REVIEW: Hubris by Jonathan Haslam

The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine

A bear of a book, Hubris was the most high context book I’ve read in awhile. I want to write this blog post mostly to clarify and compile my thoughts on the matter to refer and expand on later. I read the pre-pub for this book hoping to gain details about US duplicity I suspected existed separate from the US narrative of “crazy Russia”, and it delivered. Great information, but hard to read as it is super high context. The TLDR is that ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been repeatedly asking the US to stop NATO expansion east if they can’t be included, and specifically to keep Ukraine out of NATO. The US secretly put Ukraine on the list of NATO candidates in 1994, and has made Russia feel progressively more and more disrespected and threatened. The book goes through each US presidential administration and their individual approach to foreign policy and relationship with Russia.

“Even were Russia a democracy, the fate of Ukraine would certainly still matter, just as the fate of Canada or Mexico in the nineteenth century, or the arrival of Soviet missiles in Cuba in the twentieth century, mattered deeply to the United States. And they were taken as grounds for war. Geopolitics has of necessity played a critical part in Putin’s thinking.”

Soviet Union Collapse

After the breakup of the Soviet Union the US was worried that if Europe reconstructed along its own lines, the US would soon be shut out of decision making on the continent. Haslam argues that to avoid his, NATO had to have a new purpose. The former members of the Warsaw Pact , expect Russia, were looking for Western military alignment. Ukraine, the most important, decided on sovereignty, and non-alignment between Russia and the West. Haslam notes that the issue was that “neither Russia nor the United States was prepared to see this happen.”

While the Soviet Union was still crumbling Clinton promised authoritatively that NATO would not expand to the East, but the US has since denied this and Russia has published a long list of “empty assurances” given at various times, which are also listed throughout this book.

The US Secretary of State in 1990 assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place”. This deception continued for over 10 years.

Haslam writes that the current war in Ukraine has to be seen in the context of a US global hegemony and failure to create a “post-Cold War security architecture in Europe”.

Partnership for Peace v. NATO Expansion

The EU was of greater value than NATO at the time, and the US worried about losing their sphere of influence if the EU took off and excluded them. However, without the outer defense of the Warsaw Pact which kept NATO at a distance, Russia appealed to NATO to be redesigned as “collective security rather than a collective defense”, requiring Russian inclusion not exclusion (called the Partnership for Peace). Clinton ditched this opportunity in favor of NATO enlargement (maintaining defenses against Russia by US/ Europe).

Others noted alternative reasons for the US push for NATO enlargement could have been to distract from the US “unwillingness to oppose Serbian aggression in Bosnia” and its absence from “Europe’s worst conflict in the Alliance’s history”. Others have posited it might have been to revive the fortunes of flagging countries in Europe. Some US advisors believed the area needed a Marshall Plan for economic recovery rather than NATO enlargement.

The US Assistant Under Secretary for Eastern Europe (1992–1994), wrote: “Russian membership of NATO may have been impossible but only with a security institution in which it was on an equal footing with the United States might we have avoided the tensions and suspicions, rooted in fear of Western expansionism, manifested in the Ukrainian and Georgian crises.”

Ukraine was the second largest republic in the Soviet Union and a major part of the arms industry. In 1994 Clinton put Ukraine on a secret list of NATO candidates against Russian continuous asks not to. That same year Clinton assured President Kuchma of Ukraine that “the US does not want to see Ukraine caught between NATO and Russia”. NATO began consulting the Russians throughout NATO processes, but not granting the Russians veto power.

In 1997 Yeltsin repeated: “Our position has not changed. It remains a mistake for NATO to move eastward.” And “enlargement should also not embrace the former Soviet republics. Especially Ukraine.”

This humiliation the Russians felt on the world stage with the collapse of the Soviet Union and feeling misled by the US and NATO paved the way for Putin. While many Europeans pushed for a system of collective security for the continent that included Russia, that was not seen in US interests.

Putin + Bush

Both Bush’s aimed to use NATO to move toward a “Pax Americana” that went beyond Europe. Putin and Bush ’43 came into power in 2000, and Putin’s election he coined the slogan: “He who does not regret the destruction of the Soviet Union has no heart, and he who wants to see it recreated in its previous form has no brain”. This philosophy obviously collided with the US push for NATO’s eastward expansion, and Putin again voiced Russian opposition to this while asking for equal partnership from US.

Bush didn’t have interest in this, his international focus, unbeknownst to the public, was overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Bush considered this “unfinished business” from the first Gulf
War under Bush’s father (Bush ’41) which was aimed at driving Iraqi’s out of Kuwait. Haslam notes that the agenda was not just limited to Hussein, but a transformational crusade of the Middle East that had been brewing for the past decade with neoconservatives. “It is time for a new Middle East.” Condoleezza Rice said in 2006.

Condaleeza Rice also joined the president in pursuing a working anti-ballistic missile defense system” including NATO expansion into the Baltic and focusing on the National Missile Defense (NMD), complicating US-Soviet treaties.

During the Iraq war Bush started saying Russia democracy was in decline, while it was on the upside in Iraq. Putin publicly retorted that he “didn’t want the kind of democracy Iraq had,” while it was mid war with American interventionism.

“The awkward question for the rulers of the United States was the issue of blatant inconsistency: why had they been content to live with autocratic allies, just as they had not long ago tolerated segregation at home, and adjust seamlessly to the despotism of, for example, Saudi Arabia, the original home of the most sectarian, medieval fundamentalism? To this the self-evident answer was that, at least prior to 9/11, and certainly after its commitment to the primacy of the US dollar in the oil trade, Saudi Arabia was essential to the security of the United States.”

9/11

Haslam states that Rice and the Bus (’43) administration saw other security issues as “annoying distractions from the main order of business: Iraq”. On September 4th, 2000 (a week before the 9/11 attacks) the head of counter-terrorism had a meeting on al-Qaeda and raised the matter as urgent but Rumsfeld “looked distracted throughout the session.” He said here were other terrorist concerns, such as Iraq. Though a standard bureaucratic way of prioritizing, this would be a major mistake to say the least.

Putin did not like Saddam, but did not see him as the same level of threat of the US, though Putin lessened his opposition to the Iraq war as the US went ahead with plans. Later Putin would say that in ignoring the UN the US had created danger. “The [US] were saying there may be rules, but not for [them].”

“What would you say if we took out Georgia or sent in the B-52 bombers to wipe out the terror camps? And what are they planning next — is it Syria, Iran, Korea? I bet they haven’t told you. Also there is no consistency. Saudi and Pakistan are problems but for different reasons the Americans prop them up,” Putin vented to Blair.

Russia’s resolve to “prevent unilateral action by the single remaining superpower had been hardened” by the Kosovo.

Serbian Croatian war

Before Ukraine, Yogoslavia was the fighting ground for a US and Russian power struggle in Europe. I’m just beginning to learn about this history, but here’s an attempt at what I understand. Kosovars were more Albanian than Slavic, and Muslim not Orthodox. They were allowed semi- autonomous rule within Yugoslavia for a long time, and then a nationalist leader (Milošević) was elected in Serbia and began a campaign against the Kosovars.

In 1999 NATO launched Operation Allied Force (without approval of the UN Security Counsel) which was planned to be short, but turned into a 78 day bombing campaign against Serbia aimed at stopping Milošević’s campaign. Russia saw stopping aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina as acceptable, but attacking Serbia over Kosovo (which used to be part of Serbia) was crossing the line. While Russia had protesting against the bombing NATO did not listen and Russia feared it was hurting their prestige as a nation state due to Russian cooperation with NATO. (This also seems to foreshadow the Russian argument of Ukraine as previously being a part of Russia, years later. )

Russians also felt a brotherhood to the Serbs, though they were carrying out vicious attacks against the Kosovars. Chechyna has large part of Serbs there.

A few years earlier in1994 relations with the West were more strained because of the war Yeltsin started against separatist Chechnya beginning with bombing the capital city, Grozny. This move was in the hopes of sustaining Russia’s uncertain territory and was a failure that ended in 1997.

Orange Revolution

The US/ Russia relationship that existed really fell apart during the Color Revolutions (nonviolent protests attempting to change Soviet era leadership) in post Soviet Union spaces such as Georgia, Tajikistan and Ukraine.

In 2004 the US took the lead in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution and just 4 years after that they “had abruptly called for Ukraine’s entry into NATO but failed to secure an immediate commitment from their allies.”

US money sent to Ukraine from 2008–2013 amounted to $1.09 billion, led by USAID spending $373 million. The US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created by Reagan in 1983 as “an arm’s length propaganda outfit divorced from CIA operations”, began funding activism in Ukraine (65+ projects).

In 2013 Ukraine’s president Yanokovich didn’t sign the Association Agreement with the EU in Vilnius, and shit went down soon after. Yanokovich escaped to Russia via Crimea that made space for the coup d’état. The New York Times reported at the time “it appears much of the protests in Kiev were organic”; implying some were not, which Haslam details.

Immediately following, three new television stations appeared: Spilno TV (21 November), Hromadske TV (23 November) and Espreso TV (24 November). Haslam notes that at least the channel Hromadske, “was partly funded” by the US embassy and George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation.

Additionally specialists from the US, Germany, Britain and Serbia arrived to “guide the demonstrations into open violent confrontation, with the forceful seizure of government buildings.” The Russians also claimed the US funded the protests with $20 million a week, including weapons and Haslam writes that in private organizers of the Soros Foundation “actually boasted about” paying Maidan militants.

For the Russians, the conclusions was that the West succeeded in a coup d’état and feared that Russia was next on the US’s list. The new government immediately moved to enforce use of the Ukrainian language in the region instead of Russian. Putin stated that situation in Ukraine was “product of the imbalance [of power] in international relations.

Putin noted that while NATO was acceptable, “we
are opposed to it as a military organization setting up house right next to our fence, right next to our home or on territory that has historically been ours… We are obviously coming into collision with opposition from abroad.”

This is not to say that Russia did not try to control the outcome of the new election in Ukraine, they definitely did (with poison), and the US was also trying to influence the outcome of the new Ukrainian election in their favor in regards to Euro politics.

Years later in 2007 at the EU Security Conference Putin harkened back o US influence in Ukraine’s Color Revolution:

“What worries us? I would say and I think that this is understandable to everyone: when these nongovernmental organisations are essentially funded by foreign governments, then we see it as an instrument of a foreign state furthering its policy in relation to our country… What’s democratic about it? …Because this is not democracy, but simply the influence of one state on another.”

European Opinions

The US saw Poland’s Eastern policy as “an excellent complement to our own…” The Poles viewed Russia as a future danger and pushed for Ukraine and Georgia to be included in NATO.

In 1996 Italy’s permanent representative to NATO advocated “to avoid feeding Russia’s sense of marginalization from Europe’s security procedures at an extremely delicate phase in its history.”

French President Jacques Chirac warned, “it is the continental countries in Europe who will feel the consequences most, not the United States…I repeat that to impose something on Russia would be a big ask. NATO enlargement is not urgent… When you want something, you cannot humiliate the other party.”

Obama

In 2009 Putin vented to the new president Obama about the Bush administration. He had liked Bush as a person but hated the administration. He told Obama he had reached out to Bush post 9/11 to work together, and had helped convince leaders in Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan to allow the US to set up air bases in their countries for the was in Afghanistan, but in return was “snubbed”. When the Bush team began supporting the color revolution, it was a turning point in the relationship as that was a threat to Russian interests abroad.

Though Obama seemed to start off on a better foot with Putin, he soon began brushing off Russian commentary like past presidents. Haslam states that soon after that “to the Russians, Libya began to look all too like Iraq, and Obama, very like Bush”.

With mistrust for the US growing, Putin added to laws introduced in 2006, Putin in 2012 set up new regulations in Russia for non-profit organizations “carrying out the functions of a foreign agent”.

Ukraine

In 2008 Putin challenged the territorial integrity of Ukraine by saying Ukraine was “an artificial creation sewn together from [the] territory of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and especially Russia in the aftermath of the Second World War.”

He also said that, “the Crimea was simply given to Ukraine by a decision of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee. There haven’t even been any state procedures regarding [the] transfer of the territory, since we take a very calm and responsible approach to the problem.” Putin says that 90% Crimeans are Russian, and 17/45 million Ukrainian citizens are Russian and “if we add in the NATO question and other problems, the very existence of the State could find itself under threat.’”

In 2010 Ukraine became the place of confrontation between the US and Russia. At this point in Ukraine (according to the Pew Research Center) 51% of Ukrainians opposed entry into NATO and only 28% were in favor of joining NATO. There was much more interest in EU membership.

In 2014, Vice President Biden backed the dispatch of Javelin anti-tank missiles to be sent to Ukraine but Obama shut that down as he didn’t want to “pour fuel on the fire.” Biden would have his chance to pour fuel when he became president years later. In 2015 Vice President Biden held back $1 billion in aid until Ukraine fired its chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, and then boasted about doing it on camera.

Meanwhile since 2014 Biden’s son Hunter Biden was “milking the opportunities available tohim by virtue of his father’s office through the company Burisma and the reorganization of the gas sector.” This timeline lines up with the 11 year pardon that current president Biden just granted his son.

Trump and ‘Russian Interference’

In 2016 the FBI received an investigative referral from intelligence officials regarding: “Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.’”

Haslam notes that under Obama Russian election meddling was also taking place, but he had “signally failed to call the Kremlin to account”. Haslam also notes that:

“To anyone who had closely observed US-Russian relations since 1991, it was an underlying symptom rather than an originating cause of tension between the two Powers. The Americans had themselves been interfering in foreign elections for decades, certainly since 1948 in Italy, throughout Latin America and most recently in Israel.”

Trump threatened to leave NATO or pay less if other members didn’t start paying their full dues, and then Biden made NATO one of his main talking points and areas of pride in his presidential term.

Conclusions

“(US influence in) Ukraine is part of the effort to destabilize Russia,” Putin, 2023.

Haslam concludes that while Putin had underestimated himself about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, it was a miscalculation and not a delusion. Haslam says outbursts such as comparing himself to Peter the Great suggest influence from others, and that while the pandemic isolated him and made him impatient regarding the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he was still a rational actor. A few months before the invasion Putin mused about US foreign policy, imagining hubris to be at the base of it, not mal intent:

“Take the recent past: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we were told that our concerns about NATO’s potential expansion eastwards were absolutely groundless. And then we saw five waves in the bloc’s eastward expansion…Sometimes I wonder: why did they do all this in those conditions? This is unclear. I think the reason lies in the euphoria from the victory in the so-called Cold War or the so-called victory in the Cold War. This was due to their incorrect assessment of the situation at that time, due to their unprofessional, mistaken analysis of probable scenarios. There are simply no other reasons.”

US Secretary of Defense and former director of CIA Robert Gates noted:

“The arrogance, after the collapse, of American government officials, academicians, businessmen, and politicians in telling the Russians how to conduct their domestic and international affairs (not to mention the internal psychological impact of their precipitous fall from superpower status) had led to deep and long-term resentment and bitterness.”

Haslam posits that the original fault lies with the US for misleading Russia about their intentions with Ukraine in the early ’90s. Russia asked again and again that they not push for Ukraine to be in NATO, but the US did not respect that ask.

Haslam notes: “to the Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, the fate and status of Ukraine were never fixed and “without Ukraine Russia could never re-emerge as an empire, which Russia had invariably been.”

Putin said in 2021 when pressed, and then noted again in 2023:

“ I will repeat this once again that the issue concerns the possible deployment on the territory of Ukraine of [first] strike systems with a flight time of 7–10 minutes to Moscow, or 5 minutes in the case of hypersonic systems. Just imagine that… The flight time to Moscow is 5 minutes.”

Haslam compares Russia and Ukraine to the US and Canada:

“The mingling of geopolitical factors and the confrontation of values was further complicated by the undoubted fact that the cultures of Russia and Ukraine are too close, the population too intermingled, the dangers of a pluralist, democratic infection, however imperfect, too great to make complete separation practicable: not unlike the reasons that Canada and the United States share the same telephone system, their defense planning inseparable.”

Haslam goes on to note that in December 2021 The Russians presented terms including no NATO expansion eastward a final time in written form and went public with these demands because twenty years of quiet diplomacy had not served Russia. NATO and Biden criticized Russia for publicizing the two proposed agreements.

While the US and its allies continued to conduct military trainings and flights over Ukraine. “In that sense, Ukraine de facto is already a NATO member”, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs claimed. (Haslam notes here though that if it were, there would have been
world war when Russia invaded).

Within a week of the Russians invading Ukraine it was obvious Putin had miscalculated. Haslam notes Russia is “at a dead point” and a “Typhoid Mary” leaning on the neighboring economic giant, China. And Russia’s youth have to live with the prospect of death on the battle field, which could have a similar impact as the Vietnam war had on America youth.

There were talks between Putin and NATO that Putin agreed to within the past year, but the US blocked due to Putin asking Ukraine to renounce NATO membership.

“Through hasty resort to war, Putin could in the end bring
about what he was determined to forestall: the collapse of his regime and the fall of all who serve in it. This is exactly what happened to Nicholas II, who ultimately chose war to save the
autocracy.”

It was a bear of a book great alternative history of US foreign policy that I wasn’t taught in school or by the US media. If you think Russia is a bad actor but haven’t thought critically about the part the US has played over the years, you might have been consuming Western propaganda and this book is a peek outside of that. The US and Russia are both empires, and they both do what empires do (which is shitty things). One of the two is much bigger than the other, and one of the two is in the other’s backyard after 20 years of being asked not to.

The fact that Democrats made so much of their campaign against Trump anti-Russia really annoys me. Like, thanks for bringing Blacklisting back y’all. The Republicans are horrible, but I think in regards to Russia I don't think it’s their worst look. In Western media it's called “bullying” behavior when Russia interferes in foreign policy, but when the US is doing it it’s “advancement of human rights and democracy.” I’m just tired of the hypocrisy and wish we had a true leftist party in the US that didn't need to create a Boogeyman to win elections.

Not only would Washington respond exactly as Russia if the US balkanized, but also from a realist perspective, why the fuck does the US get to decide policy in Euope over Russia, when Russia is actually living there? And same for Asia. I don’t think Russia would make better decisions than the US, but I just can’t get caught up in this catty seeming Russia phobia.

Complete with 80 pages of sources listed, this was a book that really got me thinking and informed and I’m planning on reading more foreign policy because of this added hard won muscle. Thanks for the pre pub!

I plan on reading “Borderland” by Anna Reid next for a more Ukrainian focused experience of NATO expansion and Eastern Europe politics.