Foreign Affairs
No, the U.S. Shouldn’t ‘Maximize’ Its Obligations to Ukraine
American presidents should protect the United States, not right all the world’s wrongs.
(Photo by YURIY DYACHYSHYN/AFP via Getty Images)
The Russia–Ukraine War continues, with Moscow making modest territorial gains while launching large-scale drone and missile strikes. President Donald Trump’s attempt to mediate a conflict in which the United States is essentially a party is stalemated, since neither combatant is prepared to make concessions necessary to end hostilities.
Ukrainians suffer the most since their nation is the principal battlefield. Prodigious numbers of Russian soldiers also have died, while the economic and social disruptions from Moscow’s aggression extend across Europe and well beyond. The only good news is that Washington is not yet a formal belligerent.
Yet the allure of playing globocop and smiting the evildoers remains powerful, even, apparently, among free market economists. The Liberty Fund, a one-time classical liberal foundation best known for hosting small academic conferences and publishing classics in economics, recently ran a forum on the Cato Institute’s late executive vice president, David Boaz. In a somewhat odd essay, economist Tarnell S. Brown adopted the tone of “I like him, so he must have agreed with me.” Brown went on to criticize the Cato Institute’s position on Ukraine, from which Boaz, no shrinking violet in challenging his colleagues, never dissented, to my knowledge.
What was the problem? Brown complained that I “even went so far as to minimize America’s security obligations under the Budapest Memorandum of which it was a signatory.” He believed that “one could argue that if any of the signatories of the Memorandum had pressed their claims in 2014, we wouldn’t be here today, or that if hadn’t agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions in exchange for those (de facto ineffectual) guarantees, an invasion would have been much less likely.”
Brown is not the first person to question Ukraine’s decision to give up its nuclear weapons, left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union (for which, however, Ukraine lacked the necessary firing codes). So did Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who would like to have the nukes back, as well as John Mearsheimer, famous for detailing the Western allies’ reckless challenge to Moscow’s expressed security interests. I too have questioned ’s coerced disarmament, citing its experience as one reason North Korea’s Kim Jong-un will never yield his arsenal.
However, Ukrainian officials, yielding to substantial international pressure, including from the U.S., turned over their weapons. (Belarus and Kazakhstan did so as well, under similar circumstances.) At the time, amid Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic presidency, few people imagined Moscow threatening its neighbors. Ukraine desperately sought Western economic and political support, and in December 1994 signed the Budapest Memorandum, along with the U.S., United Kingdom, and Russia, while turning its nuclear arsenal over to Moscow.
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s original policy was to accommodate America. He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush and offer support after 9/11. Unfortunately, U.S. and European officials did their best to turn him into an enemy. Successive administrations violated multiple assurances to Moscow that NATO would not move to Russia’s border. Clinton’s defense secretary William Perry admitted: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia.” For that, he added, “the United States deserves much of the blame.” The Clinton administration simply decided that Moscow had lost the Cold War and would have to deal with the consequences.
Alas, Putin responded, his post 9/11-pleasantries long forgotten. In 2007 he spoke at the Munich Security Conference: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion … represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
The following year, William Burns, then-U.S. ambassador to Russia (and later CIA director during the Biden administration), informed the Bush administration that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players . . . I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” That same year Fiona Hill, then a national intelligence officer who later served on the Trump National Security Council staff, warned that including Ukraine and Georgia was “a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”
In April 2022, after Russia’s invasion, Yahoo News correspondent Zach Dorfman reported that a former CIA official told him that “if we took a serious step toward admitting either country to NATO, we were 100 percent convinced that the Russians would find some reason to declare war in the intervening between us announcing they were going to get in and them actually getting in.” Dorfman’s report continued: “By last summer, the baseline view of most U.S. intelligence community analysts was that Russia felt sufficiently provoked over Ukraine that some unknown trigger could set off an attack by Moscow, the former official said.”
Nevertheless, Brown dismisses Putin’s security concerns.
What matters, however, is what Russians felt, not what Americans believe they should have felt. Imagine how U.S. officials would have reacted had the Soviet Union (or China) promoted a street revolution against the elected, pro-American (obviously pre-Trump!) government of Canada or Mexico, armed the new rulers, and invited them to join the Warsaw Pact or modern equivalent. Hysteria would have enveloped Washington, with bipartisan demands for military action resounding throughout the capital. No one in authority would have affirmed the right of America’s neighbors to act as they wished.
Remember President John F. Kennedy’s response when confronted by Cuba’s becoming an advanced Soviet military base. Fortunately, the world avoided nuclear Armageddon—narrowly. Putin and much of the Russian ruling elite view Ukraine similarly. That doesn’t mean that they were right or justified in making war. However, U.S. policymakers must confront the world as it is, not as they wish it was. Yet Western officials sallied forth in a modern march of folly that has put the entire world at risk.
What should the U.S. (and UK) have done a decade ago after Russia absorbed Crimea? Brown cites the Budapest Memorandum. As with private contracts, it is worth reading the text before discussing its meaning. This document included only the barest security guarantee for Ukraine, with the three other signatories agreeing to respect Kiev’s sovereignty. If someone else attacked or threatened to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons, they promised to … do essentially nothing. They would “seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine.” That’s it, which should elicit hysterical laughter. All three were permanent members of the Security Council and could veto any measure proposed. This was nothing but a diplomatic fig-leaf to provide Ukrainian officials with political cover for surrendering the leftover weapons.
Pointing out this fact “minimizes” Washington’s obligations only in the sense of detailing what Washington agreed to do. Absent are any ambiguities, penumbras, emanations, or other wiggle room. Brown complained that none of the signatories had “pressed their claims.” What claims could those be? How could one “maximize” America’s military responsibilities under the Budapest Memorandum? There is nothing in the agreement that commits or even authorizes anyone to do anything against anyone, other than go to the UN in the midst of a nuclear war, circumstances that, thankfully, have not yet occurred.
What were the alternatives? Fantasize about what President Bill Clinton should have agreed to? Concoct a U.S. commitment that might have deterred Russia? Include what should have demanded in return for shedding its nukes? Imagine agreeing to sell your house, only to have the buyer show up at your door demanding your car, vacation home, and first born since he was “maximizing” your obligations under the sales contract.
Or the signatories could have provided assistance short of war. Actually, that’s what America and the European states did. They imposed sanctions on Moscow, used the Minsk Accords to gain time for, and provided abundant military aid, effectively bringing NATO into Ukraine rather than Ukraine into NATO. Unfortunately, turning Ukraine into an allied military outpost ultimately encouraged Putin to turn his threats into reality. Russia’s 2022 invasion was the result.
Which leaves treating the Budapest Memorandum as a sub rosa declaration of war on violators, even though no one, least of all the Clinton administration, imagined it to be such. The American people wouldn’t know that the president was committing them to a potential nuclear war over something never viewed as an important security interest. Congress would have no say in the matter, despite the Constitution’s express demands. In contrast, the traditional procedure to issue a defense guarantee is to negotiate a treaty and then present it to the Senate for ratification. Not the Budapest Memorandum.
Even if there was a formal treaty, the president would have lacked authority to intervene militarily. The Constitution’s framers consciously rejected the British model of promiscuous executive war-making. For instance, Alexander Hamilton stated that the president’s authority was “in substance much inferior to” that of the king. George Mason spoke of the importance of “clogging rather than facilitating war.” James Madison insisted that the “fundamental doctrine of the Constitution that the power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.” James Wilson said, “It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is in the legislature at large.” Thomas Jefferson celebrated the “effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose.”
Of course, the Russian invasion was criminal and unjustified. Unfortunately, the world is filled with violence, tragedy, and horror. Nevertheless, the president is not entitled to wander the globe seeking to right whatever wrongs most tug at his heart. The primary responsibility of U.S. officials is to protect the United States, its people, territory, liberties, and prosperity. Prudence dictates that Washington not rush into battle, especially against nuclear-armed great powers, and over interests far more important to them than to America.
Tragically, the Russia-Ukraine war rages on. It grows ever more dangerous as European governments remove limits on the use of weapons provided to and the latter strikes at Russia’s strategic deterrent. If U.S. policymakers desire to intervene, their decision should not be based on arbitrarily maximizing Washington’s obligations under something like the Budapest Memorandum. Rather, they should put American interests first, follow legal procedures, and make their case to the American people. As the Constitution requires.
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JD Vance confronted Zelensky on the forceful mobilization, that is what he means!
(@Jay__Cost) 
