A Moral Imperative in East Europe
We often talk about blow-back: when a military adventurism goes sour because of foreign retaliation. But we never apply it in the other direction: foreign governments facing consequences for their adventurism.
In essence, this is what has happened in Eastern Europe. Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and NATO deployed more troops to Eastern Europe in response. This wasn’t just a predictable response to aggression, it was also the right thing to do. We should not mistake failure to impose liberal ideals in a Middle East which rejected them forthright, with doom in an East Europe which embraced those ideals independently.
After the end of the Cold War, countries in Eastern Europe broke from the Soviet Union and established their own liberal-democracies. A decision was made at that time to bring these countries into NATO so they could have stability to develop. The logic being quite simple: it’s hard to develop into a liberal-democracy when massive portions of GDP is spent on defense, and bringing these countries under the NATO umbrella would diffuse these costs. In the long-term, this benefits everyone, since those countries get stable development and can later share the costs of defense with the rest of the coalition. Importantly, NATO expansion was widely popular in the nations NATO expanded too, and still enjoys 70% support in Poland today.
This, of course, made many in Russia angry. It is a common theme in Russian History to dominate nations in eastern Europe to keep a distance between the Russian heartland and European Empires. This is why every time Russia loses this territory, it is quick to take it back. We saw this with Tsar Alexander I in 1815, with Russia’s multiple wars with the Ottomans in the 19th century, when Russia went to war over Serbia in 1914, when the Red Army invaded Poland in 1919, and when the Red Army seized Eastern Europe in 1945. So it wasn’t surprising that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia eventually began invading countries again. They invaded Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 and have been meddling in Eastern Ukraine to this day.
Russia has also returned to its authoritarian streak. Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party controls the whole government, and it’s biggest opposition are the remains of the Communist Party. The Russian state is implicitly adamant that it wants control of east Europe again – and it could achieve this, if the west would just back off.
The argument is sometimes made that Russia wouldn’t be doing this if NATO weren’t approaching its borders. But remember that Russia’s first war was in Georgia; the west wasn’t seriously involved there. Of course, the Ukrainian interventions were triggered when Ukraine made gestures about leaving Russia’s sphere of influence and joining Europe’s. So it is true that Russia is pissed about western influence in this instance. But does that make their actions just, or the West’s actions wrong?
It isn’t as if NATO invaded Eastern Europe and stole it from Russia, the people in eastern Europe liberated themselves from Russia and invited NATO to defend them. Moscow may be uncomfortable with this, but it is the right of east European nations to rebuke Russian rule, and establish themselves as liberal-democracies.
Furthermore, NATO’s East European policy has worked. Countries like Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland have seen some of the highest growth in Europe, and have become much better places post-soviet rule. And the coalition between these countries and the rest of the west also paves the way for reducing average military expenditures (if we could get our government on board). If each nation has to pay fully for its own defense, it must spend much more than if it cooperates with similar nations. This is actually very important if you, as I do, want to reduce U.S. military spending.
Ultimately, the Russian state is enraged that they aren’t getting the fair share of world power that they have traditionally had. But the pride of wanna-be-tsars is a worthy trade-off for human liberty in Eastern Europe.
We can recognize that western states are dirty actors, with the public choice dilemmas and disasters that states have always had in history. But we can also reject the false-equivalence between liberal-democracies and pseudo-tsardoms pushed by Russian state media. There is a reason Russia lost its empire, and why its former satellites sought western support.
We must reject a fundamentally collectivist idea that states have rights, and therefore states deserve fairness in the international arena. On the contrary, only individuals have rights, and state’s just powers must be judged by how well they respect those rights. When people choose to throw off the yoke of a tyranny and establish governments that are more respectful of individual liberty, they have the moral right to defend that new regime, including with foreign help – because it is the liberty of individuals that matters in the end, not the liberty of states.
So let me be clear: the Russian state is not entitled to liberty in Eastern Europe. That is reserved to the people of Eastern Europe, and western states have as much a right to defend the liberties of East Europeans as they have a right to defend the liberties of Alaskans.
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