To be brief, the capacity of the Russian Federation to levy the threat of military force against Ukraine in order to obtain concessions from the United States and from other members of the NATO alliance regarding the present and future status of Ukraine relative to NATO needs to be fully acknowledged in its broader context as both a subject of domestic political showmanship by Putin and United Russia and, not inconsequentially, as a critical subject in the maintenance of national security for the Russian Federation. In regard to the latter, I mean to suggest here that the United States and NATO are being portrayed by the government of the Russian Federation as the legitimate aggressors in their efforts to aid Ukraine in its ongoing internal disputes over its eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk, and there is absolutely something to be said for this argument. If the shoe was on the other foot and the Russian Federation became implicated in domestic politics in, say, Mexico directed against the national security interests of the United States, then we would rightly perceive a direct threat to our national security from the interventions of a military rival in our relations with an immediate hemispheric neighbor. If the Monroe doctrine should hold in one case, then shouldn't we expect some other equivalent acknowledgement for the regional territorial hegemony of the Russian Federation to hold in the other, at least with respect to states that directly border the Russian Federation. In these terms, abstractions like the idea that every nation should possess the privilege of democratic sovereignty are great guiding principles for foreign policy over the long term, but we also have to acknowledge that, if such abstract principles are to succeed over time, then we might have to compromise them minimally in the short term. Ukraine is in no position to take on Russia militarily without Western military assistance and, perhaps, without NATO military intervention. On the other hand, if a fight over Ukraine takes on the trappings of an existential struggle for the Russian Federation in which all bets are off and there are no means off the table to secure victory, then would we be willing to start World War III over an abstraction? To be clear, it is my position that the extension of NATO to the western borders of the Russian Federation has been a mistake. The Eastern European states that were granted an open invitation to enter into NATO's ranks in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse should never have been admitted, and the extension of Article 5 promise of collective intervention on their behalf should never have been granted to them. Doing so has placed us in the position that we are in now with Ukraine. It has furthered fueled the descent of Russian domestic politics and foreign policy into perpetual confrontation with the West. Acknowledging, in this regard, that, if we do actually believe in the importance of Ukrainian sovereignty, we cannot just let the Russian army roll across its eastern frontier without any consequences, we must simultaneously recognize that we cannot deal with the territorial integrity of states in the immediate hinterlands of the Russian Federation in the same way that we would deal with the maintenance of collective security for the states composing the NATO alliance prior to 1989, and, as such, we would have to recognize that some approach other than the leveraging of military force must be used to compel the government of the Russian Federation to behave itself and respect the sovereignty of its neighbors. NATO membership for Ukraine or, more minimally, the suggestion that the states of the NATO alliance might ever be open to extending such a relationship to Ukraine should be emphatically off the table. If the Russophobes in Eastern Europe and in the halls of the Pentagon and the US State Department think that it is worth meeting the threat of Russian aggression in Ukraine with the threat of military intervention by NATO, then they should stop for a second to contemplate the potential for such a conflict to literally go nuclear, even in some "limited," "de-escalatory" manner. I am hopeful that they have already done so and are thinking better of it.
