George Beebe argues for enlarging the Russia-Ukraine peace process to address the broader European security architecture
Glenn Diesen interviews George Beebe, former CIA Director of Russia Analysis and current Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews George Beebe about why the current US-mediated peace process in Ukraine has stalled and what a more comprehensive approach might look like. Beebe argues that the Ukraine conflict cannot be resolved as a bilateral territorial dispute because it is fundamentally a broader geopolitical contest between Russia and the West over the foundations of European security — a conflict that has been ongoing since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He contends that the West must engage Russia directly on the principle of indivisible security, which Russia has been requesting for thirty years, and that a new European security mechanism giving Russia a genuine voice — not merely a consultative role through NATO — is essential. Beebe notes that Russia placed draft treaties on the table during the Medvedev era (the Obama years) and again in late 2021, but the West declined to engage seriously with either. Beebe also applies a similar logic to Iran, arguing that normalising diplomatic relations with Tehran would serve American strategic interests and potentially accelerate evolutionary change inside Iran, much as the Helsinki process unexpectedly undermined Soviet control in Eastern Europe.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Why the Ukraine peace process has stalled — and what Eisenhower's maxim suggests
Glenn Diesen: In response to the inability to find a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, you recently quoted Eisenhower saying that if a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it. In using that term, you do not refer to escalation but to enlarging it — I assume in the sense of taking a step back and addressing the larger picture. I was wondering if you could flesh out what you mean and how this applies to the Ukraine war.
George Beebe: You'll recall a few weeks ago Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in talking to the press, said the peace process — the US mediation effort between Russia and Ukraine — has really stalled and we're in need of some new ideas. The things that were discussed at the Anchorage summit are essentially failures because the Ukrainians wouldn't agree to them. He said, "We're looking for new opportunities to reinvigorate this process. We're looking for new ideas — stay tuned."
My proposal is that they need to think about enlarging this peace process — not escalating the conflict, which there are many people in Washington and in Europe more than willing to do — but understanding that this is not just a bilateral conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory and other bilateral matters. It is, I think first and foremost, a broader geopolitical conflict between Russia and the West that has actually been going on since the very early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a conflict over what the parameters of European security are going to look like — what the foundations for European security are, and in particular what Russia's role in Europe is. That is something the West and Russia have disagreed on in profound ways.
If we're going to find a way out of the bilateral conflict being waged between Russia and Ukraine, we have to zoom out and ask: what about this broader conflict between Russia and the West over European security? That is not something that is going to be settled on the battlefield in Ukraine. The Russians, theoretically, could capture all of Ukrainian territory and still be left with that bigger problem — facing a NATO that has actually doubled in membership since the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a lot more territory, a lot more border with Russia, and a Europe that is rearming and very hostile toward Russia. That is a problem for the Russians, and they cannot solve it just by defeating the Ukrainian army.
So what is the incentive for the Russians to engage with the West on some new ideas? I think the incentive is this: let's talk to the Russians about European security. They have been asking us to do this for thirty years and we have been quite reluctant to do so. They have actually put draft treaties on the table and said, "Let's talk," and we have said, "Well, no thanks." If you want to reinvigorate this process, I think the United States ought to say to Russia: this is an issue we have to talk about. Let's start doing it. And I think that may cause the Russians to think about the bilateral conflict with Ukraine in a different context and open perhaps some new possibilities.
The flawed logic of "escalate to de-escalate"
Glenn Diesen: Marco Rubio made the point that longer-range strikes deep inside Russia would make Russia more flexible and reduce some of its demands. But this is premised on the assumption that the war is about Russian opportunism — that Russia is trying to expand its empire and see how much territory it can get. If that is the case, then yes, there would be more room for negotiation. But if this is about the European security architecture and the Russians genuinely see this as an existential threat, there is not much more to give. The long-range strike is not going to change the Russian calculation. They might be willing to sacrifice more, but at the end of the day they must reach their war objectives.
What is strange to me is that we never actually discuss what peace looks like. And when peace is discussed, it is only in terms of what Ukraine wants — a deterrent, security guarantees — all of which is reasonable. Ukraine does face an existential threat and I understand why that has to be part of the conversation. But by not discussing the Russian aspect, we seem to miss a big part of the picture. What does the European security architecture actually entail? What is the main concern for the Russians? And there are so many layers to why the current situation is a disaster — for all of Europe, for Russian security, for the Americans who see it pushing Russia closer to China, and of course the risk of nuclear war. What has to be done with the European security architecture? What is the solution?
George Beebe: I was laughing as you were describing the reasoning going on in the West about the potential impact of escalation against Russia. I remember when President Trump was meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House just a few weeks ago. He said, "What's going on here is an escalation," and then he said, "And we're hoping this is an escalation that will lead to peace." The rationale in the West is escalate to de-escalate. It follows exactly the logic you just laid out — that this is largely a bilateral conflict, and if you increase the pain level on the Russians, they will calculate it is not really worth it to continue this war and will find a way to make peace.
But if you zoom out and acknowledge that the Russians actually see this as a bigger geopolitical conflict over Europe and over the relationship between the West and Russia, then that kind of escalation only reinforces Russia's conviction that this is exactly what is going on — that this is not a bilateral conflict with Ukraine but a conflict with the West using Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia. It exacerbates the sense of existential threat in Russia. That is dangerous in and of itself.
If you are going to break that cycle of escalation and counter-escalation — and the Russians have responded to long-range Ukrainian drone attacks by escalating their own strategic air campaign against Ukraine and closing the port of Odessa, which as several of your guests have acknowledged is devastating for Ukraine's future — you have got to sit down with the Russians and say: let's talk about what Europe's security architecture ought to look like and what is in our mutual interest.
The principle of indivisible security and its origins
What the Russians have argued for many years is that there is a principle first discussed during the Helsinki negotiations back in the Cold War, codified in the Helsinki Final Act, and then explicitly reaffirmed by the Paris Charter for a New Europe in the early 1990s — the principle of indivisibility of security. It is a simple concept. It acknowledges the security dilemma that international relations theory describes: one side in a relationship can advance its own security interests in a way that threatens the security of another side. To minimise the potential for that kind of security dilemma to spark an escalatory spiral, you have to acknowledge that other sides have security concerns you must take into account when enhancing your own security. We cannot be secure in the West if Russia is fundamentally insecure, and vice versa.
What is interesting about Russia's pleas to talk about this principle and find ways to operationalise it is that we have not been willing to do so. The Russians put a treaty forward when Dmitri Medvedev was president during the Obama era that basically said a European security treaty ought to have as one of its primary foundations this principle of indivisibility of security. And when Putin and the Russian government put two more draft treaties in front of the United States and NATO in late 2021, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, that principle was also highlighted in what they placed on the table.
To me, this is the heart of a diplomatic process. It has to be a central focus of discussions between the United States and Russia over mutual concerns in Europe. The principles in the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris are inherently in tension with one another — if you apply any one of them absolutely, you undermine other principles that are also important. The principle of territorial integrity is in tension with the principle of self-determination of peoples. How do you reconcile these tensions? That is what diplomacy is about.
What I would argue is that the first thing we ought to talk about with the Russians is explicitly recognising that these tensions between principles are things we have to be discussing and finding pragmatic balances among. That is a very different approach than what the United States has taken. We have basically said the principle of territorial integrity is absolutely sacred — almost absolute. The principle that states get to choose their own military alliance — absolute, cannot be violated in any way. And the Russians have been arguing that we also have to balance those principles against this question of indivisibility of security. Simply acknowledging that and saying to the Russians, "We have to talk about how to reconcile these tensions," would be, I think, a sea change in how the US has approached this. That by itself might help a lot in moving from what Churchill referred to as "war war" into "jaw jaw" — talking — which would be far better for everybody involved.
Why NATO cannot serve as a pan-European security organisation
The other thing I think, when you get specific about what Europe ought to look like, is that we are going to have to acknowledge that European security cannot be NATO. NATO cannot be the pan-European security organisation, and it cannot be for a very fundamental reason: Russia is not a part of it, and Russia believes that a pan-European NATO is fundamentally a security threat to Russia that violates this indivisibility of security principle.
We are going to have to say to the Russians: we need to find some understanding that, yes, preserves the NATO alliance — I think the United States has not reached the point where we are comfortable dissolving that alliance — but also takes into account Russian concerns and finds a mechanism for Russia to have a voice in European security that does not get funnelled through NATO. The arrangement we had proposed for much of the post-Cold War period was saying to the Russians: yes, you can have a voice through the NATO-Russia Council. What that enables you to do is talk to us about how you think about decisions that NATO has taken. But you cannot change those decisions. Those decisions are our sovereign right. We will make them, we will tell you about them, we can discuss them, but you cannot change them. And the Russians essentially said, "No. That is not our vision of what the European Security Order ought to look like."
We are going to need to find some new mechanism. My guess is we are going to need some sort of relatively small equivalent of the Security Council of the United Nations that would apply to Europe, in which the Russians would have a seat and a voice — a mechanism that would enable an ongoing discussion about how to balance these principles in practical ways. That is an issue we ought to start talking to the Russians about now. It will be a long discussion. You cannot resolve these things quickly. It will take years. But beginning that discussion and laying out some principles that ought to govern it would go a long way toward changing the context in which the Ukraine war is now being fought.
Returning to enduring principles — not going back in time
Glenn Diesen: It is not as if we have to start from scratch. As you said, the foundational structure for organising relations between East and West was laid at Helsinki in 1975, which laid the foundations for Gorbachev's vision of a common European home, and also for the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in 1990, and for the establishment of the OSCE in 1994 — all of them built on the principle of indivisible security, sovereign equality, and how to avoid dividing lines where one side enhances its security at the expense of others.
In the words of William Perry in the 1990s, he considered quitting because he was opposed to NATO expansion, making the point that others in the administration realised it would alienate the Russians and be seen as a threat. However, because Russia was weak at the time, it was felt it didn't really matter — they were no longer a great power, they were seen as a declining third-rate power. But as Perry argued, as did George Kennan, one day the Russians would rebuild their strength, and they are not weak anymore.
I wonder how we can go back. We can't just skip the last three decades, go back to the nineties, and pick up the book again. And what you are talking about — how do you have territorial integrity versus self-determination, these competing principles — in the hegemonic era we had the luxury of not having to discuss these things with the Russians. We could pick and choose. In Kosovo, we go with self-determination; with Crimea, we go with territorial integrity. But what you are talking about is essentially rediscovering diplomacy, and that goes against liberal hegemony, because the whole idea is that liberalism has to be elevated above questions of sovereignty. So democracy promotion, for example, is necessary. And suddenly you are putting a question mark behind everything we have been building for the past three decades. Going back to the nineties is going to be very difficult. We have a formula, but it seems it has to be updated.
George Beebe: I think that is true, but we are not going back in time. What we are doing is returning to principles, and those principles are actually enduring principles. International relations were not invented in the past century. The relations between nations and sovereign states go back many many centuries, and the principles that apply are enduring. There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to how nations interact.
So yes, we need to rediscover diplomacy. Why? Because that liberal hegemony we were pursuing for the bulk of the post-Cold War period failed. It held out a vision that was not achieved and is not realisable. It is not possible for European security to be run by the United States and its allies with Russia on the other side more or less passively acquiescing. The question of whether Russia will willingly or unwillingly acquiesce to NATO domination of Europe has been answered, and the answer is a resounding no. Russia has shown it will go to war to prevent this. It did so in 2008 in Georgia. It did so again in Ukraine — first in 2014, again in 2022.
I also think American interests have changed in very profound ways. We are not in a unipolar world anymore. The world created with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union is over. The United States faces a peer rival in China, and many other formidable great powers and middle powers that have a lot more freedom of manoeuvre in the world today than they did in the early 1990s. That means the United States needs to approach the world with a different strategy. It is profoundly counterproductive for the United States to undertake policies that actually encourage a close security partnership between China, Russia, and Iran.
This was something former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned explicitly about in his book The Grand Chessboard. He said that a Russia-China-Iran alliance is the worst possible strategic outcome the United States could face. And yet it is almost inarguable at this point that the United States has taken steps over the past several decades to make exactly that kind of alignment among these countries even more likely. That makes no strategic sense. The United States has an interest in not driving Russia toward China, in not encouraging Russia and China to partner with Iran against our interests. And that has to start with Europe — with addressing what Russia believes is its biggest security threat. The United States needs to recognise that strategically it is not in our interest to pursue the kind of liberal hegemonic policies that we pursued in the post-Cold War period — policies that both failed to achieve their goals and proved counterproductive to the strategic interests the United States faces in an increasingly multipolar world.
Glenn Diesen: Brzezinski is well known for The Grand Chessboard, but he also wrote — I think it was in 2012 — a book called The Choice, where he outlined that the unipolar moment was going away. He argued the US had two paths: one, you can seek to facilitate a new multipolar world where the US is essentially first among equals, a multipolar world the US would still be in a position to shape; or it could hold on to the unipolar moment, but then the rising powers would likely create a multipolar system in opposition to the US. He was making the point that the former was the wiser choice, but that argument is less referenced — probably because people don't want to give up the unipolar moment.
But I will withdraw my earlier comment — you make a good point that there is no need to go back in time. A lot of what was done in Helsinki in 1975 originates from 1648 in Westphalia, so we do have a formula. And I think where we are is that questions like which country does Kherson belong to, how big should the Russian buffer be in Kharkiv and Sumy, what security guarantees does Ukraine get — all of these seem like minor, very zero-sum issues, but they are symptoms of the larger problem of a collapsing pan-European security architecture. If you could fix that, essentially everyone would benefit.
Applying the same logic to Iran
Do you see something similar with Iran? If the problem cannot be solved, enlarge it — what is the problem with Iran? It is a bit similar to Russia in that we do not talk much about their security concerns. We tend to dismiss them as irrational hatred by radical mullahs. But what is the problem here?
George Beebe: Yes, obviously Iran has very serious security concerns. The United States and Israel actually attacked Iran, decapitated its leadership essentially, and quite explicitly sought regime change there. It does not get much more existential from the Iranian point of view than that.
What is the solution? I would argue we ought to think about the Helsinki process in a different way as it relates to Iran. One of the things that happened during Helsinki was that we discussed codifying the borders of post-World War II Europe — something the Soviet leadership was very concerned about. They wanted essentially de facto recognition on the part of the West that their control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany was more or less permanent. We were not going to come right out and say it was legitimate and forever, but what Helsinki allowed us to do was to essentially de facto recognise that these borders were not going to change, at least not by force. The Soviets said, "Great, big win," and pocketed that. They wrote off the other parts of the Helsinki accord — the so-called human dimension, the respect for human rights and that sort of thing — as principles that did not really matter.
But what in fact happened over the years was that a lot of people in the Eastern Bloc took the principles the Soviets had signed up to under Helsinki seriously and started holding their own governments accountable, saying, "Wait a minute — you signed up to this. Why aren't we doing this?" That actually became a significant political movement, and I think it contributed to the ultimate breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in ways the Soviet leadership did not anticipate at all in 1975.
What does this have to do with Iran? I think one of the best things the United States could do for the Iranian people — and one of the worst things for the Iranian theocracy — would be to initiate a diplomatic opening between the United States and Iran, a restoration of normal diplomatic relations. Why? For one thing, up until fairly recently — when the United States and Israel actually attacked Iran — a lot of Iranians at the popular level liked the United States and had relatively positive views of American society. They would welcome this sort of opening. Number two, what this sort of opening would do is deprive the Iranian theocracy of a clear enemy. This is something one of Gorbachev's advisors told us back during the end of the Cold War. He said, "We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to take away your enemy." That proved quite prophetic and a lot more significant for the United States than I think anybody realised at the time.
If the theocracy in Iran loses that "American Great Satan" enemy in the aftermath of restored diplomatic relations, it is going to have to govern in a different way. The expectations of the Iranian people will start to change and elevate. I think that will be a good thing for at least evolutionary change in Iran, if not something more sudden.
Is anyone in Washington thinking about doing something like that? I do not know the answer to that. But I think lifting or easing economic sanctions and beginning a process of restoring normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran would be profoundly in America's interest. It would be good for the region. It would help us think about the question of opening the Strait of Hormuz and getting assurances that the Iranians are not going to develop a nuclear weapon — in a different context. It is a different way of enlarging the problem, which we talked about in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, but I think it would open up some possibilities for resolving very difficult issues between the United States and Iran and actually changing the strategic direction of the broader Middle East in positive ways.
Whether a new Middle East security architecture would erode US influence in the Gulf
Glenn Diesen: At the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev cautioned his American counterparts that if peace breaks out and they are successful, there are going to be a lot of shifts — both sides will lose a lot of power, because the power of the Soviets and the Americans was premised to a large extent on leading their respective blocs. If bloc politics comes to an end, both sides lose a lot of power. And as Gorbachev said, if peace breaks out, a lot of hawks on both sides will push back because people like power.
Would this be a problem in the Middle East? If there is a new security architecture — if we bring Iran inside, security with them instead of security against them — wouldn't that also diminish a huge portion of US influence over the Gulf states? Given the petrodollar and all the economic interests of the United States in the region, how feasible is it to walk away from the alliance system?
George Beebe: I think the alliance system is going to walk away from us the way things are going. One of the things this conflict has driven home is that US military bases in that region are quite vulnerable to attack. And those bases have not brought security to our regional partners — in fact, they have brought insecurity. They have turned the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain into targets because of the presence of US military bases there. So that is going to have to change. There is no question about that.
The notion that we should not normalise relations with Iran because that will undermine the foundations of our alliance relationship in the region — my reaction is that those foundations are already looking a lot more like sand than concrete. We ought to be thinking about some sort of fundamental change there.
Glenn Diesen: With a shifting distribution of power, one cannot just have policies based on what one would like to see. One does have to adjust to reality, and I guess yes, that is one of the great challenges of our time. Thank you very much for your time. Unless you have any final thoughts?
George Beebe: No, that is great. Always a pleasure talking to you.
Glenn Diesen: Likewise. Thanks again.