Is This The Best Case Against Trump's Ukraine Strategy?

Yesterday I linked to a comment by Michael McFaul, a Stanford Political Science professor, Obama advisor, and US Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014. Wikipedia calls him "the architect of the so-called 'Russian reset policy'". He has been both a prestigious supporter and an architect of the Biden Ukraine policy. At Wikipedia,

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, McFaul and Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak headed an expert group called the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, which developed an individual sanctions roadmap with plans to tighten sanctions against Russia.

McFaul debated the Russian invasion with John Mearsheimer in May 2022. McFaul has taken a position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine identifying Putin as a culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine against the position of Mearsheimer that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence of perceived threats from an expanding NATO.

While this post isn't about Mearsheimer, it's worth pointing out that Mearsheimer's views, which seemed even somewhat bizarre against the initial optimism over the war, have aged very well over the past few years. McFaul, on tne other hand, has continued to make the case for the foreign policy establishment, most recently at The Atlantic:

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

. . . Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort.

I'm frankly puzzled that he claims NATO expansion was "announced in 2002 and completed in 2004". NATO expansion began with the reunification of Germany in 1990, with the former DDR gaining NATO membership via the existing BRD membership, an expansion that was recognized and negotiated at the time. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004, which is apparently the "NATO expansion" McFaul feels was announced and completed -- but then Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, while Montenegro joined in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

For fairness, we'll leave out the accessions of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, after the start of the Ukraine war. But It's hard to avoid the impression that McFaul is somehow trying to minimize the fact of NATO expansion over more than three decades. I've already noted here that NATO apparently ceased to become a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991 and had effectively stopped exporting world revolution well before then. So why was NATO expanding? Prof Mearsheimer made this point in 2022:

Given the sad state of Russian military power, Moscow was in no position to pursue revanchist policies in Eastern Europe. Tellingly, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul notes that Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned before the crisis broke out in 2014. It was an impulsive move in response to the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO enlargement was not intended to contain a Russian threat but was instead as part of a broader policy to spread the liberal international order into Eastern Europe and make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

So as far as I can read McFaul's argument in The Atlantic, he's trying to give the impression that NATO expansion has been minimal, it just took place over a two-year period, but Putin isn't concerned about that anyhow, he's just an enemy of democracy or something. Frankly, I think Mearsheimer has the stronger argument. McFaul stresses throughout that Putin's opposition to democracy is at the root of his own expansionism:

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule.

. . . In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

. . . Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world.

. . . After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world.

. . . Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

. . . After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe.

. . . The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

I think it's just as possible to argue that the "liberal West" is hardly a bastion of traditional democratic ideals -- in Canada, an unpopular prime minister "resigned" in a lengthy process by which he was replaced with a doctrinaire Eurocrat who never won an actual election. In NATO member Romania, following annulment of a 2024 wlection, the most popular candidate, a conservative, was banned from participating in the May rerun. In the US 2024 presidential election, the Democrat incumbent candidate was forced to withdraw via an extraconstitutional process and replaced with the vice president, who was never nominated as a candidate by any existing procedure.

Ukraine itself, of course, has indefinitely delayed its own elections. It's hardly a model for liberal democracy; in the very best case, it's simply a mirror image of a corrupt Russian oligarchy.

McFaul wants to repeat the losing 2016 and 2024 Democrat strategies by somehow claiming Trump is "undemocratic" and is doing Putin's bidding. But in the process, he seems to feel he can bypass any strategic reason for continuing the Ukraine stalemate. In effect, he's falling back on the idea that we should continue the war because Trump wants to end it, which is absurd.

But apparently this is the strongest case a member of the foreign policy establishment can make for continuing the war -- not doing it is a "threat to our democracy".