Seduced and Abandoned

Russia, Ukraine, and the Monroe Doctrine.

Two hundred years ago this month, the fifth president of the United States delivered his next-to-last State of the Union Address – long enough ago that the circumstances have been forgotten by nearly everyone but high school students  preparing for advanced placement exams.

Even the Cuban missile crisis unfolded sixty years ago. That means you must be at least seventy-five years old to have vivid memories of what may have been the most dangerous episode of the Cold War – a gamble taken on the basis of the principle that President James Monroe propounded in his speech to Congress that day.

No wonder, then, that the Monroe Doctrine is seldom mentioned today in connection with America’s proxy war with Ukraine, even though its basic premise about grand strategy is at the heart of it – but in reverse.

In 1823, Monroe warned European nations that the United States would not tolerate further colonization or puppet governments among its neighbors in Latin America, most of them newly independent of European empires or nearly so. “The doctrine was conceived to meet major concerns of the moment, but it soon became a watchword of U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere,” according to the National Archives.

You can argue all you want about the similarities between the US in 1823 and Russia in 2021, and their differences. A great deal of history was made during those two centuries. Still, the Monroe Doctrine, refashioned and reapplied to Russia’s dominion over the core of the old Soviet Union, is the principle most relevant to the reasons Russia gives for its invasion of Ukraine.

The failure to vigorously explore this comparison has given rise to three fundamental misunderstandings about the war: Two are American, the third is Russian.

First is the Western fantasy that the war was unprovoked. Decades of NATO enlargement, by the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, ignore Russian warnings. The Trump administration, as usual, was a special case. Redlines were repeatedly crossed, culminating in the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership on the eve of the order to prepare the invasion.

Second is the proposition that Putin enjoys unlimited power. He presides over a tricky coalition of competing interests that arose when the former Soviet Union fell apart.  The theorist behind the Monroe doctrine was former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, in his Federalist Papers writings, before he died in a duel, in 1804.  Putin is not Hamilton, but he is not Stalin either. He is a strategist seeking to shape the future of his wounded nation. He has learned a great deal since 1989. 

Third is Putin’s miscalculation that the invasion was his only option.  It wasn’t. He was winning the battle of public opinion, both in Ukraine and around the world.  If he waited another US political cycle or two, he might well have achieved Ukraine’s neutral status (short-term) and eventual absorption (long-term) that now seems the essence of the war’s goals.

Instead, Russia’s ill-prepared forces found their way blocked in February 2022 by two stalwart foes: determined Ukrainian resistance, backed by superior NATO intelligence and its apparently endless weapons supply. So, Putin ordered a strategic retreat and began regrouping for a much longer war.

What a price Putin paid for impatience! All that is left now are bitter memories of insurgencies crushed by Soviet forces: Warsaw in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Berlin in 1961, Prague in 1968, and now Kyiv. The Russian economy has been re-geared for war, as it was before 1989; its civil society is in tatters; and Europe once again has a cunning bully on its borders.

Three years of magical thinking in the West about Ukraine are slowly coming to an end.  The term was popularized by Joan  Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of lengthy experience of grief that followed her husband’s sudden and unexpected death.  The author borrowed the term from anthropological discourse. Her case of it was defined by a critic as “thinking that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions, then an unavoidable event can be averted.” 

Magical thinking applies broadly to all such wishful thinking about the war in Ukraine. The intricacies of the war’s resolution are uncertain. Its outcome, however, has become clear. Read this New York Times dispatch from the front lines if you doubt it.  It will resemble the end of the Vietnam War.