Q&A with Michael Kimmage
As the war in Ukraine continues into its fifth year, we spoke to Michael Kimmage, director of the Kennan Institute and a new nonresident senior fellow at Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe, about the conflict, the future of the transatlantic relationship, and developments in Russia.
In your recent Foreign Affairs piece with Liana Fix, you argue that the Trump administration’s outreach to Europe’s populist right, including appeals aligned with MAGA ideology, has failed. What does this tell us about the limits of ideology as a tool of U.S. influence in Europe?
For the United States, a purely technocratic approach to Europe is both impossible and unadvisable. Language, narrative, history, and culture will always play some role, and the transatlantic relationship at its most successful has reflected broad-based political ideals held in common. In this regard, the transatlantic relationship can be understood as beneficially ideological. Liana Fix and I do not argue for the avoidance of ideology as such. We emphasize the dangers of pinning narrow ideological objectives to specific political parties (and their leaders) in Europe. These dangers are two-fold. It is easy, if one is openly betting on horses, to bet on the wrong horse. When this happens, the winning party, the party that was not bet on, has an obvious disincentive to reach out and to cooperate. The other and related danger is getting drawn into the polarization present in all countries, where once again the embrace of specific parties builds resentment or disaffection elsewhere on the political spectrum. In Europe, where MAGA-type parties are mostly not in power (and MAGA’s key partner, Viktor Orbán, has just been voted out of power), the Trump administration would be especially well served by placing shared transatlantic interests over any kind of sharp-edged ideological agenda.
How should U.S. and European policymakers interpret Russia’s objectives in Ukraine today? Is it territorial revision, long‑term disruption of European security, or something else?
Russia is currently wavering between two objectives in its disastrous war against Ukraine. The first follows from Russia’s goals at the start of the war, which were to gain control over Ukraine’s political and geopolitical direction and by doing so to begin reshaping Europe’s security architecture. No doubt Russian President Vladimir Putin would prefer to be working on this project today, and in his mind he may still be working on it. Four years into an unwon war, however, Russia finds itself unable to control more than 20% of Ukraine. The brutality of the war has pushed the Ukrainian population against Russia, while Europe is investing heavily in defense—for the sake of supporting Ukraine and of containing Russia. These unintended outcomes, for the Kremlin, have left Putin with the much more modest objective of not losing the war or of not being seen as losing the war. Putin will continue imposing costs on Ukraine and on Europe in the service of an objective that is more nihilistic than strategic.
As a historian studying Russia and the transatlantic relationship, what lessons do you think leaders on both sides of the Atlantic should draw from the war in Ukraine about long‑term management of relations with Russia? Do recent economic data and signs of popular dissatisfaction portend a domestic shift in Russia?
Policymakers can and should draw incompatible lessons from the war in Ukraine and from the history behind it. A simple lesson is that the war is not visibly unpopular in Russia. The government commands enough real support and can compel enough insincere support to keep this war going. This dynamic could outlast Putin’s tenure as Russian president. To manage relations with Russia is to plan for an aggressive, anti-Western Russia for years, if not for decades, to come. A less simple lesson is that the vast majority of Russians did not want this war in February 2022, that Putin has often promised that victory is around the corner, which it is not, and that the war has imposed horrific human and economic costs on Russia. Societal breaking points—one thinks here of 1917 or 1991 in Russian/Soviet history—are mysterious in their timing. Plans for managing Russia must encompass scenarios of radical change, hard as it is to envision big domestic shifts from the portents we can discern either on the battlefields of Ukraine or inside of Russia.
