Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have more respect for your broader thesis - NATO expansion significantly contributed to the deterioration of US-Russian relations and ensuing invasion of Ukraine, but that was worth it - than I do for the people who deny any connection between those things. And I think there were real benefits of NATO expansion for the countries that were able to slip under the umbrella in time.
But your specific argument here has too many rough assumptions to compel me. I get that you're not The Lancet, but it seems a real stretch to attribute a doubling of GDP and 4 years of life expectancy to NATO membership based on a naive comparison of countries in and out. Especially when you just admitted that even things like alcoholism rates and corruption levels play an important role. Is the causal theory there that investors just had more confidence investing, because they were less scared of Russian attack? You'd probably need some sort of regression controlling for many other factors. And as you said, EU membership/free trade has a more intuitive connection, while being less threatening to / exclusive with simultaneous Russian ties. You can argue one facilitated the other, but it's not a 1:1 relationship.
It's also not an all or nothing thing. There's a big difference between no NATO expansion after 1990 at all and NATO trying to expand all the way to Ukraine, as each subsequent expansion eroded Russia's buffer and increased Russia's perception of threat to its interests. If the US had expanded NATO to every single country now included BUT not declared that Ukraine would join in 2008, and publicly announced it did not support Ukraine's membership, that alone may have sufficed to prevent the invasion. Even if not, there were plenty of stopping points along the way that would greatly reduce your 100 million people/400 million life years figures.
Other commenters here have made other good points. But again, broadly speaking, I recognize there were benefits as well as costs and wish our policy had been driven more by conversations like this, that attempt a good-faith weighing of both sides of the ledger, instead of soaring feel-good rhetoric about the end of history and universal Democratic triumphalism.
I'm not convinced NATO expansion is what caused Poland or the Baltics to do so well. There are an awful lot of things going on there. And agree that EU membership seems more important. Im pretty convinced that if we dissolved NATO in 1990 Poland would still get rich.
I'm also not sure that Ukraine is a similar situation to Poland. It's a very different country far away. The "pro western/EU" eastern parties had power from 2005-2010 and 2014-current and they didn't do a good job.
Yes, of course it is up to NATO members, principally the US, to decide whom to admit. I did not mean to suggest otherwise. But your phrasing read as though the US was pushing it on other countries.
Your comment suffers from a flaw that is evident in your choice of words: “NATO trying to expand all the way to Ukraine”; “if the US had expanded NATO” and so on. This way of thinking treats Eastern Europeans as if they were pawns with no agency of their own. The West was not pushing NATO on these countries. They were clamoring to get in. They wanted to be free from impending Russian tyranny and NATO was the answer. Mearsheimer’s position is that we should have told them to go fuck themselves. Even Arie’s original post suffers from this to an extent. It’s a lovely utilitarian calculation but *the calculation was not ours to make.* The Ukrainians have made their calculation, and their position is quite clear. They do not wish to be vassals.
No, the calculation was absolutely ours to make. It was never up to Ukraine alone. I hear this argument all the time and it's deeply confused about who gets to make these decisions.
NATO admission requires the universal consent of its members. This makes good sense considering it is a promise to fight and die for one another. No country can make that promise on another country's behalf! So Eastern Europe clamoring to join NATO is not a competing explanation for the West choosing to expand it; both are strictly necessary conditions for NATO to expand.
As the most powerful NATO military by far, the United States gets the biggest say of all over whether NATO expands. In fact, extending US protection is why NATO was founded, and why it was so attractive to new applicants. At its core, NATO is a big list of countries that the United States has promised to defend with its massive military.
Why do you think these nations so clamored for entry, if not for the promise of external protection? And how the hell could Ukraine promise that Americans will come to defend them, without an affirmation from America that this was true? The ultimate decision was always up to Americans.
An open-door policy for military alliances with whoever asks nicely is not the natural state of the world; it was a luxury the United States could temporarily indulge during its brief and bygone window of global hegemony. To deny NATO entry to Ukraine is not to tell them "fuck you" any more than it's to flip off Angola or Thailand or Pakistan, or the great majority of countries around the world to whom we've made no such promise.
The problem is that during that window of unrivaled power, our promises exceeded our actual will to fight - a problem which is increasingly exposed now that our relative power has receded, and our will to fight alongside it.
Interestingly enough, in regards to Ukraine specifically, with or without NATO, voting for Rukh in 1991 instead of for Sovoks would have been a huge improvement for them since it would have meant that Ukraine would have actually had Western-oriented government a couple of decades earlier than in real life. Plus, Galicians, in spite of their historical flaws (such as during WWII), were less corrupted by Communism and thus encouraging them to lead the newly independent Ukraine would have probably been a smart move.
Interesting article, I enjoyed it. I think you might be underestimating the risks and drawbacks associated with the Ukraine War. I tend to think that the greatest problem with great power war is not the immediate human cost, which is obviously awful, but the opportunity cost for global cooperation. The greatest threats to humanity in my view come from nuclear weapons, bioweapons, pandemics, climate change, and AI. And these issues can only be addressed internationally, due to collective action problems (and because these problems tend to transcend borders).
So when America gets into a cold war with other great powers, it's next to impossible to set up the global governance structures necessary to deal with these issues. For example, regulating biotech and virology labs will be even more difficult and more intrusive than IAEA inspections. I'm not optimistic about our chances to achieve global cooperation on these issues sans war, but it seems like it would be much easier if weren't at each others throats.
On those issues I it's not clear to me whether the best course of action is to placate the other major powers or to try to reinforce American hegemony. I lean towards the latter. Channeling Machiavelli, it is safer to be feared than loved. But that's not really what this piece is about.
Hmmm yeah I guess I think this isn't a strict dichotomy. Maintaining one global hegemonic power is probably good, but it must wield its power judiciously, by, for example, recognizing the security interests of middle powers. Probably "placating" other powers to a certain extent (and I guess I would employ a word with slightly less negative connotation) is integral to maintaining global stability.
Post-1991, America was never going to fully impose its will on Russia (a nuclear superpower). So in my view the best course of action was realist geopolitical cooperation à la OSCE and Partnership for Peace.
I fear I'm not fully able to express my thoughts in a comment. Maybe I'll have to write an essay on hegemony and global cooperation.
Interesting take, one I've never seen before. But I think you run into the problems that utilitarians always run into when they try to make moral claims about real life policy: it's extremely difficult to quantify how much pleasure or pain is generated by a given policy. I'll avoid grandiose claims, but speaking for myself, I think the pain I'd feel from burying my parents at 75 instead of 80 pales in comparison to the pain they'd feel burying me at 25. That's not even accounting for all the other negative externalities generated by war; the emigration, the enmity generated between the belligerents, the economic devastation, the risk of nuclear war; et cetera. The point is, the pain of war is nearly incalculable. No one is going to fight a war for a more efficient bureaucracy.
If not like this, how would you measure the tradeoff?
> 75 instead of 80 pales in comparison to the pain they'd feel burying me at 25.
Is it crazy to say that the second is ~10 times worse?
> that's not even accounting for all the other negative externalities generated by war
I choose not to do quality of life comparisons because those are hard to do objectively. But If I were too, poverty also creates plenty of negative "externalities" no?
Poverty does create negative moral externalities, but keep in mind that Ukraine's economy is being wrecked by this war. Not only is it being physically destroyed or occupied, but emigration is robbing Ukraine of human capital as well. The in the likely event that the war ends as a frozen conflict, the risk of the war starting back up will scare away investment. Long story short, this war is impoverishing Ukraine far worse than soft Russian influence would have, had it been left to continue.
War, from a utilitarian perspective, is a moral disaster. You are going to have a very difficult time making a utilitarian case for it. That's why war hawks often use the virtue-ethic rhetoric that you alluded to in your piece; they claim the there are things more valuable than life itself. The utilitarian case for war is to risk life for the sake of... life? It's a risky investment at best, and nonsensical at worst.
Poverty does create negative moral externalities, but keep in mind that Ukraine's economy is being wrecked by this war. Not only is it being physically destroyed or occupied, but emigration is robbing Ukraine of human capital as well. The in the likely event that the war ends as a frozen conflict, the risk of the war starting back up will scare away investment. Long story short, this war is impoverishing Ukraine far worse than soft Russian influence would have, had it been left to continue.
War, from a utilitarian perspective, is a moral disaster. You are going to have a very difficult time making a utilitarian case for it. That's why war hawks often use the virtue-ethic rhetoric that you alluded to in your piece; they claim the there are things more valuable than life itself. The utilitarian case for war is to risk life for the sake of... life? It's a risky investment at best, and nonsensical at worst.
"Morally", there's more to consider besides just GDP and life expectancy. Folding Ukraine into the EU and NATO neatly means subjecting it to mass emigration as people leave to get better jobs, and mass immigration as Ukraine would be subject to hordes of MENA garbage people to make sure the state remained a free and fair democracy. Saving Ukraine from the horrible Russian communist orcs so that we could subject it to the horrible Muslim orcs is definitely a trade... a stupid one.
Setting aside the question of whether MENA immigrants are garbage (they are not, but I hardly think that discussion will be productive)
Poland is in EU and Schengen, they have hardly any MENA immigrants, as do Baltics, as do Romania. MENA immigrants will go to where the work prospects are best because they already uprooted themselves.
Ukraine would not be flooded by anyone. It would get lots of remittances by relatives who went to work in EU countries as part of Schengen and leave money to those who stayed behind. Puerto Rico became open borders with US and became the richest nation in the Caribbean despite depopulating by a fair amount, obviously Ukraine would follow similarly.
There's actually been a growing effort to push refugees and immigrants into Poland following their electing of a liberal government. Ukraine would likely face similar pressures if integrated into the EU.
And yet Poland has successfully resisted this pressure so far, and understandably so. When Poles see continuous examples of bad Muslim behavior in Western Europe, they just don't want to risk having stuff like that happen at home in Poland. As one Ukrainian-American with Polish citizenship once mentioned on another site, having Poles see rioting French Muslims serves as a vaccine for Poles.
Why exactly would Muslims want to move to Ukraine of all places?
Russia, on the other hand, could be an attractive destination for Central Asian Muslims if they can't find any better destinations. But there are plenty of more attractive destinations in the EU for Muslims to go to, so why go to Ukraine?
"Why exactly would Muslims want to move to Ukraine of all places?"
It's still marginally less of a shithole than their home countries, and they can count on any NATO aligned government to cover for them terrorizing the non believers.
I don’t think that the future NATO would necessarily be as soft towards Muslims as you think. Trump has already taken a pretty hard line towards Muslims, for instance. Marine Le Pen and others in Europe could take a similar line if they will ever come into power there.
Trump is anti Muslim, but him being in power is driving the NATO hegemons of the UK and France and Germany to become even more crazily pro Muslim. Remains to be seen if voters will ever push the anti immigration parties any further on their own
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have more respect for your broader thesis - NATO expansion significantly contributed to the deterioration of US-Russian relations and ensuing invasion of Ukraine, but that was worth it - than I do for the people who deny any connection between those things. And I think there were real benefits of NATO expansion for the countries that were able to slip under the umbrella in time.
But your specific argument here has too many rough assumptions to compel me. I get that you're not The Lancet, but it seems a real stretch to attribute a doubling of GDP and 4 years of life expectancy to NATO membership based on a naive comparison of countries in and out. Especially when you just admitted that even things like alcoholism rates and corruption levels play an important role. Is the causal theory there that investors just had more confidence investing, because they were less scared of Russian attack? You'd probably need some sort of regression controlling for many other factors. And as you said, EU membership/free trade has a more intuitive connection, while being less threatening to / exclusive with simultaneous Russian ties. You can argue one facilitated the other, but it's not a 1:1 relationship.
It's also not an all or nothing thing. There's a big difference between no NATO expansion after 1990 at all and NATO trying to expand all the way to Ukraine, as each subsequent expansion eroded Russia's buffer and increased Russia's perception of threat to its interests. If the US had expanded NATO to every single country now included BUT not declared that Ukraine would join in 2008, and publicly announced it did not support Ukraine's membership, that alone may have sufficed to prevent the invasion. Even if not, there were plenty of stopping points along the way that would greatly reduce your 100 million people/400 million life years figures.
Other commenters here have made other good points. But again, broadly speaking, I recognize there were benefits as well as costs and wish our policy had been driven more by conversations like this, that attempt a good-faith weighing of both sides of the ledger, instead of soaring feel-good rhetoric about the end of history and universal Democratic triumphalism.
+1
I'm not convinced NATO expansion is what caused Poland or the Baltics to do so well. There are an awful lot of things going on there. And agree that EU membership seems more important. Im pretty convinced that if we dissolved NATO in 1990 Poland would still get rich.
I'm also not sure that Ukraine is a similar situation to Poland. It's a very different country far away. The "pro western/EU" eastern parties had power from 2005-2010 and 2014-current and they didn't do a good job.
Yes, of course it is up to NATO members, principally the US, to decide whom to admit. I did not mean to suggest otherwise. But your phrasing read as though the US was pushing it on other countries.
Your comment suffers from a flaw that is evident in your choice of words: “NATO trying to expand all the way to Ukraine”; “if the US had expanded NATO” and so on. This way of thinking treats Eastern Europeans as if they were pawns with no agency of their own. The West was not pushing NATO on these countries. They were clamoring to get in. They wanted to be free from impending Russian tyranny and NATO was the answer. Mearsheimer’s position is that we should have told them to go fuck themselves. Even Arie’s original post suffers from this to an extent. It’s a lovely utilitarian calculation but *the calculation was not ours to make.* The Ukrainians have made their calculation, and their position is quite clear. They do not wish to be vassals.
No, the calculation was absolutely ours to make. It was never up to Ukraine alone. I hear this argument all the time and it's deeply confused about who gets to make these decisions.
NATO admission requires the universal consent of its members. This makes good sense considering it is a promise to fight and die for one another. No country can make that promise on another country's behalf! So Eastern Europe clamoring to join NATO is not a competing explanation for the West choosing to expand it; both are strictly necessary conditions for NATO to expand.
As the most powerful NATO military by far, the United States gets the biggest say of all over whether NATO expands. In fact, extending US protection is why NATO was founded, and why it was so attractive to new applicants. At its core, NATO is a big list of countries that the United States has promised to defend with its massive military.
Why do you think these nations so clamored for entry, if not for the promise of external protection? And how the hell could Ukraine promise that Americans will come to defend them, without an affirmation from America that this was true? The ultimate decision was always up to Americans.
An open-door policy for military alliances with whoever asks nicely is not the natural state of the world; it was a luxury the United States could temporarily indulge during its brief and bygone window of global hegemony. To deny NATO entry to Ukraine is not to tell them "fuck you" any more than it's to flip off Angola or Thailand or Pakistan, or the great majority of countries around the world to whom we've made no such promise.
The problem is that during that window of unrivaled power, our promises exceeded our actual will to fight - a problem which is increasingly exposed now that our relative power has receded, and our will to fight alongside it.
Interestingly enough, in regards to Ukraine specifically, with or without NATO, voting for Rukh in 1991 instead of for Sovoks would have been a huge improvement for them since it would have meant that Ukraine would have actually had Western-oriented government a couple of decades earlier than in real life. Plus, Galicians, in spite of their historical flaws (such as during WWII), were less corrupted by Communism and thus encouraging them to lead the newly independent Ukraine would have probably been a smart move.
Interesting article, I enjoyed it. I think you might be underestimating the risks and drawbacks associated with the Ukraine War. I tend to think that the greatest problem with great power war is not the immediate human cost, which is obviously awful, but the opportunity cost for global cooperation. The greatest threats to humanity in my view come from nuclear weapons, bioweapons, pandemics, climate change, and AI. And these issues can only be addressed internationally, due to collective action problems (and because these problems tend to transcend borders).
So when America gets into a cold war with other great powers, it's next to impossible to set up the global governance structures necessary to deal with these issues. For example, regulating biotech and virology labs will be even more difficult and more intrusive than IAEA inspections. I'm not optimistic about our chances to achieve global cooperation on these issues sans war, but it seems like it would be much easier if weren't at each others throats.
On those issues I it's not clear to me whether the best course of action is to placate the other major powers or to try to reinforce American hegemony. I lean towards the latter. Channeling Machiavelli, it is safer to be feared than loved. But that's not really what this piece is about.
Hmmm yeah I guess I think this isn't a strict dichotomy. Maintaining one global hegemonic power is probably good, but it must wield its power judiciously, by, for example, recognizing the security interests of middle powers. Probably "placating" other powers to a certain extent (and I guess I would employ a word with slightly less negative connotation) is integral to maintaining global stability.
Post-1991, America was never going to fully impose its will on Russia (a nuclear superpower). So in my view the best course of action was realist geopolitical cooperation à la OSCE and Partnership for Peace.
I fear I'm not fully able to express my thoughts in a comment. Maybe I'll have to write an essay on hegemony and global cooperation.
Interesting take, one I've never seen before. But I think you run into the problems that utilitarians always run into when they try to make moral claims about real life policy: it's extremely difficult to quantify how much pleasure or pain is generated by a given policy. I'll avoid grandiose claims, but speaking for myself, I think the pain I'd feel from burying my parents at 75 instead of 80 pales in comparison to the pain they'd feel burying me at 25. That's not even accounting for all the other negative externalities generated by war; the emigration, the enmity generated between the belligerents, the economic devastation, the risk of nuclear war; et cetera. The point is, the pain of war is nearly incalculable. No one is going to fight a war for a more efficient bureaucracy.
If not like this, how would you measure the tradeoff?
> 75 instead of 80 pales in comparison to the pain they'd feel burying me at 25.
Is it crazy to say that the second is ~10 times worse?
> that's not even accounting for all the other negative externalities generated by war
I choose not to do quality of life comparisons because those are hard to do objectively. But If I were too, poverty also creates plenty of negative "externalities" no?
Poverty does create negative moral externalities, but keep in mind that Ukraine's economy is being wrecked by this war. Not only is it being physically destroyed or occupied, but emigration is robbing Ukraine of human capital as well. The in the likely event that the war ends as a frozen conflict, the risk of the war starting back up will scare away investment. Long story short, this war is impoverishing Ukraine far worse than soft Russian influence would have, had it been left to continue.
War, from a utilitarian perspective, is a moral disaster. You are going to have a very difficult time making a utilitarian case for it. That's why war hawks often use the virtue-ethic rhetoric that you alluded to in your piece; they claim the there are things more valuable than life itself. The utilitarian case for war is to risk life for the sake of... life? It's a risky investment at best, and nonsensical at worst.
Poverty does create negative moral externalities, but keep in mind that Ukraine's economy is being wrecked by this war. Not only is it being physically destroyed or occupied, but emigration is robbing Ukraine of human capital as well. The in the likely event that the war ends as a frozen conflict, the risk of the war starting back up will scare away investment. Long story short, this war is impoverishing Ukraine far worse than soft Russian influence would have, had it been left to continue.
War, from a utilitarian perspective, is a moral disaster. You are going to have a very difficult time making a utilitarian case for it. That's why war hawks often use the virtue-ethic rhetoric that you alluded to in your piece; they claim the there are things more valuable than life itself. The utilitarian case for war is to risk life for the sake of... life? It's a risky investment at best, and nonsensical at worst.
"Morally", there's more to consider besides just GDP and life expectancy. Folding Ukraine into the EU and NATO neatly means subjecting it to mass emigration as people leave to get better jobs, and mass immigration as Ukraine would be subject to hordes of MENA garbage people to make sure the state remained a free and fair democracy. Saving Ukraine from the horrible Russian communist orcs so that we could subject it to the horrible Muslim orcs is definitely a trade... a stupid one.
Setting aside the question of whether MENA immigrants are garbage (they are not, but I hardly think that discussion will be productive)
Poland is in EU and Schengen, they have hardly any MENA immigrants, as do Baltics, as do Romania. MENA immigrants will go to where the work prospects are best because they already uprooted themselves.
Ukraine would not be flooded by anyone. It would get lots of remittances by relatives who went to work in EU countries as part of Schengen and leave money to those who stayed behind. Puerto Rico became open borders with US and became the richest nation in the Caribbean despite depopulating by a fair amount, obviously Ukraine would follow similarly.
There's actually been a growing effort to push refugees and immigrants into Poland following their electing of a liberal government. Ukraine would likely face similar pressures if integrated into the EU.
And yet Poland has successfully resisted this pressure so far, and understandably so. When Poles see continuous examples of bad Muslim behavior in Western Europe, they just don't want to risk having stuff like that happen at home in Poland. As one Ukrainian-American with Polish citizenship once mentioned on another site, having Poles see rioting French Muslims serves as a vaccine for Poles.
Why exactly would Muslims want to move to Ukraine of all places?
Russia, on the other hand, could be an attractive destination for Central Asian Muslims if they can't find any better destinations. But there are plenty of more attractive destinations in the EU for Muslims to go to, so why go to Ukraine?
"Why exactly would Muslims want to move to Ukraine of all places?"
It's still marginally less of a shithole than their home countries, and they can count on any NATO aligned government to cover for them terrorizing the non believers.
I don’t think that the future NATO would necessarily be as soft towards Muslims as you think. Trump has already taken a pretty hard line towards Muslims, for instance. Marine Le Pen and others in Europe could take a similar line if they will ever come into power there.
Trump is anti Muslim, but him being in power is driving the NATO hegemons of the UK and France and Germany to become even more crazily pro Muslim. Remains to be seen if voters will ever push the anti immigration parties any further on their own
In France, Marine Le Pen performed much more strongly in 2022 than she did in 2017 and especially than her father did back in 2002.