Matlock, Jack

U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987-1991 - not named explicitly in the episode itself; identified from internal evidence: Reagan-era negotiating role, 1983 Moscow embassy service during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1997 Senate testimony against NATO expansion

Cet ex AMBASSADEUR AMÉRICAIN dénonce la politique occidentale en UKRAINE

Elucid · Aug 24, 2024

• Jack Matlock
• Ukraine war origins
• NATO expansion criticism
• Minsk agreements
• 2014 Maidan interpretation
• Crimea and Sevastopol naval base
• Cuban Missile Crisis parallel
• Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy
• military-industrial complex
• realist foreign policy critique

Core ideas

The ambassador traces the roots of the war to the abrupt and poorly consulted breakup of the Soviet Union, which left Ukraine with borders reflecting a deep linguistic and cultural divide between a western region historically tied to Austria-Hungary and Poland, and a largely Russian-speaking central and eastern Ukraine — a divide, he argues, that no Ukrainian leader ever successfully bridged, with every election splitting the country roughly 50-50 and no federal system in place to accommodate regional differences (he contrasts this with Finland's treatment of its Swedish minority or Belgium's Flemish-Walloon accommodation).

He argues the 2014 crisis began with genuine grievances among pro-EU demonstrators but that Ukraine did not actually meet the EU's accession requirements at the time, while Russia's counteroffer was in some respects more generous; he characterizes the ensuing change of government as effectively a coup rather than a clean democratic transition, citing an internationally brokered morning-of agreement for early elections that was overturned by violence he says was most likely instigated by right-wing forces from western Ukraine firing from a demonstrator-controlled building — a claim he presents as increasingly well-evidenced but which remains disputed. He argues the areas Russia later claimed were largely those that had voted for the ousted president and were unable to vote in the elections that followed, and that Crimea's transfer to Ukraine under Khrushchev in the 1950s, combined with its heavily Russian-speaking population and the strategic importance of Sevastopol's naval base (which he compares to the importance of the Caribbean to U.S. security), made it a uniquely sensitive flashpoint.

He states unequivocally that Russia's 2022 invasion was illegal and "a terrible mistake" for which he does not excuse Vladimir Putin, while arguing it was nonetheless avoidable: he cites his own October 30, 1997 Senate testimony predicting that NATO expansion "may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War," and argues that continual NATO expansion, U.S. withdrawal from key arms-control agreements under the George W. Bush administration, and Western involvement in Russia's internal politics after 1991 compounded a mistaken post-Cold War premise — namely, conflating the negotiated end of the Cold War (which he says occurred roughly two years before the Soviet collapse, driven by internal Soviet pressures rather than Western victory) with a unipolar "we won" narrative that shaped subsequent policy.

He argues a negotiated settlement broadly along the lines of the 2015 Minsk agreements (requiring Ukraine to adopt a federal system, grant autonomy and amnesty to eastern regions, while likely not restoring Crimea) could have avoided the war, and that NATO's 2008 declaration that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join represented a red line that any government capable of governing Russia coherently could never accept — comparing this to how the United States would react to Cuba joining a hostile military alliance. He also recounts, from his direct experience in the Reagan-era negotiations over German reunification, that Western diplomats (U.S., Germany, UK) gave Gorbachev's Soviet Union informal assurances that NATO would not expand eastward in exchange for Soviet approval of German reunification on Western terms — assurances he says were not incorporated into a binding treaty but were repeated to Soviet negotiators multiple times, and which he sees as having been violated by subsequent NATO enlargement.

He criticizes Western media framing that labels the Russian invasion "brutal" while rarely applying the same language to the U.S. invasion of Iraq (waged, he notes, "on false evidence without any security threat"), and argues Putin's own framing of Western double standards (NATO's Kosovo bombing without UN approval, violating the Helsinki Final Act's principle against altering borders without mutual consent) should be understood, without being accepted as justification, as part of the perceptual dynamic driving Russian security anxieties. He extends this to a broader realist critique: any large power with a history of invasion from both east and west, he argues, will react to a hostile military alliance approaching its borders much as the United States reacted to Soviet missiles in Cuba — a comparison he grounds in his own junior-officer experience at the Moscow embassy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, noting that declassified information later revealed the crisis came closer to accidental nuclear war than officials realized at the time.

He argues that ongoing arms shipments and economic aid to Ukraine, exceeding what the U.S. spends on its own citizens affected by climate-driven natural disasters, are not sustainable, and that current policy is not working toward the "real threats" of climate change and uncontrolled nuclear escalation. He calls for an immediate ceasefire (comparing a plausible outcome to the unresolved Korean War armistice) followed by genuine negotiation over disputed territories, potentially including some border changes, rather than continued military escalation, and criticizes the U.S. military-industrial complex's structural influence over Congress (noting defense appropriations exceeding even the Pentagon's own requests) as a factor sustaining the war's continuation. He recalls approvingly Ronald Reagan's approach to Soviet diplomacy — genuinely seeking nuclear abolition, never personally insulting Soviet leaders despite ideological condemnation of communism — as a model of realist engagement he contrasts with what he sees as the West's construction of a "new Iron Curtain." He closes by defining diplomacy as the peaceful reconciliation of differences by identifying and addressing what the other side perceives as its most essential needs, rather than imposing one's own preferred outcome, and states his fundamental disagreement with the idea that the United States can act as the world's policeman while enforcing rules it does not itself observe.

Excerpts