What’s at Stake in the Blame Game Over Ukraine
“You should have never started it.” As cameras rolled during an explosive press conference in the Oval Office in February, U.S. President Donald Trump used these words to blame Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, for Russia’s full-scale invasion of his country in 2022. The two leaders were meant to sign a deal that day providing the United States with critical minerals from Ukraine, but that plan fell apart, and the U.S. president threw his Ukrainian counterpart out of the White House.
Trump also suspended U.S. military aid to and ceased sharing intelligence with Kyiv. Both were eventually restored, but the temporary freeze cost Ukrainian lives. As the war in Ukraine extends into its fourth year, this ugly Oval Office scene and its aftermath provided proof—if any were needed—that the war over war guilt rages on as well, with real-world consequences.
Trump is not alone in his belief that the guilt lies far from Russia. The British historian Jonathan Haslam agrees in that regard. But unlike Trump, he does not assign blame to Ukraine. Haslam makes clear whom he sees as the guilty party in his new book, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine: “The fault here lies with the United States.”
According to Hubris, Washington moved “bag and baggage into the Soviet sphere of influence and, indeed, onto former Soviet soil” after the end of the Cold War, and “those Americans who were engaged in this enterprise knew exactly what they were doing”—namely, antagonizing Russia. Haslam argues that Russia responded as it did because it wanted to prevent possible NATO expansion into Ukraine. Hubris emphasizes that Vladimir Putin, who became acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999, nonetheless waited “more than a decade, until 2014, to seize Crimea,” among other reasons to prevent NATO from docking ships in its major port, Sevastopol.
Of course, Haslam is hardly the first to accuse Washington of driving Moscow to violence. Several authors did so in the wake of the Crimean annexation in 2014. In a widely cited Foreign Affairs essay published that year, titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” the political scientist John Mearsheimer stated that “the taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.”
Hubris tries to bring a new level of detail to that basic argument—but fails to make its case convincingly. The book instead reveals just how far this crucial debate has moved away from the realm of evidence. It also unintentionally sheds light on Trump’s views, which, despite the seeming contradictions, have much in common with Haslam’s. Both men’s interpretations, as well as Putin’s, pick and choose their way through a complex, messy history in search of alternate culprits.
Assigning guilt is more than an academic exercise. Perceptions of past wrongdoing will affect the future, not least because Putin has made clear that any peace deal in Ukraine needs to address what he sees as the original cause of the war: NATO enlargement. And if Trump views Ukraine as the aggressor and Russia as the victim, he may concede a great deal to Moscow. He could conclude a peace settlement that not only lacks safeguards against the resumption of Russian aggression but also diminishes NATO’s ability to defend its European members. Such dangerous dealmaking comes 80 years after World War II ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Red Army in the streets of Berlin, bringing Russian power into the heart of Europe. An unenforceable peace deal, resting on erroneous assumptions about history, could set the stage for a potential return of Moscow’s might. With so much at stake, it’s crucial to get this history right.
SMOKING GUNS
As ever, the devil is in the details—and the unreliability of its details is a key way in which Hubris falls short. The book’s central assertion is that NATO enlargement after the Cold War did not just threaten Russia but also violated Western pledges against such a step. In Haslam’s telling, it is a “fact” that “the Russians were promised authoritatively that NATO would not expand to the East,” not least during 1990 talks on reunifying Germany after the Berlin Wall’s collapse.
On its face, Haslam’s account has some merit. Western leaders did have to bargain with Moscow to proceed with German reunification, thanks to the way that World War II had ended. Nazi Germany had surrendered unconditionally, meaning there were no limits to or expiration dates on the rights of France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States as occupying powers. Some updates were made later to allow the creation of two German states, but an unavoidable obstacle remained in 1990. For divided Germany to unify, it would have to persuade all four powers to surrender their 1945 victors’ rights. Western leaders were willing to part with those rights—some, particularly British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, more grudgingly than others—so the challenge was to persuade the Soviets.
The West would need to offer something in exchange, and in February 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker visited Moscow to find out what that might be. According to Baker’s personal written summary, he put out a feeler in the form of a hypothetical question to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?”
Haslam categorizes not just these but also similar remarks by other Western leaders as nonenlargement pledges that were later betrayed. As proof, he cites the publication in Russia of “an embarrassingly long laundry list of the empty assurances given at various times” by those leaders. Hubris brandishes examples from both this list, released in 2022 by a Russian entity called the Civil Society Development Foundation, and other recent publications as a prosecutor might use a smoking gun: to provide irrefutable proof of the West’s guilt.
It’s on closer inspection that the cracks in Haslam’s case become fully apparent. To take just one of many problematic examples throughout the book: relying on this list or a later scholarly article or both (the citations are unclear), Hubris maintains that “on 2 February 1990 German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher outlined German plans for reunification to Gorbachev, letting him know that ‘NATO would not extend its territorial coverage to the area of the GDR [East Germany] nor anywhere else in Eastern Europe.’” Genscher did indeed speak these words on that day—but in Washington and to Baker, not to Gorbachev.
Both archival records and Genscher’s memoirs provide detailed accounts of the day’s events, sometimes down to the minute. The German foreign minister flew to the United States on February 2 and returned to Europe the same night in a hurried effort to convince Baker of the need for a nonexpansion pledge to secure German unification. For Genscher, that day had begun in Nuremberg with a working breakfast, a signing ceremony for an accord on cultural institutions, and a press conference, followed by a meeting in Bonn—all before his 1:30 PM departure for Washington. According to the archived American summary of the West German minister’s hurried visit with Baker, “Genscher reiterated the need to assure the Soviets that NATO would not extend its territorial coverage to the area of the GDR nor anywhere else in Eastern Europe for that matter.”
The chances that Genscher repeated the same words to Gorbachev that day are small and there’s no proof in Haslam’s citations. Communications in transit were difficult and potentially insecure. Even if Genscher managed to talk to the Soviet leader during those hectic hours, he could not have spoken with authority. Western policy remained under debate—hence the need for the hasty trip to Washington to convey what the Soviets might demand in exchange for allowing Germany to unify—and Genscher was not making the final decision.
The sources Haslam uses to claim otherwise are also unconvincing because not all sources are created equal. Atop the hierarchy of historical evidence are sources produced at the place and time of crucial events—such as the U.S. and West German records of Genscher’s February 2 visit—and held securely afterward, usually in an archive, with minimal or no chance of modification. These records are more reliable than ones produced and published later—especially by entities remote from the action, as with the 2022 Russian list of quotations—because of the risk of alteration. When taking on a controversy with life-and-death implications, recognizing this hierarchy of evidence is essential—as is the need for ensuring factual accuracy. Instead, Hubris contains numerous errors concerning chronology, geography, and election details and even misidentifies NATO’s founding members.
SINS OF OMISSION
Hubris also ignores existing scholarship—the most glaring omission being the lack of citations to Mearsheimer—and relevant evidence that calls its argument into question. Haslam does not, for example, inform his readers that Baker, shortly after posing the hypothetical idea of NATO nonenlargement in his February 1990 conversation with Gorbachev, walked the idea back.
At the end of that month, the U.S. secretary of state informed Genscher in writing that discussions of NATO’s jurisdiction should “be avoided in the future in describing our common position on Germany’s NATO relationship.” The reason for this about-face was that Baker’s boss, President George H. W. Bush, had decided that the best way to secure Moscow’s approval of German unification was not to place limits on NATO. Instead, Bush wanted the West Germans to provide credits and other forms of funding in exchange for their country’s unity. As Bush put it to the West German chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, “You’ve got deep pockets.” Kohl agreed.
Perceptions of past wrongdoing will affect the future.
To the anger of the Americans and Kohl, however, Genscher continued to act as if nothing had changed—and even upped the ante by suggesting that the Warsaw Pact and NATO could both “dissipate” entirely. Some lower-level Western diplomats echoed Genscher’s idea of a nonenlargement pledge, either out of ignorance that his position no longer reflected top-level policy or because the idea was useful to dangle as a carrot in negotiations. None of them were in charge, however. Kohl ultimately had to instruct Genscher in writing to cease and desist.
Hubris also neglects to tell its readers that the result of the 1990 negotiations—the treaty by which Germany’s occupying powers surrendered their 1945 rights—included the opposite of a pledge to forgo NATO enlargement. Although that treaty did impose limits on NATO activity in former East German territory, it established a far more significant precedent: it allowed NATO to extend its jurisdiction into all of Germany, that is, to cross the former Cold War frontline. Moscow signed this treaty in September 1990 and subsequently ratified it. In return, Moscow received large sums of money out of those deep West German pockets.
Hubris attempts to tie its version of this history to today’s war by telling readers: “You might have thought that a book about the origins of Putin’s war in Ukraine is all about them,” meaning Russia and Ukraine, but instead, the story “is also about us. And us means the United States and its allies in Western Europe” (emphasis in the original). Washington and its allies are, according to Haslam, the parties responsible for Russia invading Ukraine, because they allegedly broke their nonenlargement pledges. But the historical evidence doesn’t add up in the way he claims.
COMPLETING THE PICTURE
Hubris also subtracts a crucial element from its history. It insufficiently acknowledges the actions taken by Ukraine and other states formerly under Soviet domination. This problem is particularly apparent in the book’s discussion of Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. Haslam asks, What occurred in the years leading up to the seizure that “brought Putin to this point”? He then answers his own question: it was “the fact that Russia’s main enemy, the United States, persistently sustained and enhanced its presence in post–Cold War Europe,” not least through NATO expansion.
This interpretation underestimates the will of central and eastern Europeans and, above all, Ukrainians. It is not just great powers that shape events. Rather than being subsumed by the West, Ukraine deliberately sought to break away from Moscow and establish closer ties to Western institutions. To cite just one example, on December 1, 1991, more than 90 percent of Ukrainian voters supported a referendum on independence. In every region of the country, even Crimea, an absolute majority chose to become independent from Moscow. Outside observers assessed the vote to be free and fair. International recognition of the Ukrainian state in its 1991 borders—that is, including Crimea—swiftly followed, including from Russia.
In subsequent years, actions by Moscow caused many former Warsaw Pact states and Soviet republics to grow anxious about the future. They watched Russian President Boris Yeltsin order military leaders to fire on his own parliament in October 1993—killing an estimated 145 people—and to attack Chechnya in December 1994, with the fight continuing for years afterward to prevent the region’s secession from Russia.
Worried they might also be at risk, these newly independent countries pursued closer ties with NATO and the European Union. Membership was not imposed on them. They actively campaigned to join these Western organizations despite the prospect of blowback from Russia. Seeking to limit that blowback, Polish President Lech Walesa even secured a joint communiqué with Yeltsin, during an August 1993 meeting in Warsaw, stating that NATO membership for Poland “is not contrary to the interest of any state, . . . including Russia.”
The historical evidence doesn’t add up in the way Haslam claims.
By de-emphasizing the will of not just Poles but also Ukrainians, Hubris underplays the key factor that brought Putin to the point of annexing Crimea in 2014: Ukraine’s fervent hope for closer trade ties with the EU. Late the year before, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had, under pressure from Putin, ended efforts to conclude an EU Association Agreement, meant to bring Kyiv into a free trade area with the bloc. But Yanukovych had grievously underestimated its popularity among Ukrainians.
Protests erupted in the streets and persisted despite frigid temperatures. On February 20, 2014, according to an investigation by the United Nations, “police started indiscriminately shooting” into a crowd. About a hundred people died over the course of what came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity. With his grip on control slipping, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Haslam argues that the Ukrainian parliament subsequently “breached” the country’s constitution by voting “to remove Yanukovych from office on the illegitimate grounds that the president had deserted his post.” But Hubris fails to address the Russian pressure that sank the association agreement, which Ukrainians later resurrected. Nor does Haslam reckon with why Ukrainians took to the streets in the depth of winter, and why some even died, in the hope of closer relations with the EU.
In short, Hubris assigns the primary agency in this story, and the blame, to the West and particularly to Washington. But Western institutions did not foist themselves on unwilling central and eastern Europeans or Ukrainians. Ukraine itself sought closer ties to the West and its institutions. And Moscow had long since agreed, in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act—an accord signed by 35 states across the Cold War divide—that sovereign countries had the right to choose their own alliances.
THE PLAN ALL ALONG?
Finally, Haslam inaccurately characterizes U.S. foreign policy from the era of President George H. W. Bush to that of his son, President George W. Bush, as consisting of one coherent, consistent, long-term plan. Its “fundamental aim,” Haslam writes, “was to use NATO as an instrument for the enforcement of a Pax Americana that stretched well beyond the boundaries of Europe.” A central component of this plan was that, “as far back as 1994,” Washington “secretly provided for Ukraine’s eventual entry into NATO.”
This, Haslam contends, is a crucial example of American hubris—and it’s where his ideas shed light on Trump’s. The two men agree that the cause of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, ultimately, the conceit of an overreaching government that forced Moscow’s hand. For Haslam, it’s the U.S. government, and for Trump, it’s the Ukrainian one, but both maintain that their chosen culprits should not have insisted on Ukraine’s future in NATO in the face of justified Russian opposition.
Once again, bits and pieces of evidence support the notion of a long-term U.S. plan for Ukraine, but they don’t add up in the way Haslam claims. In 1994, the U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and his national security adviser, Tony Lake, did speculate about the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. But their ideas failed to coalesce into a coherent plan before events moved in an entirely different direction at the end of 1994.
In the Budapest Memorandum, signed in December of that year by Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Kyiv agreed to give up Soviet nuclear weapons in its possession—including more than a thousand warheads capable of hitting the United States—in exchange for security assurances. With this outstanding security problem ostensibly solved, Ukraine (and the question of its NATO membership) abruptly decreased in significance to Washington.
The timing was tragic for Kyiv. Ukrainian denuclearization took place while the question of how to enlarge NATO was still a live debate in Washington. There were multiple possibilities under consideration. Before the Budapest Memorandum, Clinton’s preferred method envisaged Ukraine and other potential NATO members joining an interim grouping that would enable them to join the alliance later. Kyiv’s full membership in NATO would not have been guaranteed. But its inclusion among this group of countries on a path to potential membership would have created desirable ambiguity about its future status and enhanced Ukrainian security in the meantime.
Yet at the end of 1994, facing pressure both abroad, from countries striving to enter NATO as soon as possible, and at home, from recently elected Republican lawmakers seeking swifter enlargement, Clinton changed course. He sidelined the newly created interim grouping, abandoning the notion that it was a necessary precursor to NATO membership, and instead adopted an all-or-nothing approach. States either got in or got left with Russia on the far side of an unambiguous dividing line between NATO and non-NATO territory.
Contrary to Haslam’s idea of a consistent plot to get Ukraine into NATO, Washington knowingly left a denuclearized Ukraine outside the alliance, where it remains. Subsequent statements by NATO that Ukraine would eventually become a member, most notably in a 2008 Bucharest summit declaration, were not part of a decades-long master plan. Instead, they were belated, badly executed efforts to address Ukraine’s vulnerability amid rising tensions with Russia.
THE HIGHEST STAKES
For all the messiness, this history does at least have some fixed points. There is no wishing away Moscow’s signature on, and ratification of, the September 1990 treaty that allowed NATO’s jurisdiction to move eastward across the Cold War– era frontline. This feature of the treaty was no accident. Top experts participated in negotiations on both the Western and the Soviet sides, and they all knew that they were crafting a historic accord with the highest possible stakes.
It was a Soviet diplomatic failure, not an amateurish oversight, that left Moscow without a legally binding prohibition against NATO expansion. Although some Western participants had discussed a blanket prohibition on the alliance’s enlargement during the talks, such a prohibition did not appear in the final text. Gorbachev, who had wanted to block NATO from moving not just across unified Germany but also farther east—which he knew was a possibility—could not close that deal. Instead, his diplomats settled for limits on NATO’s activities and infrastructure as it enlarged.
It is not just great powers that shape events.
Imagine nonetheless that Hubris is right and that Moscow did manage to secure a legally binding pledge against NATO enlargement. Even in that hypothetical scenario, neither the United States nor Ukraine would be responsible for Moscow’s choices on and since February 24, 2022. To name but one of many tragic examples, such a pledge would not explain—let alone make Washington or Kyiv answerable for—why Putin found it necessary to bomb a Ukrainian maternity ward.
Putin has no broken commitment to blame for his actions, but he still uses his interpretation of history as justification for his effort to subdue Ukraine. To weaponize the past in this way, he must cherry-pick the evidence. Scholars must not do the same. Haslam is undeniably correct that the history of U.S. foreign policy contains numerous displays of hubris, many of which wreaked terrible and bloody consequences. But responsibility for the horror that has unfolded in Ukraine does not rest with Washington or Kyiv. To respond to Trump’s words to Zelensky: the Ukrainians didn’t start it. To assign blame elsewhere is to absolve the guilty party in this war—Russia.
Any settlement resting on a false account of how and why the war began will ultimately yield an ineffective deal. If Trump and his team negotiate a peace accord on the basis of distorted history, they will fail to secure the measures necessary to prevent Putin from resuming aggression once Russian forces reconstitute. Instead, peace talks will yield a permissive environment for future attacks by Moscow, in Ukraine and beyond. Those attacks could, in turn, not only create destabilizing refugee flows westward but also threaten the West as a whole. Without an evidence-based history shaping a peace settlement, that peace may swiftly become history itself.