The Need for Trust: Reflections on the Quincy Institute's 'The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine’
Photo Credit: Kazakova Inna, WikiCommons
This essay originally appeared on the Landmarks Substack page (March 6, 2024). Grenier argues that until the West radically reevaluates its philosophical assumptions, both diplomacy and peace will remain elusive. An earlier, shorter version of this article was published at ACURA] — The Editors
Anatol Lieven’s and George Beebe’s “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine” serves as a refreshing antidote to the usual mainstream account of the Ukraine conflict. They provide objective, factual data on the demographic, economic-industrial, and troop strength gaps—not to say chasms—separating Russia and Ukraine today. They further note, in a similarly realistic vein, that attrition warfare by no means favors Ukraine:
… in a war of attrition, the numbers, munitions and economy of one side falter before the other does so, leading to a collapse either of the army or the home front. As things stand at present, if either side in the Ukraine War eventually cracks, it seems likely to be Ukraine.
This circumstance, Lieven and Beebe conclude, should motivate those who purport to support Ukraine to start negotiations with Russia immediately, since delaying will only put the government in Kiev in an even weaker position. They point to President Putin’s apparent openness to such negotiations—an openness hinted at during his Feb. 8, 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson—as an encouraging sign.
Given the Russians’ decisive defeat of the Ukraine army’s summer counteroffensive, and its accelerating success in this attrition war, it is only natural that the authors raise the question as to why the Russian side would wish to participate in peace negotiations at this juncture. Why would the Russians want to abandon their current trajectory of making territorial gains and putting themselves in a better position to dictate terms consonant with their political aims? The crux of the Quincy authors’ argument runs as follows:
Russia … has shown that it can block the further expansion of NATO into ex–Soviet republics, but it cannot fight its way into Western recognition that Russia has a legitimate role to play in Europe’s security order, nor can it reduce the potential for direct war with NATO absent diplomatic engagement with the United States and Europe. In sum, although Russia can make progress on demilitarizing Ukraine, it still has some significant reasons to want an understanding with the West over Ukraine and the broader European security order [emphasis mine - PRG]
This framing is helpful to the extent that it at least implicitly acknowledges that the current conflict is taking place between Russia and the ‘collective West’; that it is not, as the usual Western narrative would have it, a war that Russia is waging on Ukraine. An eventual peace settlement, if and when it comes, must indeed be concluded between the actual warring parties: the US, its NATO partners and Ukraine proxy, on the one side, and Russia, on the other.
What is much less convincing is the authors’ assumption that such negotiations with Russia can be successfully concluded even in the absence of trust. As they put it: “Moscow and Washington have decades of useful Cold War experience in constructing, implementing, and monitoring a wide range of security agreements despite mutual distrust and broader geopolitical competition.”
The most obvious example of such a security agreement being implemented despite imperfections of trust would of course be the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty hammered out by Reagan and Gorbachev and signed by the U.S. side in December 1987 after the U.S. president popularized the slogan ‘trust but verify.’
Examined more closely however, doesn’t this example prove the very opposite of what the Quincy authors are claiming? After all, in the period 1986 – 1987, both sides were taking steps that in various ways were rapidly building trust. In the case of Gorbachev, by de-ideologizing the Soviet state. In the case of the Reagan administration, by so to speak ‘de-demonizing’ the Soviets and the Russians, a process greatly assisted, at the time, by advisors to the president who were deeply familiar with Russian culture and history.
Today’s dynamic … is exactly the opposite of the one that allowed the INF treaty to succeed.
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Today’s dynamic, for a whole range of reasons, is exactly the opposite of the one that allowed the INF treaty to succeed. It is now the U.S. that is increasingly becoming an ideological regime. It is the U.S. that demonizes Russia and its leadership, and that for many years now has gone out of its way to accuse Russia of every imaginable sin, including when the sins, as with the famous ‘Russian hacking’ of the 2016 U.S. election, turn out to be imaginary. The U.S. side has taken numerous steps that make it all but impossible for the Russian side to trust the U.S.; at times these steps seem almost intended to achieve that very end. Worse still, as French social scientist Emmanuel Todd has recently concluded, American political culture as a whole has drifted away from rationality as such.
A Matter of Scale
There is no need to be pollyannish about the Russian state. Russia’s leaders, like the leaders of other states, sometimes tell lies and do other genuinely bad things. What we have witnessed in the past decade or two in the U.S., however, is something qualitatively new. What is new is the sheer scale of the invention of ‘reality,’ an invention that, at least within ‘polite society,’ masks from view the destructive things that the U.S. does, making them impossible to correct.
Whether in a domestic or international context, to the extent a common reality is more or less shared by all sides, political actors can always fall back on simply telling the truth, and thereby establish trust. Unfortunately, today, the United States government operates from within its own, separate reality. It has increasingly created precisely that alternative fabric of invented ‘facts’ about which Hannah Arendt warned, a fabric which, because of its very scale and consistency, could manage to successfully substitute for truth.
Nor does this reliance on an alternative ‘fabric of reality’ pertain only to America’s ruling elites. In the years since Ronald Reagan’s America, generations of students have been educated by professors steeped in French post-structuralist theory (Foucault and the like). For those educated in this spirit, it is simply assumed that truth only ever exists in reference to some particular power configuration: ‘truth’ now becomes simply an expression of someone’s interests, nothing more.
This same perspective dominates American discussions of foreign affairs. As Matthew Dal Santo recently pointed out, questions of fact are no longer proven or disproven by appeals to logic and material evidence; it now suffices to point out in whose interests it is to accept or deny a given proposition.
Did the U.S. play a role in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (which event, incidentally, was a violation of international law as well as an attack on Germany)? Which side, Russia or Ukraine, was purposely shelling civilian areas of Donbas after 2014, and which shelled the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in 2022 - 2023 after it had been occupied by Russian troops? Who killed almost a hundred demonstrators on Maidan Square in 2014? In such cases, the answer is allegedly already known in advance prior to the gathering of evidence – assuming evidence is ever even sought (it usually isn’t). The a priori answers fall into one of the following categories: Russia is to blame; or those ‘in league’ with Russia are to blame; or -- in cases that appear to point in the ‘wrong’ direction -- then the culprit is declared to be simply unknowable. To suggest that America or its allies might be to blame is to repeat ‘Putin talking points.’
Such sophistry precedes, of course, the Ukraine war. Questioning the motivations for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the destabilization of Syria and Libya starting in 2011, was similarly dismissed as tantamount to promoting the interests of Assad and Qaddafi. Conformance to U.S. policy objectives has for some time now, in the U.S., become our measure of truth.
But how can diplomacy take place between the U.S. and another state if the U.S. renounces the givenness of factual reality, if it substitutes for reality a utilitarian narrative whose veracity, on the one hand, and whose correspondence to American interests on the other hand, is always considered an identity?
Let it be granted that what concerns U.S. policy makers is not philosophical truth but ‘what works.’ It is assumed in Washington that in international politics what works is pressure. If the application of pressure is continuously escalated, eventually the other side will be forced to ‘play ball’ according to our rules. They will sign on the dotted line. They will trust our promises. This, at any rate, seems to be the reigning assumption in official Washington.
Firstly, Russians are not Pavlovian dogs who can be trained to respond to external stimuli …
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But the assumption that this schema will work with the Russians is sheer fantasy. The Russians will not trust those promises, and it is very unlikely that they will sign on the dotted line of any agreement other than one that they have drawn up themselves. The reasons for this are plain. Firstly, Russians are not Pavlovian dogs who can be trained to respond to external stimuli – now the ‘pain’ of economic sanctions, now the ‘pleasant’ feelings of being told that they will be accepted by Europe and made part of its ‘security order.’ Second, Russians know and care about history; and they are not about to accept promises from a U.S. government that has repeatedly deceived them (starting with ‘not one inch eastward!’).
They remember that the Minsk II agreements, despite having been endorsed by Germany and France and made subject to international law via the UN Security Council, were subsequently not only not observed; as we later learned from no less a personage than Angela Merkel, there had never even been any intention to observe them. Both the European and Ukrainian signatories of the Minsk agreements have subsequently made this same admission.
They remember that post-Soviet Russia, including under Vladimir Putin, left Ukraine in peace, and would presumably have continued to do so in perpetuity, except for the US-engineered 2014 coup d’etat which brought to power in Kiev persons and organizations viscerally hostile to Russians – including the many millions of ethnic Russians living within Ukraine’s borders. They remember that the coup-installed Kiev regime declared the Russian-speaking Ukrainians living in Donbas ‘terrorists’ and began bombing them. They know that it was the American side that scuttled the peace accords reached just weeks after the Russian incursion in February 2022. The Russians have every reason not to find the U.S. side worthy of their trust.
There is insufficient room here to go into the extensive scholarship that provides factual support for the above assertions. Anyone who cares to can read such scholars as John Mearsheimer, Richard Sakwa, and Nicolai Petro, among others, who have laid out the relevant history in great detail. All the same, for anyone curious about the purposes behind the United States’ Ukraine project, it remains very useful to read Stratfor director George Friedman’s December 2014 interview with the Russian business newspaper Kommersant. In that interview, Friedman said nothing about Ukraine’s ‘European aspirations,’ or its God-given right to join NATO. Nor does he say anything about democracy. The U.S. decision to pull Ukraine out of the Russian sphere was made, Friedman tells us, as a response to Russia’s growing power and its unwelcome interference with U.S. plans for Syria:
… It is in this context [Russian interference in the Middle East -- PRG] that we should be evaluating the events in Ukraine. The Russians, apparently, simply have not calculated how seriously the US side might perceive their actions or the extent to which they can easily find countermeasures. It was in this situation that the United States took a look at Russia and thought about what it wants to see happen least of all: instability in Ukraine.
The Illusion of Liberalism
According to the usual ‘narrative,’ the war in Ukraine is being fought so as to rescue liberal democracy from its authoritarian enemy – Russia in the first instance. The advance of liberal civilization, whether in Ukraine or anywhere else, is always ‘worth it,’ despite the high cost, because, as democratic peace theory tells us, liberal democracy’s expansion will lead to Perpetual Peace (also the title of Kant’s famous essay on the topic). It is therefore paradoxical that American practices make peace impossible, and it is doubly paradoxical that this point can be proven by reference to the very prescriptions outlined by Kant, the source of inspiration for democratic peace theory.
The articles of peace outlined by Kant in his famous essay have all been blatantly violated by the US and its partners. In Perpetual Peace (article 1) Kant stated that no peace treaty can be regarded as valid if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war. In the Ukraine case, however, this is precisely what happened, although the ‘material for a future war’ was sent to Ukraine by its Western partners for the most part after their signing of the duplicitous Minsk peace agreements.
In article of peace number 6, Kant proscribed the use of assassins and treachery, as well as any other actions that “would make mutual confidence impossible in a subsequent state of peace.” And yet Ukrainian intelligence has committed a number of assassinations of Russian (and Ukrainian) civilians and journalists. Not only have these assassinations not been officially condemned by the U.S. side, we recently learned from The New York Times that U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have been tied at the hip at least since 2014. Ukraine’s so-called Peacekeeper (Mirotvorets) de facto assassination list has likewise never been officially condemned by the U.S. side.
More broadly, the U.S. has engaged in a great many actions large and small, for a great many years, that clearly violate Kant’s stipulation against taking actions that ‘make mutual confidence impossible.’ For example, the rhetoric of president Biden (“yes, I think he is a killer”). And what of the Russiagate narrative? How can the Russian side have trust and confidence in a U.S. political order that over the course of almost a decade has manufactured a Byzantine narrative about Russian involvement in domestic U.S. political affairs that has almost zero basis in fact?
…. the U.S. has precisely treated Ukraine as a means, not an end.
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Kantian moral theory famously teaches that it is immoral to treat others as a mere means to one’s own ends, and yet the U.S. has precisely treated Ukraine as a means, not an end. It has treated Ukrainian lives as objects to be used by the U.S. in order to ‘kill Russians’ in a proxy war, and as a means to teach distant China a lesson – a lesson of interest only to the U.S., not Ukraine. The U.S. practices today the very opposite of the Enlightenment rationality advocated by Kant. Whatever weaknesses Kant’s philosophy may have had, and it had several, at least he had a conscience and respected objective truth.
Now What?
I agree with George Beebe and Anatol Lieven (who at least imply this outcome) that a final settlement with Russia over Ukraine will entail the acceptance by the West that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO. This is a necessary but not a sufficient requirement, at least from the Russian perspective. The Russian side will insist that not only will Ukraine never be a de jure member of NATO, neither can it ever be a de facto member -- as it was already becoming in the years prior to the most recent outbreak of hostilities, given Ukraine’s arming by the U.S., its participation in exercises with NATO troops, the placement of advanced U.S. weapons systems within Ukraine, and the planned expansion of those systems to ever more sophisticated ones.
Right up to the torpedoed (by the U.S. and England) peace negotiations in Istanbul in April 2022, Russia repeatedly declared its willingness to accept a neutral and independent Ukraine. For the Russian Federation to be willing today to accept such a neutral and independent Ukraine, the U.S. must first take decisive steps to restore trust.
Having said that, I believe that the Russian side is very unlikely to enter into negotiations with the U.S. on anything other than its own terms. The conditions of trust have been too thoroughly destroyed, primarily, though not exclusively, by the American side. In saying this, as I hope is obvious, no criticism is intended toward Lieven and Beebe. It is their job to provide policy makers with approaches that can be applied today, given American politics as it currently is. And given those strictures, I am not sure anyone could have come up with a more convincing near-term plan. My criticism is aimed at America, not Lieven and Beebe.
The American project is itself the main impediment. In a sense, America simply is an ideology, one oriented toward continuous expansion. What is more, Americans have been consumed by their own national idea, such that the ideology itself is now the actor, and actual humans its objects. This is true also, perhaps especially, of America’s ‘ruling political elites,’ its permanent bureaucracy and so forth. Recovering from such an ideological vicious circle will not be easy, to say the least. Ultimately the American ideology revolves around power, but since power in and of itself is not attractive (cf. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace), it must rely on subterfuge and force. It has no other option. Truth is attractive, but precisely truth has been instrumentalized and set aside.
The steps that the United States could in theory take to increase trust are easy enough to formulate, but it is extremely difficult to believe that the U.S., in its current make up, will take any of these steps. And yet, the U.S. has not always been as it is now. Perhaps someday it will return to a more limited sense of its destiny, and stop resisting the continued existence of other polities in the global order that it neither controls nor dominates ideologically. If that day should ever come in respect to Russia, such steps as the following would jump-start our moribund diplomatic process by beginning to restore trust:
Stop demonizing Russia. Stop denying to Russians the right to define their own sense of who they are; stop insisting that Russia is not legitimate until and unless it accepts American values and sense of what is ethical. Questions of gender, for example, should be viewed as something that each culture can best define for itself. This would represent a return to the ‘live and let live’ version of liberalism for which the U.S., in former times, was admired even by many Russians. Russians will never accept the current iteration of American liberalism, which illiberally dictates: ‘live as we do.’[1]
The U.S. government, in some official capacity, should publicly admit that the Russiagate scandal had no sufficient basis in fact and should hold those government officials who manufactured it to account. U.S. representatives should commit, henceforth, to contradicting any media stories that continue to make use of that narrative, and they themselves should promise to stop making use of it as a means of demonizing Russia, and stop treating Russia as an untrustworthy state for what was entirely (except to a trivial extent) a U.S. – manufactured narrative.
It hardly seems plausible, in the near term, that the U.S. side will admit to having sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, even though no one has come up with a more plausible explanation of what happened than Seymour Hersh. It would be easier, and therefore more likely to take place (granted, this is still most unlikely!) for the U.S. to offer, using its own financing, to collaboratively restore the destroyed pipelines and to not object to the restoration of Russian sales of gas to Germany and Europe. This might have the long-term beneficial effect of reviving the German economy and not thereby creating the danger that an angry and impoverished German populace eventually grow tired altogether of its relationship with the United States. Of course, ideally, we would see a genuinely neutral, professional and open investigation of the Nord Stream incident in which experts from all sides, including Russia, would have access to all the evidence.
Commit to abandoning, immediately, the politicization of international sports, including the Olympics, and commit to never again preventing Russian sports teams from participating, and under their own flag. Even better: apologize for having done so in the past.
NOTES
[1] I have elsewhere argued that such genuine tolerance of different civilizations may be simply impossible for America. See P. Grenier, “Konstantin Krylov’s Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West,” in Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue [https://landmarksmag.substack.com/p/konstantin-krylovs-ethical-theory?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FGrenier&utm_medium=reader2], as well as the full version of this same article in Telos, Telos 201 (Winter 2022): Civilizational States and Liberal Empire, 109 – 125.