Opinion | The Tale the West Tells Itself About Ukraine

Sometimes the stories we tell to win the war help us lose the peace. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States decided the Taliban government in Afghanistan was as culpable as the Qaeda terrorists who struck America. It then spent 20 years trying to keep the Taliban entirely out of power, only to cede the whole country to them.

The story we are telling ourselves today about the war in Ukraine runs its own risk. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the debate in Western capitals about the origins of the conflict settled on one leading cause: Russia took up arms exclusively out of aggressive and imperialistic drives, and Western policies, including the yearslong expansion of NATO, were beside the point.

When NATO weighs Ukraine’s prospects for membership at its summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month, it must recognize that the war has more complex causes than this popular narrative suggests. Without question, Russia is committing horrific, inexcusable aggression against Ukraine, and imperialist attitudes in Moscow run deep. But partly because of those attitudes, Russia’s leaders are also reacting to NATO’s expansion. Folding Ukraine into the alliance won’t end that impulse, even with U.S. backing and the nuclear guarantee it brings. Ukraine’s best path to peace is to be well armed and supported outside NATO.

Since the invasion, a chorus of current and former U.S. officials has insisted that, as a former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, tweeted, “This war has nothing to do with NATO expansion.” In their account, the invasion emanated chiefly from motives internal to Russia. In one version, Putin the Autocrat seeks to destroy the democracy on his doorstep, lest ordinary Russians demand freedom themselves. In another, Putin the Imperialist wants to restore the Russian empire by annexing territory. Either way, the West’s actions played little part.

It’s hard to imagine that future historians will be so simplistic. Even tyrants do not act in a vacuum. Invading Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe by land area, entailed enormous costs and risks for Mr. Putin. Before attacking Kyiv, he spent more than two decades as Russia’s leader, tacking toward the West and then against it. The dismissal of any Western role reeks of what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to ascribe the behavior of others to their essential nature and not the situations they face.

Ample evidence suggests that enlarging NATO over the years stoked Moscow’s grievances and heightened Ukraine’s vulnerability. After the Cold War ended, Moscow wanted NATO, previously an anti-Soviet military alliance, to freeze in place and diminish in significance. Instead, Western countries elevated NATO as the premier vehicle for European security and began an open-ended process of eastward expansion. Even though, as the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright noted, the Russians “were strongly opposed to enlargement,” the United States and its allies went ahead anyway, hoping differences would smooth out over time.

Time instead had the opposite effect. While NATO claimed to be directed at no state, it welcomed new entrants that clearly — and understandably — sought protection against Russia. Russia, for its part, never stopped claiming a “zone of influence ” over the former Soviet space, as President Boris Yeltsin baldly stated in 1995. Though Ukraine did not initially seek NATO membership after gaining independence in 1991, that calculus pivoted in the early 2000s, especially after Russia meddled in Ukraine’s presidential elections in 2004. That year, NATO took in seven new members, including the three Baltic States, leaving Ukraine in a narrow band of nations caught between the Western alliance and a bitter ex-empire.

As Ukraine’s domestic struggles became entangled in a resurgent East-West rivalry, it sought to join NATO and found a powerful backer: President George W. Bush.

In the run-up to NATO’s summit in 2008, Mr. Bush wanted to give Ukraine and Georgia a formal path to enter the alliance, called a Membership Action Plan. Before the meeting, William Burns, the current C.I.A. director who was then ambassador to Russia, cautioned that such a move would have deadly consequences.

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” Mr. Burns advised from Moscow. He specifically predicted that attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Senior intelligence officials like Fiona Hill delivered similar warnings.

Undeterred, Mr. Bush pressed his case, meeting widespread opposition from America’s European allies. In the end, they forged a compromise: NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” of the alliance but offered no tangible path to join. It was a strange solution, provoking Russia without securing Ukraine. Yet NATO leaders have kept doggedly repeating it, including at the last summit held before Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Ukraine stopped seeking to join NATO in 2010 once the Russia-leaning Viktor Yanukovych became president. After a revolution caused Mr. Yanukovych to flee in 2014, Mr. Putin feared Ukraine’s new leaders would adopt a pro-Western stance, and he promptly annexed Crimea. He tried to use this meddling to gain leverage over Kyiv but obtained no concessions. In fact, Russia’s aggression only drove Ukrainians further West. Ukraine enshrined its quest for NATO membership in its Constitution in 2019. By 2022, having failed to prevent Ukraine from drifting out of Russia’s orbit, Mr. Putin ordered his men to march on Kyiv.

No matter how this war ends, the risk of recurrence may be high. Since 2014, NATO has demonstrated it does not wish to fight Russia over Ukraine. Should Ukraine join and Russia reinvade, the United States and the rest of NATO would have to decide whether to wage “World War III,” as President Biden has aptly called a direct conflict with Russia, or decline to defend Ukraine and thereby damage the security guarantee across the alliance.

Any formula for lasting peace must acknowledge this complexity. When negotiations take place, President Volodymyr Zelensky should return to a proposal Ukraine reportedly broached in March of last year to stop pursuing NATO membership. Instead, a postwar Ukraine, as Mr. Zelensky has suggested, should adopt an “Israeli model,” building a large, advanced army and a formidable defense industrial base with extensive external support.

The European Union, for its part, should establish a path for Ukraine to join the bloc quickly to attract investment for reconstruction. That would come with its own security guarantees, to which the United States and other non-E.U. partners could add a promise to provide material assistance in the event of further aggression.

There are no silver bullets. Russia will probably also object to Ukraine joining the E.U. or other Western institutions. But Moscow is more likely to put up with Ukrainian membership in the E.U. than in U.S.-led NATO. So much the better if European states take the lead in postconflict assistance, minimizing the scope for Mr. Putin to believe Americans are encircling his country and pulling every string.

Ukraine needs a vision of genuine victory — of a prosperous, democratic and secure future — not the Pyrrhic victory of NATO dreams and Russian invasions. Its international partners should start to provide that vision this summer. It’s time to move to a less propagandistic phase of public debate, one that learns from the past to shape the future. However one judges the wisdom of NATO enlargement to date, it is a good thing that Ukraine, the United States and their allies can still take actions to affect Russia’s conduct and are not simply hostage to Moscow’s darkest drives. They should make the toughest choices with the clearest eyes.

Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.