Ukraine/Quaker Op-Ed: War is not the Answer
In the wake of 9/11, as the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan and the Bush Administration was already discussing invading Iraq, members of a Quaker Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia took a line from Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech against the Vietnam war and made it into a yard sign: “War is Not the Answer.” The slogan quickly became the centerpiece of a campaign to end the post-9/11 wars by the Quaker lobby in Washington, the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
I worked with FCNL from 2006 to 2010, and I found in the slogan “War is Not the Answer” a powerful double meaning. It was an expression of Quaker faith, most famously exemplified by the declaration of members of the founding generation of Friends to King Charles II of England in 1660 “that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.” But “War is Not the Answer” was also an assertion of hard-headed political analysis, of shrewd policy advocacy tailored to the world as it is, not as faith would like it to be. The argument was that responding to the attacks of 9/11 by occupying Afghanistan, rather than concentrating on quickly bringing to justice those directly responsible, was a mistake certain to cause new human suffering and more likely to increase violent Islamic extremism than reduce it. And the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, was far worse and even more likely to have catastrophic results.
Many Americans would agree now that the costs and the results of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were horrific and entirely unacceptable. But we are now faced with a war not of our own making. Do Friends, whose advocacy has sometimes proven prescient in the past, have anything to say to our fellow citizens in this new and deadly situation created by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that some have termed the most dangerous international conflict since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis?
I think we do, if we follow the same course that informed our criticism of America’s own wars. We can best discern what needs to be done to end war and provide security for everyone by listening to the voices of our own experts from across the political spectrum and to the diversity of voices elsewhere.
In the case of Russia and Ukraine my listening begins with the late George Kennan, the dean of American Russia experts, who as a State Department analyst in Stalin’s Russia first proposed “containment” of the Soviet Union that guided U.S. policy throughout the Cold War. Kennan wrote in a New York Times op-ed in February 1997, as President Bill Clinton was preparing to bring the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into NATO, that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Vladimir Putin looks like the fulfillment of Kennan’s prophecy.
Kennan was not alone in his judgment. Clinton’s own Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, wrote in her memoirs that Russian President Boris Yeltsin “and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.”
For a long time, it looked like the fears of Kennan and others were exaggerated. A further expansion of NATO in 2004 to include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia passed without Russian action. But Vladimir Putin complained at the 2007 Europe-wide Munich Security Conference that “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders.” This he said represented “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
A year later, at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, President George W. Bush pressed to admit Georgia and Ukraine as members. France and Germany objected. U.S. intelligence agencies also opposed admitting the two countries bordering Russia, according to former U.S. National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill. In the end, Britain brokered a compromise in the form of a pledge in the final Bucharest communique that the two countries would become members sometime in the future. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, called the Bucharest compromise “the worst of both worlds. It created expectations that were not fulfilled and fears that are grossly exaggerated.”
Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in his 2014 memoir that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching.” It was, he said, a case of “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”
We are witnessing the worst results of the U.S. policy of steadily advancing NATO to Russia’s borders now with the brutal war on Ukraine, but only four months after the Bucharest summit, Russia invaded Georgia and recognized the “independence” of the two Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Then, in February 2014 when street protests led to the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (with behind-the-scenes efforts by the Obama Administration as well as Russia to influence the outcome), Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and began aiding Ukrainian separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
However you may wish to categorize it, as well-intentioned, foolish, principled, or aggressive, it is clear that U.S. policy toward post-Cold War Russia and the countries bordering it has failed. It has done more to provoke than protect.
What now can be done to staunch the bleeding? I think most Friends, and much common sense, would say ‘end the war as soon as possible and do everything possible to mitigate its effects; don’t escalate, and don’t encourage a fight to the last Ukrainian.’
Ukraine and Russia have maintained diplomatic contact throughout the conflict, one promising and unusual step for countries at war. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has declared that Ukraine is willing to accept neutral status and forego membership in NATO, while President Putin has outlined to Turkish intermediaries terms of a settlement that amount to Ukrainian recognition of the status quo on the ground before the invasion. (Putin’s floating of peace terms received prominent coverage by the BBC but little attention in American media.) All this suggests a negotiated solution is possible. As the atrocities of war mount in Ukraine, the sooner the better.
The most important thing the U.S. can do to promote a diplomatic solution—after refraining from escalating the war with a no-fly zone or other direct intervention—is to declare that U.S. sanctions are aimed at ending the war, not removing Vladimir Putin from power, and will be lifted when Ukraine and Russia reach an agreement.
In Ukraine, a prolonged or wider war is not the answer.
Jim Fine is a member of Bristol Friends Meeting and is a former Quaker International Affairs Representative and humanitarian worker and lobbyist with the Friends Committee on National Legislation.