ACURA Viewpoint:
The West Needs to Rethink Its Approach In Ukraine
ACURA: American Committee for US-Russia Accord
May 5, 2021
By Nicolai Petro
The West’s approach to achieving peace in Ukraine has focused on Russia’s role … while ignoring domestic factors because they are consistent with the broader US policy of portraying Russia as a destabilizing actor in world affairs.
It is also in keeping with the dominant approach to international relations—Realism—which sees domestic actors as irrelevant when considering a nation’s foreign policy. This view is a myth, left over from the 1950s, the Golden Era of U.S. foreign policy when senator Arthur Vandenberg, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, famously put it “politics stops at the water’s edge.” It is telling that Joe Biden, who remembers that era, called on Ukrainian political leaders in his speech to the parliament on December 9, 2015, to put aside their “parochial differences” and think about the common good.
But this has not occurred, and we have not stopped to ask why.
It is because we insist on seeing Ukraine through the prism of Russia, rather than through the complex realities of Ukraine. This has prevented the emergence of any policy toward the country, other than to see it separated from Russia. It has even unwittingly led the U.S. to support Western Ukrainian demands for an ethnically and culturally monolithic Ukraine, against Eastern and Southern Ukrainian demands for cultural pluralism.
