Enough With the Idiotic Statements On Ukraine. Eminent scholars need to stop embarrassing themselves with policy proposals that endanger people’s lives.
NEIL A. ABRAMS
July 16, 2024
Hardly a day goes by without some academic calling on the West to give into Russia’s demands on Ukraine. Few of these commentators have specialized knowledge of either country, a fact which should give them pause before pontificating on the matter. Alas, it does not.
The past week has seen no less than three contributions from this sorry genre. All take the form of open letters, mostly from scholars.
The first, published in the Financial Times, emphasizes “the desirability, even urgency, of a negotiated peace, not least for the sake of Ukraine itself.” Notably, the lead author, Robert Skidelsky, was suspended from Britain’s House of Lords for failing to disclose his relationship to a think tank funded by a Kremlin-connected businessman. Skidelsky also served on the board of a Russian state firm for years following Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, all while using his official platform to argue against the sanctions imposed on the Kremlin for its naked land-grab.
As Russia itself has made clear, any deal would require Ukraine to cede large amounts of territory and the people living in it. The result, for the millions of Ukrainians unwillingly consigned to Russian domination, would be the furthest thing from peace.
The second letter, signed by dozens of Nobel laureates and which for some reason is addressed to the Pope and Dalai Lama, demands a ceasefire as a prelude to peace negotiations. The statement begins as if announcing its own preposterousness: with a disclaimer that “certain prohibited words in Russia” have been blotted out of the text “under the threat of criminal prosecution.”
Such schemes contain a major flaw, one that should be glaringly obvious yet which never seems to dawn on those who advance them. As Russia itself has made clear, any deal would require Ukraine to cede large amounts of territory and the people living in it. The result, for the millions of Ukrainians unwillingly consigned to Russian domination, would be the furthest thing from peace. Instead, it would be more of the killings, deportations, child abductions, arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual violence they have already endured.
How, you might ask, do I know that a negotiated settlement would lead to further Russian atrocities against Ukrainians? First, it is what Russia has always done in the wake of armed conflict. The post-Soviet period alone offers up an abundance of examples. In Chechnya, Georgia (twice), Crimea, and eastern Ukraine (from 2014-2021), Russia either committed war
crimes itself or enabled them on the part of its clients—even after the cessation of active hostilities.
Second, the Kremlin has announced—loudly and repeatedly—that it plans to carry out such measures in whatever parts of Ukraine it ends up controlling. Actual peace is attainable by one means and one means only: the complete expulsion of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory. Therefore, anyone genuinely interested in peace should be lobbying not for territorial partition but for more arms transfers and the removal of the counterproductive restrictions on their use.
NATO and the Logic of Deterrence
The third and final letter issued in the past week adopts a different tack but is no less inimical to peace. It is a statement from dozens of international relations specialists urging NATO to reject the prospect of Ukraine’s accession to the alliance. Of the 61 scholars who signed on, perhaps four have any substantive expertise on Russia or Ukraine. The fact that their recommended course of action is dangerously myopic should thus come as no surprise.
Their most recent missive, it turns out, features all the inanity of their previous ones while having the added defect of resting on mutually-contradictory premises.
To their discredit, many of the signatories have previously endorsed the sort of “peace deal” discussed above. Below are just a few examples:
Emma Ashford once argued that “It would be far better from the point of view of human lives and of cost to try and at least freeze the conflict in place rather than continuing the slaughter.” In stating this, she evinces no awareness of how such a freeze would affect those doomed to live under Russian occupation.
Samuel Moyn signed a statement recommending a “humanitarian ceasefire, as a prelude to good-faith negotiations toward a permanent peace.” This, we are supposed to believe, would somehow lessen rather than exacerbate the “abyss of war and suffering” already borne by Ukrainians.
Anatol Lieven affixed his name to the embarrassing letter by Lord Skidelsky mentioned earlier, which includes the following nonsensical line: “The sooner peace is negotiated the more lives will be saved.”
Charles Kupchan, evidently ignorant of the disastrous and bloody implications of what he is proposing, calls on the West to push for “a durable truce, one that could prevent renewed conflict and, even better, set the stage for a lasting peace.”
Stephen Wertheim belittles Western efforts to “back up an ally” and instead favors a bid “to end the war at the negotiating table.” How this would help the Ukrainians consigned to Russian occupation is left to the reader to figure out.
Mark Hannah claims that “lofty expressions of unconditional support” for Ukraine will end up “hindering the kind of negotiated peace that saves civilian lives and restores stability.” The assumption that a negotiated peace would benefit rather than harm these civilians again goes unexamined.
Finally, Stephen Walt, under the guise of rescuing Ukrainians from their “ill-advised” and “dangerous” obstinance, would compel them to sign away millions of their fellow citizens to genocidal subjugation. “If we are talking about human lives,” he admonishes those who, unlike him, would actually bear the costs of his advice, “we must look beyond abstract principles and consider the real-world consequences of different choices”—this, mind you, from a guy who is entirely oblivious to the real-world consequences of his own preferred course of action.
Obliviousness, in fact, is only one of the two possible explanations for such calamitous guidance. The other, less charitable, alternative is that they are knowingly advocating measures which will enable more genocide. Neither reflects particularly well on the proponents.
And yet, having already disqualified themselves from speaking on the subject, they are once again calling on us to defer to their supposed expertise. Their most recent missive, it turns out, features all the inanity of their previous ones while having the added defect of resting on mutually-contradictory premises.
The authors of the letter begin by claiming that any pledge by NATO to defend Ukraine from attack would lack credibility. Since the alliance has opted not to come to Kyiv’s defense thus far, they maintain, it would probably not do so in the future either.
“Since Russia began invading Ukraine in 2014,” they write, “Nato Allies have demonstrated through their actions that they do not believe the stakes of the conflict, while significant, justify the price of war. If Ukraine were to join Nato, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of Nato’s security guarantee—and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct Nato-Russia war or the unraveling of Nato itself.”
It is true that NATO has avoided direct involvement in the war. There is a very good reason for that: Ukraine is not a member of the alliance. If it were to become one, the calculus facing the other members would obviously change, and so, as a consequence, would Russia’s. That is because NATO’s credibility would now be on the line, which would be reason enough to follow through on their commitments.
If Ukraine joined NATO, the authors state, “Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee.” But why, one wonders, has Russia not doubted the very same guarantee long extended to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? The Baltic States are tiny; their combined population is a mere sixteen percent of Ukraine’s while their territory amounts to less than a third. The costs they would pose to a Russian invasion are thus a fraction of what Moscow is now dealing with in Ukraine.
So, why has Russia not invaded them? The answer is simple: They are part of NATO. If Russia attacked them and NATO did not intervene on their behalf, the reputational damage to the alliance would be massive—a fact which is abundantly clear to everyone involved, including Russia.
Is there any particular reason why the security guarantee that has so far deterred Moscow from invading the Baltic States would fail to serve its purpose if Ukraine joined? This, one would think, is an obvious question, and yet the letter’s signatories do not deign to answer it.
In fact, they could have made the same argument against NATO admitting Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. After all, the Soviets sent forces into all these countries without triggering a military response from the alliance. Would this not have given post-Soviet Russia cause to doubt NATO’s security guarantee to these states when they became members after the Cold War?
Going by the logic of the recent letter, Moscow would have had every reason to question that commitment. And yet, during the quarter-century that has elapsed since the first of these states joined NATO, Russia has not re-invaded them. To be sure, Russia’s conventional military capabilities are a shadow of what the Soviet Union once had. But it still boasts a nuclear arsenal that could destroy human civilization many times over, as it possessed decades ago. Why, then, has Russia not tried to reconquer these former satellites? Could it be that it views NATO’s security obligation to them with all the seriousness it merits?
It is already outrageous that so many of them are on record encouraging a “peace deal” whose obvious result would be to exacerbate an ongoing genocide. Now, they are doubling down by lending their collective prestige to a proposal that would leave a long-suffering country unnecessarily exposed to further war.
NATO has an interest in defending its members because failing to do so would threaten the security of them all. The letter’s authors acknowledge this point when they write: “The purpose of NATO is not to signal esteem for other countries; it is to defend NATO territory and strengthen the security of NATO members.” Still, for some reason, they would have us believe that this purpose would apply to every NATO member except Ukraine. Why? It makes no sense.
It would be bad enough if the letter had stopped here. And yet, it continues on. After advancing one spurious argument against Ukraine’s NATO membership, the authors proceed to offer another—only this second one happens to contradict the first. “The closer Nato comes to promising that Ukraine will join the alliance once the war ends,” the drafters write, “the greater the incentive for Russia to keep fighting the war and killing Ukrainians so as to forestall Ukraine’s integration into Nato.”
Do you see what happened here? Having just claimed that Russia would regard a NATO security commitment to Ukraine as a joke, they state in the very next breath that Russia would treat that commitment so seriously that it would fight Ukraine to the bitter end.
Some sixty esteemed scholars, you will recall, signed onto this letter. Yet, in the heat of their collective paranoia toward the Great Russian Menace, not a single one noticed the glaring contradiction at the heart of their argument.
Leave aside, for the moment, that Russia’s capacity to wage war is not, in fact, limitless, and that at some point it will have to give up its hopeless dream of marching on Kyiv. One can argue that Russia would never take a NATO security guarantee to Ukraine seriously. It is a bad argument, to be sure, but one can make it nonetheless. Having offered it, however, elementary logic would preclude one from advancing the exact opposite contention—that Russia would be so afraid of a
NATO security guarantee that it would never abandon its war on Ukraine. Yet, somehow, our scholars find a way to argue both.
If there is one takeaway from this farcical episode, it is that academics who lack the requisite expertise on Russia and Ukraine should refrain from offering policy advice on the matter—if not for the world’s sake, then for their own. It is already outrageous that so many of them are on record encouraging a “peace deal” whose obvious result would be to exacerbate an ongoing genocide. Now, they are doubling down by lending their collective prestige to a proposal that would leave a long-suffering country unnecessarily exposed to further war. If you happen to be one of the signatories and are reading this, I beg of you: Please stop, and find something less destructive to do with your time.
Neil A. Abrams has a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and is a political risk consultant specializing in Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of Eastern Europe.