Is there a positive outcome for the Ukraine-Russia debacle?

• Author: Adams, Tucker Hart
• Position: THE ECONOMIST

A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS IN UKRAINE to collect folk songs with my high school granddaughter and a folklorist from the Russian Academy of Science. Tongue-in-cheek, I asked, "Does the Crimea belong to Ukraine or Russia?"

The answer was instantaneous: "Russia, of course! Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in a drunken stupor, but it wasn't his to give away." I would have gotten the same answer from any Russian I questioned. So when protests and violence began to unfold in Kiev, I knew there was trouble ahead.

Beginning in 1989 I spent many months in Russia. I taught economics at Moscow State University, ran a small consulting firm to help Russian companies learn how to do business in capitalist society and traveled the country.

The United States made two serious foreign policy mistakes in the early 1990s and now they are coming back to haunt us. The first occurred in June 1994, the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. There was a massive, multinational celebration in Europe, and Russia was not invited because it wasn't present at D-Day. But they were busy fighting more than half the German military on the eastern front so the D-Day invasion could succeed. The Russians were insulted. I was in Moscow and witnessed the blow firsthand. It was thoughtless on our part and set a negative tone.

The second mistake was more serious and far-reaching --keeping NATO in existence after 1991. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in April 1949 to serve three purposes:

* Deter Soviet expansion

* Forbid the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent

* Encourage European political integration Numerous events in the ensuing decades demonstrated the wisdom of that decision: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Berlin blockade, Afghanistan.

The excuse for maintaining NATO following the disintegration of the Soviet Union was that the Alliance's two other original mandates still held: Deter...