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The Logic of U.S. Engagement 99
directions, while keeping NATO divided on the issue, is a likely
Russian goal. Since the NATO allies have no intention of actually
having Ukraine join NATO, they illogically risked incurring
unnecessary costs by holding on to an ideal of Ukrainian NATO
membership. Worse, they signaled dangerous false promises to the
Ukrainian people.
A preference for spheres of influence and buffer zones in
Ukraine was a clear redline for the Russians, which NATO policy
drove right over with the alliance’s 2008 declaration that Ukraine
and Georgia would eventually become NATO members 17 .
Advocates of the NATO open door for a democratic Ukraine did
so out of an idealist-based moral goal that is laudable. But, as
former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, wrote in his 2014
Memoir Duty:
Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a
member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But
moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to
incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO
was a mistake. Quickly including the Baltic states, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was the right thing to do, but I
believe the process should then have slowed […] Trying to bring
Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The
roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth
century, so that was an especially monumental provocation.
Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send
their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly
[...] NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully
considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose
of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians
considered their own vital national interests 18 .
Meanwhile, the United States had long believed it was important
that the enlargement of the European Union was an additional key
ingredient to order-building alongside NATO. Russia too had
seemingly taken a less assertive tone towards the European Union.
17 “NATO Bucharest Summit Declaration”, 3 April 2008,
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm.
18 R. Gates, Duty, New York, Alfred Knopf, 2014, p. 157.