It Wasn’t Only Russia: How Western Policy Helped Pave the Road to War

By Said Arikat

News Analysis

Washington, D.C. — Four years into the war in Ukraine, a rigid orthodoxy dominates Western debate: Russia alone caused the conflict. The invasion, we are told, was entirely unprovoked, and responsibility rests exclusively with the Kremlin. This conclusion is presented not only as a moral judgment but as strategic truth.

Yet claiming moral clarity is not the same as analytical honesty. Wars of this magnitude rarely emerge from a single decision detached from political context. Russia bears direct responsibility for launching the February 2022 invasion. Acknowledging that fact, however, should not preclude examining how Western policies helped shape the conditions in which war became increasingly likely.

For nearly two decades, Moscow repeatedly warned that Ukrainian membership in NATO crossed a fundamental security red line. These warnings were neither subtle nor concealed. At NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit, the alliance declared that Ukraine “will become a member.” Western leaders framed the pledge as support for sovereignty and democratic choice; Russia interpreted it as the continued advance of a hostile military alliance toward its borders.

Western officials insist NATO is purely defensive and therefore nonthreatening. That claim reflects how the alliance understands itself, not necessarily how others perceive it. International politics operates on perceptions of power rather than declarations of intent. Strategic stability depends less on what states believe about themselves than on what their adversaries fear.

The United States has long recognized this logic. Washington was prepared to risk nuclear confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis to prevent Soviet deployments in Cuba. No American policymaker would calmly accept a rival military alliance integrating Mexico or Canada into its security architecture. Yet Western leaders appeared surprised by Russia’s intense reaction to NATO’s gradual expansion toward Ukraine — a country central to Russian history, geography, and military planning.

Rather than treating Russian objections as a security concern requiring management, Western policymakers increasingly dismissed them as paranoia or imperial nostalgia. That dismissal was not strategy but wishful thinking. Ignoring an adversary’s stated fears does not neutralize them; it hardens them.

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Western policy deepened rather than recalibrated. NATO expanded training missions, increased weapons transfers, and intensified intelligence cooperation with Ukraine. Kyiv moved steadily closer to NATO in practice while remaining outside its formal security guarantees. The result was a dangerous imbalance: enough integration to alarm Moscow, but insufficient deterrence to prevent escalation.

Ukraine thus entered a strategic gray zone — aligned militarily without protection, while Russia perceived a slow-motion absorption of a neighboring state it considered vital to its security. Western policymakers viewed this approach as a way to support Ukraine without direct confrontation. In practice, it produced mounting instability rather than equilibrium.

I witnessed how stark this disconnect had become in December 2021. As Russian forces massed along Ukraine’s borders, Moscow delivered two draft treaties to the Biden administration proposing what it called “security guarantees.” The documents demanded a legally binding prohibition on Ukrainian NATO membership and a rollback of NATO deployments in Eastern Europe. The proposals were sweeping and, in key respects, unacceptable. But they also represented an unmistakable signal that the Kremlin viewed the existing trajectory as intolerable.

Days later, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland entered the State Department briefing room to address the escalating crisis. I was present. When I and several colleagues asked whether the Russian proposals might serve as a starting point for serious negotiation — even if only to test Moscow’s bottom line — the idea was dismissed. There was little indication that Washington saw value in publicly engaging the core demand. Soon afterward, the United States and its allies formally rejected the drafts.

Rather than testing whether diplomacy could reduce tensions, Washington reinforced that NATO’s open-door policy was nonnegotiable. Principle took precedence over strategic timing. From Moscow’s perspective, diplomacy appeared exhausted before it had meaningfully begun.

Western leaders continue to describe the invasion as “unprovoked.” Yet from the Kremlin’s vantage point, NATO expansion — combined with the refusal even to discuss limits — constituted a cumulative provocation. Whether that perception was justified matters less than the fact that policymakers failed to account for it.

The deeper problem lies in the structure of the post–Cold War order itself. NATO expanded steadily eastward while no inclusive European security architecture emerged that meaningfully incorporated Russia. Enlargement advanced during a period of Russian weakness, producing a system in which one side’s security gains appeared to come at the other’s expense. Western policymakers assumed liberal integration would eventually override geopolitical rivalry. It did not.

Critics argue that acknowledging Western missteps risks legitimizing spheres of influence. Yet refusing self-examination carries its own danger. A foreign policy that treats its principles as immune from strategic consequences becomes incapable of learning from failure.

None of this alters the central fact that Russia chose war. But Western decisions narrowed diplomatic space and intensified confrontation. Two realities can coexist: Russia acted aggressively, and NATO policy helped create a crisis environment in which escalation became increasingly probable.

Four years later, the consequences are unmistakable. Ukraine lies devastated, Europe is rearming, Russia is entrenched in long-term confrontation with the West, and global instability has deepened. The promise that NATO expansion would produce a more secure Europe has yielded the opposite result.

If policymakers hope to prevent future catastrophes, they must abandon comforting myths. Strategic success requires understanding how one’s own actions appear to rivals, not merely asserting moral righteousness. The tragedy of Ukraine is not only that Russia chose war, but that Western leaders pursued policies that made that choice easier to imagine — and harder to avoid.