin assassinated. After the Cold War, Russia lost its Eastern European Empire, nearly half of its Soviet-era population and nearly one-quarter of its territory, totaling over twice as much territory as it was forced to give up under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.  At the end of the Cold War as part of Soviet agreement to permit the reunification of Germany in 1990, Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never be expanded east of Germany. From a Russian perspective, the US broke this promise when it expanded NATO to Russia’s borders for the first time in its history, less than a decade later, including nearly all of the nations that comprised the former Warsaw Pact. Even more provocatively, NATO expanded its membership to include the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania infringing upon what Russia considered to be its sphere of influence. This reduced the distance between NATO and Moscow by over two-thirds potentially reducing the warning time for a NATO nuclear missile launch against Russia’s capital to as little as five minutes even though the US has not had any nuclear missiles in Europe for decades and has no plans to deploy them there. Putin has vehemently opposed NATO’s eastward expansion and has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian membership in NATO would be crossing a red line for Russia that could lead to armed conflict but Western leaders did not listen.