The Delusions That Created the Ukraine Crisis

Promising future NATO membership has not made Ukraine safer.

The current Ukraine crisis is the product of delusional thinking. Gerard Toal explained this last week in an excellent column:

The short answer is this: security delusions on all sides paved the way, delusions that are now on a dangerous collision course.

The threat and use of force do not create genuine security, Toal argues, but the Russian government assumes that they can. But Western governments have their own delusions that have brought us to the current situation. There is a widely shared belief among Western policymakers and analysts that Russia has nothing to fear from NATO and therefore expanding NATO cannot possibly have been threatening to Russia, but in fact Russia perceives the alliance as a threat and considers its continued expansion to be intolerable. As Toal says, “Claiming Nato is not a threat to anyone is a delusion.” Toal continues:

Admitting Ukraine into the Nato procurement system, training its troops, building Nato-standard infrastructure, and supplying advanced weapons to its forces without grasping that this may inflame Russian insecurity is also delusional thinking. It is living solely within one’s benevolent view of oneself.

Toal is one of the best analysts working in this area, and I commend his book Near Abroad to everyone if you haven’t already read it. He is right when he says of Ukraine, “They deserve better than to be a sandbox for a proxy war between Russia and the West.” That has been true for a long time, and it is about time that we heeded that wisdom.