McNamara’s first lesson is to empathise with the enemy. He says in the documentary, “We should try to put ourselves in their [the adversary’s] skin and try to look at us through their eyes.” This is said with reference to the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis when President John F Kennedy received two messages from Nikita Khrushchev. The first was what McNamara calls the “soft message”; the second, which followed the first, was the “hard message.” The soft message said the Soviet Union would remove the missiles from Cuba if the US promised to not invade Cuba. The hard message declared that the Soviet Union would respond with massive force if the US invaded Cuba.
Which letter to respond to? During deliberations, a former US ambassador to Moscow, Tommy Thompson, advised Kennedy to negotiate on the basis of the soft message. Kennedy’s initial reaction was to scoff at the idea. He wasn’t convinced that negotiations could get the Soviet Union to remove the missiles from Cuba. But then Thompson, who bluntly told Kennedy “Mr President, you are wrong” prevailed. Thompson and his wife, McNamara tells us, knew Khrushchev and his wife. Thompson sensed, correctly, that Khrushchev needed a face-saver by being able to tell the Soviet people that he had saved Cuba and Fidel Castro from a US invasion. McNamara believed this to be empathising with the enemy, to look at the world through the enemy’s eyes to understand his threat perception and thought processes. In the end, as McNamara says, we weren’t saved by rationality, but by pure chance.
Ironically, President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has produced the exact opposite of what he wanted to prevent: encirclement by NATO.
Let’s return to the Vilnius summit now. Finland and Sweden are now NATO members. Both had remained outside the alliance through the Cold War. Ironically, President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has produced the exact opposite of what he wanted to prevent: encirclement by NATO.
Look at the map. Russia’s Baltic Fleet is headquartered in Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave surrounded by Lithuania, Poland and the Baltic Sea. In case hostilities break out, access to the Atlantic and any required operational link-up with Russia’s Northern Fleet can now be blocked by Sweden in cooperation with other NATO states. How? The Baltic is now a NATO lake. Every littoral of that sea is a NATO member with the exception of Russia. And Russia is the reason for it. The Baltic Fleet, in theory, cannot move out of that sea into the North Sea (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean) or all the way south to the Black and Azov Seas if Sweden blocks the Oeresund Channel and the Kattegat and Skagerrak Straits. Finland could play the same role with regard to Russia’s Northern Fleet, headquartered in Severomorsk.
If that’s not a threat to Russia, then the Statue of Liberty is situated in Moscow.
But this is not all. We still have the problem of Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO, the original bone of contention. The communiqué states, “[The] Alliance will support Ukraine… on its path towards future membership. We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”
As I scoured the websites of Beltway think tanks, I was surprised to see many policy experts in the US call the language ‘uninspiring’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘head-scratching’ and ‘disappointing.’ Earlier, responding to a pre-summit statement by US President Joe Biden regarding Ukraine’s NATO membership, Ukraine’s President Zelensky had called it “absurd.”
The desire to give Putin a bloody nose is overwhelming, for sure. But for experts to want to fast-track Ukraine’s inclusion even as the war is going on is quite baffling. Technically, given Article 5 of the NATO charter, Ukraine’s inclusion would require the collective defence of Ukraine and pit NATO directly against Russia. The dangers of that approach should be obvious. But apparently they aren’t.
In April 2008, US President George Bush, speaking in Kyiv after a meeting with then-Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, said Ukraine and Georgia should be allowed to join NATO. Result? In August 2008, Russian forces along with Abkhazian and South Ossetian rebel forces invaded and “liberated” Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia and a few other allies consider both as independent republics, though the UN and the rest of the world consider both as Georgian territories under Russian occupation.
Technically, given Article 5 of the NATO charter, Ukraine’s inclusion would require the collective defence of Ukraine and pit NATO directly against Russia. The dangers of that approach should be obvious.
The point, however, is not about recognition of these occupied territories but how Russia responds to any possibility of being encircled by NATO. The same script was played out in Ukraine after the Euromaidan revolution ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. With Yanukovych exiling himself to Russia, trouble began in Sevastopol in Crimea and spread to the entire peninsula. The Russian Front, a radical, pro-Russia organisation, organised a rally of a few thousand people, dismissed the city’s mayor and elected a new one. By the end of the month, Crimea was under de facto Russian control.
Up north and in Ukraine’s east in Donbas, war began in April 2014 when armed Russian-backed separatists seized government buildings and the Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. The internal war, supported by Russia, continued in the Donbas until the territory, comprising Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Now, to be sure, Russia is no innocent actor. But if we are to empathise with the enemy, any analysis must look at the US and NATO through Russian eyes. Russia is a great power which has seen its power steadily erode since the breakup of the Soviet Union. It does not take much intelligence to realise that it would try to do whatever it can to arrest its decline or at least increase the cost for its adversaries of encircling it and shrinking its near-abroad. NATO is an existential threat for Russia.
Whether Putin has managed to do that successfully is a different debate. With the war continuing, the jury is still out on that debate. What is important, meanwhile, is to avoid dismissing Putin as an irrational actor. That’s the easy way out.
Equally problematic is the reference to Russia’s invasion as the starting point of this problem. Far from being that and instead of taking a snapshot view, it is the culmination of a longer trajectory. One way of empathising with Putin would be for the US to imagine a pro-Russia government in Canada or Mexico or, as we noted above, in Cuba. President Kennedy’s Air Force general, Curtis LeMay, wanted to bomb the hell out of Cuba; Kennedy himself, until Tommy Thompson swayed him to the side of caution, wanted to invade Cuba, starting with a strategic bombing of the island. Why must Putin be expected to do anything different?
After Russia withdrew its forces from the Kyiv theatre, it became obvious that its main effort had failed and the Ukraine war was headed towards becoming a war of attrition.
In the end, the Cuban Missile Crisis was mercifully resolved through negotiations. The Soviets withdrew the missiles from Cuba. The less-known detail is that the USAF was asked to dismantle Jupiter missiles deployed in Italy and Turkey as part of the secret deal!
When the debate about expanding NATO began in the US in the early 90s, a number of foreign policy heavyweights opposed the policy. Fifty of them, including Robert McNamara, wrote a letter on June 26, 1997 saying that “the current US-led effort to expand NATO [and] the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits is a policy error of historic proportions.” They then added, “We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability” and gave “reasons” in support of their argument.
They ended the letter by writing, “Russia does not now pose a threat to its western neighbours and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are not in danger. For this reason, and the others cited above, we believe that NATO expansion is neither necessary nor desirable and that this ill-conceived policy can and should be put on hold.”
Later, former US ambassador to Russia, William Burns, the current director of the CIA, warned in a February 2008 embassy cable that Ukraine constituted a security “redline” for Moscow. Ditto for George Kennan, the doyen of America’s Russia hands. Kennan, who authored the US Cold War policy of containment, called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
The point, again, is not to absolve Russia. In many ways, Putin’s invasion has exposed Russia’s many weaknesses. After Russia withdrew its forces from the Kyiv theatre, it became obvious that its main effort had failed and the Ukraine war was headed towards becoming a war of attrition. The real point is to analyse, objectively, why Russia is doing what it is and whether the US would not do the same if the shoe were on the other foot. Any takers!