The road to war in Ukraine started with the decision in the mid-1990s to enlarge NATO’s membership to include countries formerly in Russia’s security sphere. The enlargement took place in phases, but finally sinking Ukraine into the NATO pocket would have run the table. Russia went to war to stop it. Most of the events in the run-up took place during a period that is sometimes called America’s “unipolar moment.” Most experts agree that this “moment” has passed, and it likely ended even before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Let us set the start date for America’s unipolar moment as December 25, 1991, when the hammer and sickle, the insignia of Communist Russia, was lowered for the last time at the Kremlin and the tricolor of the Russian Federation took its place. The Soviet Union was no more, and the United States stood supreme in the world, at the apex of a power structure in which no other country on earth was able to challenge it militarily. This situation lasted only a generation, but during that time the way the U.S. acted in the world was radically different from its behavior during the Cold War.

For one thing, the United States replaced Russia as the world’s great revolutionary power. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Russia waved the red banner. It told the world that the communist way of life is universal and inevitable, that it possessed the secrets of economic success, and that it was the champion of good fighting the forces of oppression. It supported communist insurgencies and intrigues. But when the Cold War ended, Russia shed its ideological pretenses and became a country numbered among other countries, and a struggling one at that.

The United States then stepped up with an assertive foreign policy that pushed economic liberalization and global democratic revolution. Historically, Americans have always believed that such values as “liberty” and “equality” are not meant for Americans only, but for people everywhere. The idea that a world filled with more democracies would be a better place became the consensus view of policy experts. Democracy promotion could be found in presidential statements, think-tank policy papers, and in national security strategies. The downside to this kind of talk is that it inflates the more traditional conceptions of the national interest. It became customary to think that liberty at home cannot be secure unless liberty prevails everywhere. Even as the old Soviet Union sought to globalize communist values, post-Cold War America sought to globalize its own political agenda. A moral vision merged with America’s military might, which meant that global miscreants could find themselves sanctioned, ostracized, and in some cases the subject of regime change.

Another before-and-after change can be seen in NATO itself. During the Cold War, NATO was quintessentially a defensive alliance. It did not fire a shot or drop a bomb or engage in any military operation against another country. It held firm, contained the Soviet threat, and out-waited the enemy’s lifetime. After the Cold War, a change took place. NATO began dropping bombs. All its military operations took place after NATO’s original enemy had collapsed. In 1999 NATO launched a 79-day aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia. The purpose was humanitarian: to stop the civil war in which ethnic Serbs threatened the minority Albanian (and predominantly Muslim) population. Although the motive was noble (“Operation Noble Anvil” was the Pentagon’s name for it), the action lacked U.N. Security Council approval. Russia and China were ready to veto if the matter came to a vote. The episode showed that if only one power dominates the system, it can finesse the rules to fit its end. American might made right.

Another contrast between the two periods can be seen in the American attitude towards “spheres of influence.” During the Cold War, both Russia and the U.S. were respectful of each other’s security space, but in the post-Cold War period disdain for traditional power politics became American policy. “The days of empire and spheres of influence are over,” President Obama proclaimed in a speech in Warsaw in 2014. “Bigger nations must not be allowed to bully the small or impose their will at the barrel of a gun.”

Similar denunciations of “spheres of influence” have been made by the last four American administrations. The outlook is bipartisan. Behind it is the idea that if all countries in the world were democracies, there would be no need for “spheres of influence” or “balance of power” in the first place. All countries would have pacific values and they would just get along with each other. 

A crisis heated up in the summer of 1961 after Russia demanded the withdrawal of NATO troops from Berlin. In a televised speech, President John F. Kennedy announced the call up of reserves, but he also made this remarkable statement: “We recognize the Soviet Union's historical concern about their security in Central and Eastern Europe… and we believe arrangements can be worked out which will help to meet those concerns, and make it possible for both security and freedom to exist in this troubled area.”

There is irony here. During the Berlin Crisis, an American president showed regard for Russia’s security needs, whereas the several post-Cold War American presidents have shown no such regard. To the contrary, they have backed NATO's enlargement precisely into the spaces where Kennedy would not tread. Of course, Kennedy had to sound conciliatory because he faced a dangerous foe and Europe was divided into two camps, whereas Obama had the luxury of denouncing “empires” and “spheres of influence” because he spoke at a time when America had a near monopoly on power. In fact, Obama’s generation of policy elites have known no other kind of world.

All three cases -- America’s revolutionary turn, NATO military operations, and the cancelation of traditional great power politics -- stem from the fact that external constraints were removed from American behavior. When a great power faces little or no opposition, the lesser powers in the system must depend on it to use self-restraint, to be willing to live in a world with imperfections, to be willing “not to win too much,” and not to run the table. America’s sense of self-restraint is weak. When the external constraints fell away, the dogs of democratism were unleashed.

Today a new kind of world order, one with multiple power centers, seems to be taking shape, and the U.S. has already started thinking about how to accommodate itself to it. The smart money is on little or no change in America’s basic outlook: on the surface, it will manage conflicts with the other power centers, but at its core the belief that America is destined to transform the world is hard-wired. The preferable outcome has a low probability of occurrence: the U.S., like Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed, should shed its ideological pretenses and settle into becoming a country numbered among other countries. It would certainly be an excellent specimen among them, but let it be one that holds its sense of crusading zeal in check and gives full measure to the virtue of self-restraint.

James Sorianoi is a retired Foreign Service Officer. He has previously written for American Thinker on the Ukraine war here, here, and here.

Image: Public Domain