Stephen Kinzer's case on US role in Ukraine meets a sovereignty caveat

Stephen Kinzer's Boiling Point argues that US and Nato policies helped fuel the Ukraine war, but the book's thesis faces scrutiny over Russia's motives and security concerns.

David Kortava Boiling Point: How America Brought  War to Ukraine

By Stephen Kinzer

Published by Holt

369 pages $32.99

 In the past four years, pundits, journalists and historians have thrown out a lot of explanations for why the war in Ukraine began. Some point to Covid-induced hysteria in the Kremlin, others to Soviet nostalgia. Some have even suggested that geography is destiny — as long as Russia exists, it will want the land on its borders.

 

Boiling Point, by former New York Times journalist Stephen Kinzer, points the finger the other way. Based largely on secondary sources, the book may be the most comprehensive accounting of the United States’ (US) long involvement in Ukraine. It is also among the clearest articulations of an iconoclastic, wildly counterintuitive argument — namely, that America and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), not Russia, are principally responsible for the war in Ukraine.

 

Mr Kinzer is not the first American public intellectual to make this case. In 2014, shortly after Russia occupied Crimea, the international relations scholar John Mearsheimer argued in Foreign Affairs that the crisis was the “West’s fault”. In order to appease Moscow, American and European officials should have been content to “make” Ukraine “a neutral buffer between Nato and Russia”.

 

Boiling Point starts much earlier than the recent conflict. Beginning in the 1940s, Mr Kinzer writes, the US trained and armed anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisans, parachuting them into the country in a campaign to foment rebellion. The plans were half-baked; most of the participants were swiftly captured and killed.

 

For decades after, Americans funded — sometimes covertly, often openly — all manner of oppositionist activity through dissident media outlets and, later, non-profits. In the 1950s, the CIA backed a radio station that broadcast from Germany into Ukraine. It also partnered with a publisher in New York whose pamphlets and articles were dropped into the country by balloon.

 

Much of this was driven, we are told, by zealous Eastern European refugees or their descendants, like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke and the former US ambassador to Nato Victoria Nuland, who, according to Mr Kinzer, had “imbibed anti-Russia passion with her mother’s milk”.

 

By the time President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Mr Kinzer contends, the country was “a fully compliant proxy of the United States”. Like his predecessors, Mr Kinzer also stresses Nato enlargement as the taproot of hostility between Moscow and the West. Since the end of the Cold War, the alliance has welcomed 16 new members, most of them from what Moscow regards as its historic sphere of influence. In 1994, Ukraine joined Nato’s Partnership for Peace, a programme seen as a stepping-stone to membership. Five years later, over Russian objections, Nato forces bombed Yugoslavia.

 

By that point, Mr Kinzer writes, “no one in the Kremlin could avoid recognizing that Russia’s ultimate security nightmare — Ukrainian membership in a hostile military alliance — was beginning to become real”. In his view, it was this intolerable possibility, and the West’s cavalier disrespect for Russia’s “security concerns”, that would cause the country’s elites to lose faith in the US and, many years later, compel Putin to attack Ukraine.

 

This is an unfalsifiable thesis. We can only speculate about how Russia’s position might have developed in the absence of Nato enlargement. But the opposite hypothetical is just as hard to disprove. As a pair of ambassadors who served between Poland and the United States argued in 2024: “If NATO enlargement had not taken place, then Europe might now be dealing with Russian domination of Ukraine, re-occupation of the Baltics and the direct threat of an invasion of Poland.”

 

The trouble with fixating on Putin’s ostensible concerns over Ukraine’s future in Nato is that, well, there were no imminent plans for Ukraine to join. In February 2022, as Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s border, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters that the Kremlin was forcing “a military conflict about an issue that isn’t even on the agenda”.

 

For Mr Kinzer, most major political events in that part of the world can largely be explained as a reaction to American pressure. In Donald Trump’s second term, Mr Kinzer and his fellow restrainers are getting a taste for what scaling back US involvement in the region could look like. Last month, the Trump administration reportedly threatened to cut off intelligence sharing and suspend weapons deliveries. Ukraine also lost access to a satellite system that its military uses for battlefield communication and drone operations. Meanwhile, as Ukraine’s sixth winter in war approaches, the only thing worse than US meddling, it seems, is US abandonment.

 

In a narrow sense, Kinzer’s overarching thesis is probably right: Were it not for American and European support for Kyiv over many years, Ukraine would likely not be at war with Russia today. Instead, it might resemble a large Belarus — a docile protectorate that is sovereign only in name, on good terms with Moscow at the cost of its own prosperity, dignity and freedom. 

 

The reviewer is an editor at Foreign Affairs.

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