As the United States and Russia begin negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, I can’t shake off an episode that, in retrospect, was the first step down the slippery slope leading to war.

In the summer of 1992, I took my friend, Dmitro Markov, then press counselor at the Ukraine Embassy in Washington, D.C., to a news conference at the National Press Club. At the time, I was a consultant to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and to the Ukrainian presidency. The press conference was held to announce Carnegie’s latest report, Changing Our Ways: America and the New World. I wanted Markov to experience how we handled the Washington press corps. 

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In the 18 months since the Soviet Union’s dissolution into newly independent states, Ukraine among them, the Carnegie Endowment had convened a blue-ribbon commission composed of America’s top foreign policymakers. It included former defense secretaries and CIA directors, diplomats, trade experts, and several individuals who turned out to be Bill Clinton’s Cabinet-in-waiting. I attended most of the commission’s working sessions. Its report promised to be a dramatic departure from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the Cold War.

During the meetings, I listened as Richard Holbrooke, former President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death in 2010, argued passionately for U.S. intervention in the Balkans War. But nothing I’d heard or read in early drafts of the commission’s findings prepared me for the bombshell dropped at the news conference.

The commission proposed that America adopt “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” It counseled that the U.S. should “realign NATO and [the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] to deal with new security problems in Europe” and urged military intervention for humanitarian purposes. The report proposed the revolutionary idea that a U.S.-led military first strike was justified, not to defend the country, but to impose highly subjective political settlements on others.

Humanitarian interventionism was an entirely new concept for NATO, which was born as a purely defensive alliance against the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact. If these changes became policy, they would transform NATO overnight. The world’s foremost military alliance could be used to intervene wherever warranted to impose political settlements or protect vulnerable minorities within a nation-state. Real or trumped-up incidents of repression could become grounds for military intervention in dozens of countries where nothing like a melting pot has ever existed.

Markov and I exchanged alarmed glances. Ukraine had a sizable Russian minority. Its population of nearly 52 million was 73% ethnic Ukrainian, 22% ethnic Russian, and 5% “other,” including Crimean Tatars. Across the former USSR and its Eastern European satellites, the only problem more explosive than that of national minorities was how to dispose of the thousands of “loose nukes” and other armament Moscow left in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Russia had already declared its red lines: the nuclear weapons had to be returned to Moscow, and any maltreatment of ethnic Russians in the “near abroad” or new republics would be grounds for military intervention.

After the press conference, Markov was somber. He warned that one day, Russia could use this new principle to intervene in Crimea or southeastern Ukraine, where the majority of the country’s ethnic Russians lived. It was obvious to both of us that this new rationale for the use of military force had the potential to pit the U.S. and NATO against Russia, most immediately in the Balkans but also in the Baltics and Ukraine. 

On one of my subsequent trips to Kyiv, Valery Jacovich Matvienko, a senior adviser to former President Leonid Kravchuk, asked me to meet with him privately to discuss Crimea. I worked closely with Matvienko on high-priority projects, and my firm had recently created a joint venture between him and three top Ukrainian businessmen, Grigoriy Surkis, Bogdan Gubsky, and Viktor Medvedchuk. Over time, the trio became Ukraine’s top oligarchs. Medvedchuk later achieved notoriety as Putin’s choice to succeed Zelensky as Ukraine’s president if Russia’s invasion succeeded.   

In Crimea, there was growing dissatisfaction with Kyiv, and public opinion was deteriorating. For the better part of an hour, I probed Matvienko for details, trying to apply Western political management techniques to the problems. The task was made tougher by Ukraine’s reliance on old Soviet methods of gauging public opinion. Instead of polling a representative sample of the people, the Soviet technique involved interviewing factory directors, local officials, the heads of collective farms, and other leaders. A by-product of our meeting was an arrangement for my firm to conduct the first Western-style political polling in Ukraine. 

Just before our meeting ended, Matvienko stunned me when he asked whether paying the salaries of workers in Crimea would boost support for Kyiv. I was gobsmacked. I knew that in the immediate post-Soviet era, workers, officials, doctors, military officers, factory heads, scientists, and pensioners sometimes went months without a paycheck. When the centrally controlled economy collapsed across the USSR, so did any semblance of economic stability. I’ve written about the misery suffered by the people of the USSR after its dissolution, but in Ukraine, it was worsened by bouts of hyperinflation and currency devaluations. 

Pay them, I agreed. Capital idea. But I left with the feeling that Ukraine’s hold on Crimea was slipping. A few months of salary checks could delay a rupture in relations, but the boost would be transitory without steady economic improvement. Not long after that meeting with Matvienko, NATO shot down four Serbian aircraft carrying out strikes on Bosnia and began bombing Serbia’s military positions in the break-away republic. America and NATO had indeed changed their ways. 

Boris Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation when the U.S., United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandums later that year. The Memorandums bound each nation to respect not only Ukraine’s territorial integrity but also Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainians interpreted the agreements as legally binding security guarantees, while the U.S., U.K., and Russia never believed the commitments rose to the threshold of international law.

Someone who was not a signatory to the security guarantees was current Russian President Vladimir Putin, then first deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. In 1998, Putin was appointed head of Russia’s Federal Security Service. Under Putin’s watch, NATO launched an offensive against Serbia in March 1999. NATO’s second humanitarian intervention in the Balkans was on behalf of the Albanian population in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia. The bombing campaign lasted two-and-a-half months. About a month after the NATO campaign ended, Putin became one of Russia’s first deputy prime ministers. In 2000, he was elected president.

In 2008, Russia invaded the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. It had become an independent nation in 1991 when the USSR broke up. In what is now widely viewed as Russia’s test case for how the West would respond to military force against its former territories, the Russo-Georgian War drew few repercussions from the U.S. and Europe.     

In 2014, Markov’s fear that Russia would use its ethnic minorities to justify intervention in Ukraine became true. Vladimir Putin’s “little green men,” Wagner Group mercenaries and Russian Special Forces, combined with pro-Russian local leaders to pull off the annexation of Crimea. In his March 18 speech to the Russian Duma and assembled dignitaries, Putin justified Moscow’s seizure of Ukrainian territory in terms that mirrored the language of the Carnegie Endowment’s 1992 report. 

Today, Russia occupies about 20% of Ukraine, mostly in the southeast. A succession of U.S. presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden, have failed to stop Russian aggression against its former republics. Toothless security assurances and easily avoided sanctions haven’t deterred Putin in his drive to reclaim Russia’s dominions.

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If President Donald Trump can achieve an outcome in the war that preserves Ukraine’s independence, provides security guarantees, and creates inviolable borders, he will have outdone every one of his post-Cold War predecessors. If so, Trump will have created not only greater security for Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but he will have stabilized relations with Russia and thereby created the new world order that has eluded all our leaders since the fall of the Soviet Union.

In doing so, he should reverse the use of NATO as an offensive alliance and jettison the principle of humanitarian intervention in a sovereign nation’s affairs. It is the root of the problem in U.S.-Russian relations.

John B. Roberts II served in the Reagan White House and is a former international political consultant and executive producer of the McLaughlin Group. He worked extensively in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union on nuclear disarmament, nuclear power safety, and democracy-building. His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.