President Joe Biden is nearing the end of what many consider a disastrous presidency. His departure from the White House likely represents a turning point in both the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and in the three decades of ill-considered Western policies that led to the isolation of Russia and the collapse of its democratic project. But that depends on the ability of the next President, Donald Trump, not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors.

It was Russian President Vladimir Putin who decided to launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the ground for this conflict was prepared by American security forces in the 1990s. At the time, Russia had just emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union much weaker and disoriented, while the Russian leadership, idealistic and incompetent at the time, operated on the assumption that full integration with the West was inevitable.

The decisions taken at that time sparked a confrontation between Russia and the West, which reached its logical climax during the Biden presidency.

The problem was never with the eastward expansion of NATO – the security pact established to confront the Soviet Union – and the European Union per se, but rather with Russia’s exclusion from the process.

Significantly, this approach put Ukraine on a path to Euro-Atlantic integration while keeping Russia off it – creating a rift between two countries closely linked to each other through history, economic ties, and personal ties. It also accelerated Russia’s securitization and retreat from democracy under Putin.

This outcome was completely undesirable, and it took the strenuous efforts of US security officials to achieve it.

One missed opportunity for a different path was the Partnership for Peace, formally launched by the Clinton administration in 1994. This program was designed to balance the desire of former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO with the crucial goal of keeping Russia in the alliance. . As a major nuclear power and a new democracy with a clearly pro-Western government.

Russia joined in, but as American historian Mary Sarraut wrote in her book Not an Inch, this useful framework was derailed at its inception by a small number of security officials in Washington.

She specifically talks about the “pro-enlargement troika,” consisting of Daniel Fried, Alexander Vershbow, and Richard Holbrooke, who pushed for aggressive NATO expansion, ignoring Moscow’s protests.

Sarott also mentions John Herbst as the author of a subsequent report on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s informal promises of non-NATO expansion, which, she suggests, shaped the US policy of ignoring Russia’s complaints about NATO expansion all the way to its borders. Decades to come.

The unreflective arrogance and triumphalism embodied by these security guards can be seen in Biden himself, who at the time was a prominent member of Congress. In a 1997 videoHe mocked Moscow’s protests against NATO expansion by saying that Russia would be forced to embrace China and Iran if it continued its intransigence. He clearly assumed at the time that this was an absurd and unrealistic scenario – and he may have believed that Russia had no choice but to remain in the Western orbit. But it turned out to be something he thought was a clever joke.

In his hard-line policies toward Russia, Biden found a willing partner in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is no coincidence that the major shift in relations with Russia by Zelensky began with Biden taking office.

The Ukrainian president was elected on a promise to end the simmering conflict that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. He met with Putin in Paris in December 2019 and the two agreed to a ceasefire in the Donbas region, which both sides agreed to. It was largely respected by the parties, reducing the number of deaths to nearly zero.

But as soon as Biden set foot in the White House, Zelensky ordered a crackdown on Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk, while at the same time launching vociferous campaigns demanding Ukraine’s NATO membership, the return of Crimea, and also to derail the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline. . Gas pipeline project.

Two factors may have played a role in Zelensky’s decisions. Azerbaijan’s victory over Russia-backed Armenian forces in the fall of 2020, achieved largely thanks to Turkish Bayraktar drones, raised hopes that the high-tech war against Russia would be successful. The other factor is that in December 2020, opinion polls showed Medvedchuk’s party ahead of Zelensky’s party.

Just a few days after Biden’s inauguration, Zelensky gave an interview to the American website Axios in which he famously asked his American counterpart: “Why is Ukraine still not a member of NATO?” This was followed by an op-ed with the same question in its title, written by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, and published by the Atlantic Council – a think tank that receives much of its funding from the US government and Pentagon contractors.

Unsurprisingly, some of the same figures who shaped US policies toward Russia in the 1990s also urged the Biden administration to adopt aggressive policies that contributed to the invasion.

On March 5, Fried, Vershbaugh, and Herbst, along with three others, published an article a report At the Atlantic Council with a list of recommendations for the Biden administration regarding Ukraine and Russia. These matters boiled down to pressuring Putin through escalation on all fronts – from presenting the NATO membership plan to Ukraine to obstructing Nord Stream 2 and “enhancing security” in the Black Sea.

Three weeks after the publication of this report, Putin began deploying forces on the Ukrainian border, embarking on a policy of brinkmanship that lasted 11 months. This period saw the British warship HMS Defender enter what Russia declared its territorial waters off the coast of occupied Crimea in June, the United States began covert arms supplies to Ukraine in September, and finally the United States and Ukraine announced a strategic partnership. In November. A move that amounted to a casus belli in the eyes of Kremlin hawks.

Around that time, Putin began preparing for the invasion in earnest before eventually launching it in February 2022. The resulting war is now approaching its third anniversary.

Despite massive Western support, Ukraine has suffered heavy losses and gained nothing by challenging Putin in combat. The war has pushed Ukraine to the brink, causing a massive refugee crisis, economic collapse, social dislocation, and an ever-mounting death toll.

If peace is achieved in Ukraine this year, it will likely be modeled on the failed Istanbul Accords of 2022, which envisioned a neutral Ukraine modeled after Austria with limits on the size of its army. Russia is likely to insist on keeping a large portion of the territory it has acquired as punishment for Ukrainian intransigence. This would technically constitute a defeat for Ukraine, but it would be a clear victory for the Ukrainian people, who have borne the brunt of this war, as well as for the rest of the world.

It would also be a major defeat for the security class, which has been pushing for a new confrontation with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Clearly, the aggressive pursuit of expansion at Russia’s expense has failed as a strategy. It is time for Western policymakers to do some soul-searching about how to reverse the situation and begin the slow drift toward rapprochement with Moscow.

This is not about exempting Putin’s government from accountability for the crime of aggression, as well as for war crimes committed by Russian forces. Rather, it is about removing the conditions that caused Russia to become a military dictatorship and ending the conflict that will continue to underpin Putin’s regime as long as it lasts.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.