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Secretary of State designate Madeleine Albright listens during her Senate confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 8, 1997.
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Ronald H. Linden: Ukraine and the legacy of Madeleine Albright

Chris Kleponis/AFP via Getty Images

Ronald H. Linden: Ukraine and the legacy of Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright, who passed away on Wednesday, had many achievements, both personal and professional. The child of a Czech-Jewish family twice driven from her home, she pursued a successful career in America in both the academic and policy worlds. She advised several presidents and candidates, and became the first woman in U.S. history to serve as Secretary of State.

Her record was not spotless, as she herself admitted, but in the power-obsessed world of Washington, and especially foreign policy, she added a theme too little heard: that of moral obligations. This was clearest when it came to the question of NATO expansion and support for the new democracies of East Europe — the site of her own heritage. Her sharp vision then serves us well now.

When the democratic revolutions occurred in East Europe in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several formerly subjugated nations pushed to join the western alliances, the E.U. and NATO. Applicants included not only formerly communist states, like Poland and Hungary, but also former Soviet republics, like the Baltic states.

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Many veteran diplomats who were accustomed to Cold War realism, like George Kennan and Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the USSR, argued that admitting these states was unwise or even unnecessary as a Europe-wide security system might be constructed.

Washington hesitated and debate was fierce inside the Clinton administration. While recognizing and supporting the geostrategic case, Madeleine Albright made a powerful moral argument against keeping newly independent states forever across a line drawn by Josef Stalin. “With the Cold War over,” she said, “there is no moral or strategic basis for saying to the American people: ‘We must be allied with Europe's old democracies forever, but with Europe's new democracies never.’"

Still, NATO proceeded slowly. The Partnership for Peace was created to stall by offering non-member partner status. But people who had been subject to Soviet domination for 40 years, like the Poles, were not satisfied and pushed for full membership. Poland, along with the Czech Republic and Hungary, joined in 1999 and several others, including the three former Baltic Republics, followed in 2004. The E.U. was similarly deliberate, but added eight former communist countries the same year.

But it was NATO expansion that produced Russian objections. These became especially fierce after the U.S. and NATO threatened and bombed Serbia in 1999, a state that had not attacked the U.S. or any other NATO member. The United States, Ms. Albright said, was “not going to stand by” while the Milosevic regime tried to do in Kosovo what it could no longer do in Bosnia.

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Her statement was notable not only for its acknowledgement of previous, mistaken U.S. hesitance but for its moral stance. NATO thus became the midwife for the new state of Kosovo. Russia supported Serbia, but was weak at the time and Vladimir Putin was early in his ascension. NATO’s actions there, and in Afghanistan and Iraq in support of the U.S., reinforced the Russian view that NATO was not a defensive alliance but an instrument of U.S. hegemony.

NATO’s growth slowed after 2004 but, under pressure from conservatives during the 2008 election season, George W. Bush pushed NATO to promise eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia. It did so, but this time the world learned the truth of Winston Churchill’s caution that "Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks."

Russia invaded neighboring Georgia and carved out two ministates. Six years later, in the aftermath of E.U. involvement in Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” it did the same in Donetsk and Luhansk, and forcibly annexed Crimea. The Russian aim was clear: no more NATO members on the territory of the former USSR, whose collapse Vladimir Putin called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

Powerful nations assert the right to police their neighborhoods — think of the U.S. in Latin America or China on its borders. Despite the fact that Russia agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty” of Ukraine in the Budapest Agreement of 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons, Moscow wants its way: a Ukraine that is subordinate and attentive to Russia’s perceived security needs.

Some, like U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, blame the victim, saying Ukraine kept “poking the bear” by seeking NATO membership. But why wouldn’t a western-oriented democracy with a long history of territorial dissection and Russian control seek protection from the very act that has now occurred?

Like Ms. Albright’s, Ukraine’s record is not without blemish. It has its oligarchs and severe corruption. But its democracy project, according to Freedom House, has put it ahead of every other former communist state not already in the E.U. It has a notorious history of antisemitism, but now a vibrant Jewish community and a Jewish president. It is, as David Frum calls it, “a nation worth fighting for.”

In the last op-ed she wrote before her death, Madeleine Albright read the situation clearly and displayed her gift for speaking truth to power: “Ukraine is entitled to its sovereignty,” she wrote, “no matter who its neighbors happen to be. In the modern era, great countries accept that, and so must Mr. Putin.”

Ronald H. Linden is a retired Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as Director of the Center for European Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies.

First Published: March 24, 2022, 6:14 p.m.

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