Washington Can Still End the War in Ukraine

The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

Hundreds of physicians from around the world have gathered in Nagasaki, Japan, this week to discuss our shared belief that we can and should abolish all nuclear weapons.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) has won a past Nobel Peace Prize for this sort of work. In particular, the scientific arguments of the world’s doctors about the species-level threat of a nuclear war made a profound impression on Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and convinced those Cold War leaders to jointly declare that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Many eyes here are on the situation in Ukraine, where, after nearly four years of war, we continue to flirt with the unthinkable: a blundering escalation into the use of nuclear weapons.

This week, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the U.S. will help Ukraine strike deep inside Russia with long-range missiles. President Donald Trump also just told a gathering of top U.S. generals and admirals that this summer he ordered two nuclear-armed submarines “over to the coast of Russia, just to be careful.” The Trump White House is even considering arming Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles (which in theory can carry nuclear weapons).

It all sounds like the opposite of progress. Not so long ago, Trump claimed that he could end the war quickly, as long as Ukraine recognized the war was over and agreed to let go of its long-lost territory. He now has changed his mind, and says he believes Ukraine could win it all back.

“Why not?” he said in one of his legendarily grammar-torturing social media posts:

“Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win … [Ukraine] has Great Spirit, and only getting better … In any event, I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”

So much of this is bizarre, not least Trump’s suggestion that NATO is something separate and autonomous from the U.S. security state.

But the president is clearly frustrated. Probably he thought the Russians launched the war because they wanted land, and were only complaining about NATO as a cover story. Actually it’s the other way around: the Russians wanted NATO out, and occupied land as a means to that end.

Trump could move forward with a peace process, but to succeed he’d have to face down a rage-filled U.S. national security establishment. Remember how all of Washington pilloried President Joe Biden over the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? Trump knows he would face at least as much bipartisan fury if he were to announce that Ukraine will never join NATO.

Yet such an announcement is exactly what peace will require. As the Russian government has made plain for years, and has reiterated in its officially published memoranda, all sides must agree that Ukraine will forever be a militarily neutral state. This is clearly nonnegotiable for the Kremlin.

Russia will thus continue to fight the war until this goal is accomplished, or until so much of Ukraine gets annexed that it matters little what any rump remainder state does.

Rather than accept peace on these terms — renouncing NATO expansion to Ukraine — our collective leaders have decided we’ll have more war. Is NATO expansion worth so much death and destruction? Is it worth continuing to risk a blunder into all-out nuclear war?

‘No One Was Threatening Anyone!’

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a 76-year-old, U.S.-led military alliance. For the first 42 years of its existence, its job was to coordinate a shared American-European defense of the borders of Western Europe against attack by the Soviet Union. But that job disappeared overnight after the Soviet Union broke happily apart into more than a dozen new states, from Ukraine to Uzbekistan.

Many assumed the NATO alliance would thus be honorably retired. But it still had value to U.S. defense contractors: NATO is their marketing department to the world. Whenever a new nation “joins NATO”, it receives a pledge that the U.S. military will fight and die to protect it from any attack. The new nation returns that pledge, but more importantly, it also promises to spend 2% of its economy on its military forces — and 20% of that on buying (mostly American) weapons and equipment. This is NATO’s completely arbitrary “2/20 goal”, and it’s worth hundreds of billions to arms dealers.

Ever since its justification for existence abruptly disappeared 34 years ago, NATO has been busily growing. From 12 initial members after World War II, it has ballooned to 32 today. NATO expansions are treaty commitments between nations, which means each must be approved by the U.S. Congress. It’s unclear why ordinary Americans would want to voluntarily agree to fight and die defending far-off places like Bulgaria or Slovenia. But this has been floated past Congress each time on a sea of defense contractor cash.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, each round of NATO expansion was met with dismay among top foreign affairs experts. William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defense secretary, wrote in his memoirs about regretting he did not resign in protest over NATO expansion. George Kennan — a career diplomat regarded by many as the most famous U.S. foreign policy expert, and the architect of the Cold War strategy toward the Soviet Union called “containment” — was livid about the drive to expand NATO. He told us 27 years ago (!) that this “tragic mistake” would revive the Cold War.

“There was no reason for this whatsoever,” he fumed. “No one was threatening anybody else.”

“I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe,” Kennan told The New York Times back then, speaking of the defense contractor-oiled Senate hearings. “Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. … It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia [to NATO expansion], and then [the NATO expanders] will say that ‘we always told you that is how the Russians are’ — but this is just wrong.”

Ukraine was a major prize in this game. The Ukrainians themselves initially wanted to become a non-aligned state — a neutral and hopefully prosperous gateway nation between East and West. In July 1990, when Ukrainians declared their independence, they pledged for themselves a coveted neutrality:

“[Ukraine] solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear-free principles: to neither accept, produce nor purchase any nuclear weapons.”

But that was decades ago, and U.S. defense contractors continued to play a long lobbying game. American leaders over the years would regularly announce that Ukraine had every right to join NATO, someday, if it wanted. Russian leaders grew ever more bluntly sullen in opposing this. And all waited for the crisis to declare itself — especially NATO, which apparently exists to manage the crises created by NATO.

Double, Triple, Quadruple Trouble

We have more than 20 years of American, French and German diplomatic cables in which the diplomats of the West all warned us not to expand NATO into Ukraine. Doing so, wrote the U.S. ambassador to Russia, would cross “the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”

Ambassador William Burns made clear in his cable (17 years ago) that this wasn’t just Russian bullying or whining, but a legitimate strategic concern. As Burns recounted, Russian leaders recognized that Ukraine itself was angrily divided over whether to join NATO — remember, they had pledged themselves to military neutrality in their very declaration of independence! The Russian elite worried that forcing the question of NATO could cause a civil war there, which would be a major headache for the Kremlin:

Yet we did force the NATO question, and the collapse of Ukraine’s government and a civil war did follow, exactly as our diplomats had warned. Moscow seized Crimea and armed Ukraine’s pro-Russian east, while the Washington foreign policy establishment backed Kyiv and Ukraine’s west.

Amid all the uproar of 2015, President Barack Obama raised a lone voice of reason. Although he came under enormous pressure from across the D.C. national security spectrum, Obama refused to pour in weapons.

“[Obama] has told aides and visitors that arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow,” reported The New York Times.

The paper noted that the president was virtually alone in Washington with this opinion, but a rare person on Obama’s team who agreed was Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Years later, after he’d been promoted to Secretary of State, Blinken would always say yes to more war. But a decade ago, under Obama’s influence, he was smarter:

“Russia is right next door,” Blinken said in a speech 10 years ago. “Anything we did as [NATO] countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

The New York Times described the idea that Russia would double-triple-quadruple down on violence as the argument that “seems to most closely channel the president’s, according to people familiar with the internal debate.”

Obama (and Blinken) had grasped a crucial reality: We in America just don’t care as much about Ukraine as Russia does. That means any military escalation we attempt there will be matched by Russia — and then doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or possibly even escalated to the point of tactical nuclear weapons use. Ukraine won’t win, but it will get destroyed.

If only Obama had stood firm on such logical and moral high ground. Sadly, while he avoided providing weapons, Obama instead signed off on a massive CIA buildup inside Ukraine. We have only learned about this recently, especially as recounted last year in a major (and clearly CIA-blessed) New York Times report, “The Spy War.”

During the 10 years (!) before the Russians finally invaded in 2022, the CIA had constructed listening posts in Ukraine at “12 secret locations along the Russian border.” One such “listening post” visited by The Times was a massive underground bunker that, well before the war, was staffed by more than 800 Ukrainian agents. The CIA also trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force” known as Unit 2245 that engaged in so much anti-Russian violent mayhem — “staging assassinations and other lethal operations” — that it left the Obama administration “infuriated.”

“The Obama White House was livid,” The Times article said about a 2016 raid into Crimea by Unit 2245, a surprise attack that left several Russian soldiers dead. The CIA-trained commandos had dressed in Russian military uniforms and crossed the Black Sea at night in inflatable speedboats; Putin had denounced it as a terrorist attack, and Vice President Biden afterward got the job of calling Ukraine’s president to yell at him about it.

But the CIA continued to build up its spy networks, which included infiltrating Ukrainians deep into Russia as sleeper agents:

“The [CIA] program was called Operation Goldfish,” The Times reported, “which derived from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish who offers two Estonians wishes in exchange for its freedom. The punchline was that one of the Estonians bashed the fish’s head with a rock, explaining that anything speaking Russian could not be trusted.”

“Anything” speaking Russian should have its head bashed in with a rock?

By 2021, The Times reported, “as Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion,” a top Russian spy service chief told him that “the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.”

This all sounds like stuff that would provoke any nation to invade its neighbor, doesn’t it? If Mexico had 12 enormous bunkers along the Rio Grande filled with hundreds of Chinese-trained black ops guys who believed Texas had been wrongly stolen from them, and who occasionally slipped across the river in rubber boats to slit the throats of U.S. border guards, and whose official motto involved using a rock to bash in the head of every English speaker — would Washington tolerate any of that?

A final note on Operation Goldfish, which is apparently ongoing: In revealing it last year, The Times asserted that:

“Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to scale back.”

The Times followed up this year with a second, even richer report detailing how U.S. soldiers and CIA agents under Biden “received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.” An unnamed “European intelligence chief” is quoted as observing of these American officials: “They are part of the kill chain now.”

CIA-trained spies are in Russia now, sleeper agents who emerge to direct some of the many drone strikes inflicted on cities and infrastructure. With Trump’s recent blessing, they will be ready to help guide whatever new American missiles Ukraine may soon be launching. What do we think this does for Russian civil society? It must surely be helping to drive Russia deeper and deeper into authoritarianism.

We’ve seen thousands of ordinary Russians arrested and many receive long prison sentences simply for speaking out against the war. This suppression of dissent is commented on smugly in the West, as if it provided more evidence of Russian savagery. But imagine if American airports, apartment buildings, oil refineries and other infrastructure were being attacked by drones, month after month — even as China bragged publicly about having secret “Operation Goldfish” sleeper agents spread throughout our country to guide the drones to their targets. How well do you think the American government and people would respect civil liberties under such pressure?

Offered a Chance to Avoid the War, We Declined

Obama may have opted for discreet CIA shenanigans and tried to avoid full military involvement, but of course Trump’s team opened the weapons spigot.

The first Trump administration signed off on hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons for Kyiv that Obama had blocked. (It was only after the White House reportedly had paused those shipments — even as Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Hunter Biden’s sketchy job at the Burisma oil company — that Congress erupted in rage and sought Trump’s 2019 impeachment.)

Biden, of course, took over from Trump in 2020. The Kremlin found itself facing one of America’s loudest champions of expanding NATO — a man up to his elbows in family corruption in Ukraine and also deeply involved in the Obama-era 2014 coup d’etat and the ensuing massive expansion of the CIA’s presence there.

But with Trump out of power, at least the hysterical Russiagate hoax might blow over? Maybe U.S.-Russia relations could normalize? The Kremlin sought a new understanding with Biden.

By fall of 2021 — months before the Russian military invasion — Russia gave Washington a proposed draft treaty for a post-NATO security system for Europe. That offer also came with an ultimatum: Leave Ukraine alone, or we will go into it militarily, and kick you and your CIA-backed allies out.

The assertion I just made — that the Russians were provoked into the invasion by our efforts to make Ukraine a NATO client state — has often been dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” For years, anyone who’d say this could be smeared as “Putin’s puppet,” a “useful idiot,” etc.

Thankfully, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg long ago made this utterly explicit:

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament in September 2023. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that. … [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

So, let’s think about this for a second:

In the weeks before the Russians invaded in February 2022, the Kremlin told President Biden that war could be avoided — and all Biden had to do was open up a dialog about Russian unease with NATO encirclement and entertain proposals for a different international security system. Apparently, our reply was to refuse. We told the Russians we thought they were bluffing and warned them to expect heavy economic consequences if they did invade.

Offered an Early Peace Deal, We Declined

The Russians invaded. But they were indeed still sort of bluffing. They were also clearly spooked by the loud international condemnation and the early supply of NATO-grade weaponry to help Ukraine resist. The war was barely two weeks old and not going well when the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said Russia would cease military operations “in a moment,” if only Ukraine would declare neutrality — note the consistency of war aims — and also grant autonomy to the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk (of note, Russia was pointedly not annexing those regions — not then). Ukraine’s new President Zelensky also said then he was open to ditching NATO and agreeing to a peace.

Moscow and Kyiv reached for conciliation after just two weeks of war? We ignored that in our media — you never heard about it — and we certainly did not enable or support that. Instead, behind the scenes we undermined it.

By just 21 days into the war, Kyiv and Moscow already had a working draft of a peace treaty, and in just a few weeks more, there was a signed-and-agreed-to deal. It, too, was scuttled — at American insistence. This has been testified to now by many participants and insiders, including top Ukrainian officials involved, U.S. foreign policy scholars, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, and former Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennet, to name but a few. (The New York Times has published draft documents of some of those peace agreements.)

What Now?

Ukraine has been wrecked. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country. Polls show most of them now desperately want to trade lost lands for a quick peace.

This entire catastrophe could have been avoided by keeping NATO and the CIA out in the first place, or, failing that, simply by humoring the Russians in autumn 2021 and talking to them about their proposed post-NATO security treaty. The war could have been stopped “in a moment” on Day 12, if President Biden had replied to the Kremlin spokesman’s offer — which, by the way, was a much better deal than Ukraine will ever get today. It also could have been wound up 30 days or so after it started if we hadn’t interfered when Moscow and Kyiv reached tentative deals in Istanbul.

And it could be wound up today. But that would involve someone standing up to the U.S. national security state and renouncing any plan to include Ukraine in NATO.

Why don’t we have a more vigorous debate about this in the West? Perhaps because if we start to ask even a few questions, it might quickly come apparent how NATO is a source of problems, not solutions — and how much better all of our lives could be without any NATO at all. For some in D.C., that’s a scary conversation indeed.