{"id":57085,"date":"2014-09-01T12:05:49","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T20:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=57085"},"modified":"2014-09-01T12:05:49","modified_gmt":"2014-09-01T20:05:49","slug":"the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=57085","title":{"rendered":"The Ukraine Crisis Is The West’s Fault"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past year, I’ve found John J. Mearsheimer my favorite foreign policy expert. He writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia\u2019s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU\u2019s expansion eastward and the West\u2019s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a \u201ccoup\u201d — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West. <\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia\u2019s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past year, I’ve found John J. Mearsheimer my favorite foreign policy expert. He writes: …the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13775],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57086,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57085\/revisions\/57086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}