The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

24 NOVEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the Russian Federation. Ukraine is only the latest and most dan- gerous manifestation of the Putin Doctrine. It will not be the last. Exercising Preventive Diplomacy? The clarity of the Putin Doctrine meant that the current crisis in Ukraine—or, more accurately, the crisis in U.S.-Russian relations—was foreseeable. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia added an unmistakable warning, but its significance quickly vanished among the “frozen conflicts” that littered so many territories of the former Soviet Union. Military force cannot be the first thing to come to the minds of policymakers for handling such challenges. Preventive diplo- macy—which the United Nations defines as “diplomatic action to prevent disputes from arising between parties, to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflict and to limit the spread of conflicts when they occur”—should be the first resort, but it is exceptionally difficult to sustain. No government likes to borrow trouble from the future, and democracies, including the United States, are very poor at setting strategic priorities and sticking to them. The American stance under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama was that Moscow should have con- siderable say in its neighboring states, and Washington should not seek to supplant that influence. Georgian and Ukrainian membership in NATO, for example, should not have to damage their good relations with Russia. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, successive administrations thought that Moscow should understand that Russia would benefit from having pros- perous, democratic nations in its neighborhood. The Kremlin interpreted NATO’s November 2002 decision to invite seven new members to join the alli- ance, including the three Baltic states, as taking advantage of Russia’s weakness. The later American decision to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Repub- lic only heightened Russian insecurity. President Obama and Sec- retary of State John Kerry have contrasted their enlightened, 21st-century point of view with the zero-sum, 19th-century thinking that has characterized Rus- sian diplomacy. Putin was not persuaded by rhetoric, and the West failed to formulate a new strategic or institutional frame- work to match 21st-century challenges, although plenty of ideas were out there. For example, in 2002, the U.S. Institute of Peace Press pub- lished a book titled A Strategy for Stable Peace: Toward a Euro- Atlantic Security Community . It was written by a Russian, Dmitri Trenin, a Dutchman, Petrus Buwalda and an American—myself. We wrote that “Ukraine must solve its internal problems through its own efforts” and “the stakes in the outcome of Ukraine’s struggles are high, not least the progress of Russia and the West toward a stable peace.” We called for “concerted national strategies on the part of the major nations within the extended European system.” In defining these strategies, we argued that a detailed master plan is not realistic, and that “governments should work with building blocks already available to them, having their objective clearly in mind.” The long-term objective, we thought, should be the inclusion of Russia as one of three pillars, with North America and the European Union, of a Euro-Atlantic security community, sharing similar democratic values. In 2012, a study of mutual security in the Euro-Atlantic region was conducted, led by four distinguished statesmen: former German Ambassador to the United States Wolfgang Ischinger, former U.K. Defense Minister Desmond Browne, former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and former Chairman of the U.S. Ambassador James Goodby (seated, left) and Ukrainian General-Lieutenant Aleksey Kryzhko initial a Nunn-Lugar agreement with the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine in 1993 in Kyiv to provide assistance for the elimination of strategic nuclear arms. Courtesy of Royal Gardner