4. Turn---Russia is the historic imperial power. American leadership is a necessary corrective to violent nationalism that subjugates millions and upends international stability.

That Russians ultimately rejected that course has been unfortunate but not entirely surprising. Nor was Russia’s behavior primarily a response to actions by the West, such as the enlargement of NATO. Long-standing Russian ambitions and insecurities, together with a tradition of autocrats benefiting from popular fears of foreign threats, have made it difficult for Russia to steer out of old ruts.

For the better part of three centuries, the Russian empire had included everything from the territories of the Baltics to the Black Sea, as well as parts of Poland. For decades the Soviet Union was regarded by the world as a superpower, the equal of the United States, the co-manager of a “bipolar world.” The Cold War may have been a low point for the living standards and individual freedoms of many Russians, but it was a high point in Russia’s long history as a great power and empire, equaling the triumph of 1814 when Russian forces drove across Europe and occupied Paris. During the Cold War, pride in this superpower role even offered some compensation for the privations and abuses Russians suffered at home. If Russians had changed their historical trajectory after the end of the Cold War, if like Germany and Japan they had chosen economic over geopolitical competition, focused on improving their standard of living and integrating themselves fully into the liberal world economy, they might have lived better lives but at the price of Russia’s historical greatness on the world stage.

We would like to believe that ordinary Russian people would gladly have traded superpower status for a freer, safer, and more prosperous existence. That is part of our modern, liberal faith. But the Russian people’s desire to restore their country to greatness on the world stage proved to be a significant factor in Russian politics after the Cold War. Ultranationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky consistently received a quarter of the votes in elections, and Zhirinovsky’s platform had less to do with national security, strictly speaking, than with national honor, national greatness, and the survival of Russian culture. “Unless we get back the historical borders of Russia,” he argued, the Russian people were “slowly going to degrade and die out.” The U.S. bombing of Serbia in March 1999 outraged Russians, not only because they sympathized with their fellow Slavs but because Russia’s inability to do anything about it was a reminder of Russia’s diminished stature on the world stage. Even the billions of dollars in financial aid provided by the West was humiliating. In the 1930s Stalin had promised, “We shall catch up to America and overtake it.” Now America was giving Russia handouts.139

It did not help that the political and economic reforms instituted first by Mikhail Gorbachev and then by Boris Yeltsin neither improved Russians’ economic situation nor, it seemed, produced true democracy. Instead, a few got rich and powerful while the rest suffered. The United States and the West ended up providing Russia billions of dollars, but there were critical moments, including at the very beginning, when the Bush administration had been parsimonious. There was no Marshall Plan for Russia as there had been for Western Europe. It’s not clear that it would have made a difference. The Russians had their own Dolchstosslegende, a Russian version of post–World War I Germany’s stab-in-the-back story, featuring Gorbachev and Yeltsin as the villains who caved in to the West, gave up Russia’s position in Eastern and Central Europe, and allowed the Soviet Union itself to break up—the greatest “geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, as Putin put it.

It was in this context that the United States and the West came to be viewed as a threat: not to Russia’s security but to Russian ambition and Russian pride. Many Russians, led by Putin, have pointed to NATO enlargement as proof of the West’s hostile intent—and many American critics of the decision have agreed. But as Russian generals and strategic thinkers admitted in candid moments, NATO’s expansion did not increase the alliance’s overall military capabilities or the threat to Russian security. The two decades after the Cold War saw steady decreases in the numbers of U.S. troops in Europe and, even by Russian estimates, an overall reduction of the “joint military potential of its members.”140 Putin certainly had much less reason to worry about the U.S. or NATO threat when Barack Obama was in the White House than Gorbachev did in the era of the Reagan defense buildup. More than Russia’s security, NATO’s enlargement threatened Russia’s ability to reassert its regional sphere of interest, to reclaim its position as a dominant power in Eastern and Central Europe and its standing on the world stage as an equal of the United States.

This may not have been strictly rational, but feelings of pride and honor are often more potent than rational calculations of interest. They shaped the policies of Germany and Japan, the self-described “have-not” nations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the result was to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Germany’s arms buildup accompanied by a bullying diplomacy produced the very predicament German leaders claimed to fear: the encirclement by hostile neighbors. Russia’s actions have had the same effect. By the end of the Obama administration, Putin’s attempts to restore Russian influence and military involvement from Northern Europe to the Middle East sufficiently unnerved its neighbors that the United States felt compelled to increase its military role in a region from which it had been steadily pulling away. Last year American forces in Eastern Europe increased for the first time in three decades.

Many in the West have seen this as a “security dilemma” and sought ways to solve what they regard as an unfortunate misunderstanding. Such was the theory behind the Obama administration effort to “reset” relations with Russia back in 2009. That effort failed, however, and in large part because it misdiagnosed Russians’ feelings and motives. In the classic security dilemma as imagined by international relations theorists, insecurity rises on both sides despite the fact that both sides are trying to reduce their insecurity. Tensions rise even as both sides seek to reduce tensions. Yet reducing tensions has never been Putin’s objective. He has wanted to increase tensions, and insecurity, on both sides. And he has had sound reasons for wanting to do so.

The problem Russia has faced since the end of the Cold War is that the greatness Putin and many Russians seek cannot be achieved in a world that is secure and stable, in which the liberal order remains coherent and cohesive, especially in Europe, and in which the United States remains willing and able to continue providing the basic guarantees that make the liberal order possible. Russia’s economy today is the size of Spain’s. Its military, except for its nuclear force, is no longer that of a superpower. Its demographic trends suggest a nation in decline. The present world order affords Russia the chance to be more secure than at any time in its history. But in this world order Russia cannot be a superpower. To achieve greatness on the world stage, Russia must bring the world back to a past when neither Russians nor anyone else enjoyed security. To return Russia to its historical influence on the world stage, the liberal order must be weakened and toppled, and international strategic competition must be returned to its normal historical state.

Such a world not only offers the best chance of restoring Russian greatness. It also serves Putin’s personal ambitions. It justifies and even requires a strong leader. Like the tsars of the past, Putin tells the Russian people that to defend a “vast territory” and to occupy “a major place in world affairs” require “enormous sacrifices and privations on the part of our people.”141 Stalin said much the same, and indeed Putin’s repeated comparisons of the United States with Nazi Germany and his claim that opponents in Ukraine and elsewhere are Nazis, evokes not only the Great Patriotic War and past Russian glory but also the need for a strong leader like Stalin.

Putin’s hostility to the liberal world is also personal. Ever since he consolidated power, he has worried that the external forces of liberalism would work to undermine his authoritarian rule at home. Behind every democratic revolution on former Soviet territory, in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, he saw the hand of the West, and particularly the United States, even though the role of outsiders was not the decisive factor in the toppling of the authoritarian regimes in those countries. His objection to the expansion of NATO has less to do with the eastward advance of the alliance’s military power than the presence of democracies closer to Russia’s borders. Putin is at least as worried about the eastward advance of the European Union as he is about NATO. It was after Ukraine negotiated a trade agreement with the EU that he invaded and seized Crimea.

It is hard to see what concessions the United States and the West could offer to address the complex mix of feelings and motives whose sources are more internal than external, more psychological than strategic. Obama’s “reset,” his decision to trim back missile defenses in Poland in response to Russian objections, his tepid response to the attack on Ukraine, and his acceptance of a Russian military role in Syria and the broader Middle East did nothing to cure Russians’ sense of grievance or tame Putin’s ambitions. They only emboldened Putin to press for more. The election of Trump, who throughout his campaign expressed a desire for improved relations with Moscow, did not affect Putin’s approach to the world. Those who suggest we should recognize a Russian sphere of interest in its region should recall that Russia’s historical sphere of interest does not end in Ukraine; it begins in Ukraine. It includes the Baltic states, and it includes Poland.

That is a dangerous path to head down, as history has shown. Even if we sacrificed Ukrainian independence or Georgian independence or Baltic independence in the hope of calming Russian anxieties and sating Russians’ ambitions, such concessions would not solve the problem, any more than feeding Manchuria to Japan and Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany solved those problems. The peace established after World War II and which endures almost seventy-five years later was not based on accommodating Japanese and German anxieties, even though those nations suffered infinitely greater horrors at the hands of the Allies than anything Russians suffered at the end of the Cold War. Among the liberal order’s greatest contributions to international peace has been the discrediting and denial of great-power spheres of interest. To begin acknowledging and accepting such spheres again would be a big step back to old patterns of history and to the conflicts and instability that characterize the international system “as it is.”