On Our Way Out of NATO, What Can We Get in Return?

Putin apparently is signaling he is open to negotiating peace in Ukraine.

Beware, warn some of my conservative friends. He will insist that negotiations touch on the “root causes” of the war as he sees them. That means he will want to roll back NATO expansion, which many in the West say should be off the table.

I think that is exactly wrong. NATO offers us the chance to make a cost-free concession that would look like a victory for Putin, serve as a tonic for Europe, and help us avoid future troubles.

In exchange for a decent peace in Ukraine, we should offer a timed U.S. exit from NATO, starting within the year and completed by, say, Jan 20, 2029.

Why would this be cost free? Because it is going to happen anyway. Europe’s indignant answer to Trump’s scolding seems to be “We’ll show you we can’t be pushed around. We’re going to re-arm and defend ourselves, so there.”

Briar patch anyone?

In truth, we should have offered this same deal no later than 1992 in return for, say, a radical reduction of arms across the continent. If Reagan had been able to serve another term, it would have happened.

In the early 1980s, God’s gift to the world—maybe all those rosaries helped—was to elevate two men of vision to the leadership of the two most powerful and dangerous nations in the world, Reagan and Gorbachev. Reagan’s conciliatory stance, his welcoming of perestroika and glasnost, his embrace of Gorbachev as a fellow peacemaker, his bold proposals for disarmament all helped encourage Gorbachev’s best inclinations.

Reagan, because he believed in the power of liberty, always expected the Soviet state to fail, and so was able to see it happening. By the early 1990s Gorbachev was desperately seeking U.S. friendship. He even, more than once, proposed Russia entering NATO while withdrawing his opposition to the former Warsaw pact nations joining as well.

No one ever accused the elder Bush of being a man of vision. Like nearly our entire foreign policy establishment he underrated not the desirability of liberty, but its strategic power. And so could not grasp the importance of liberty’s rise—however imperfect—in Russia.

Based on a thin resume of figurehead jobs--Ambassador to the U.N. and, oddly, Director of the CIA—Bush fancied himself a foreign policy sophisticate: a “player.” As such he cherished NATO as the vehicle by which the U.S. would remain a European power. (M.E. Sarotte, in his masterful Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Post-Cold War Stalemate gives the history in excruciatingly well-documented detail.)

Meanwhile most Americans’ response would have been ‘why would be want to run, and be responsible for Europe one minute longer than necessary?’

Alas the pre-Reagan faction in the GOP wanted precisely that. A fair date for the beginning of the populist rebellion in the GOP was just this decision that we must continue to play the Great Game, a decision benefiting only the ego of the players, who defined what we now call the “elite.” Within less than a decade that elite would render the GOP so obviously unfit to govern as to make rebellion inevitable.

Had Reagan been eligible and healthy enough for another term, or had he a successor of like mind, the populist split would not have happened. It would have been unnecessary. Perhaps Reagan’s greatest quality as a leader was his humility, his willingness to have government stand back and let the goods of liberty happen. Though his policies revived the American economy, I don’t believe I ever heard him claim to have “created jobs” —as Presidents always do now on far less justification. Reagan did not want to run the world; he wanted people to be free to run their own lives.

The visionless Bush not only wanted to keep the U.S. the leader of Europe, he persisted in a policy that did make sense early in the Cold War and was not wholly unreasonable even in the 1970s but was obsolete by the time he got to the White House. In those earlier years it had been frequently the job of the U.S. to buck up the Western European allies in their opposition, even hostility, to the Soviets. We deprecated European peace movements and American conservatives were horrified at Willy Brandts’ Ostpolitik.

By 1992 or even 1989, this made no sense at all. If the U.S. were to follow the sensible course after the demise of the USSR, and gradually leave Europe to itself, it would be up to the European nations to work out their relationships with Russia. Some accommodations with a nuclear power next door would have been in order. Strong nations require some deference from weak neighbors as we rightly to in our hemisphere. But since Russia at the time devoutly wished to become part of Europe, there would have been give and take.

Instead under Bush and Clinton we not only continued to urge our allies to take a militant stance toward Russia we led them on that course.

There is no other way to describe the eastward expansion of NATO under our leadership. NATO was created to oppose Russia and has never veered from that course. The proof of this was our refusal to seriously consider Russia for membership—because that would have deprived NATO of is reason for being.

Before you scream that I am ‘blaming America first,’ the word ‘blame’ is of little interest in relations between states and nearly always a mistake to dwell on. (Blame launched the Great War in 1914 and its continuation in 1939.) What is of interest is not blame but the reasonable interpretation of actual behaviors by and between nations that share no great reserve of mutual trust. However benign our intent, American-led eastward expansion of an anti-Russian alliance could have been interpreted by Russia in only one way.

Water under the bridge. It would have been better to leave NATO at a time of our own choosing when it could have done much more good. Today our departure is so obviously destined that it may not gain us as much in trade as I hope. Still, since it is going to happen anyway, why not see what we can get for it?