In October 1994, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Borys Tarasyuk, came to Washington. There he met with Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, with whom Tarasyuk raised the question of NATO enlargement. Tarasyuk noted Moscow’s growing discontent about NATO. In the event of enlargement, what was the American vision for Ukraine, Tarasyuk asked? Would Ukraine be consigned to a place in between, to the east of the West and to the west of Russia? A buffer zone? A gray area? Talbott acknowledged that he did not yet have a good answer. He was optimistic, however, about arriving at one over time.

THE EAGLE AND THE TRIDENT: U.S.-UKRAINE RELATIONS IN TURBULENT TIMES by Steven Pifer Brookings Institution Press, 366 pp., $29.99

This exchange appears in a new book by Steven Pifer, The Eagle and the Trident: U.S.-Ukraine Relations in Turbulent Times. Pifer was the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. He has served at the National Security Council and the State Department and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institute. Before 2014, his excellent study of U.S.-Ukraine relations would have garnered mostly specialist interest. Given the severe and ongoing downturn in U.S.-Russian relations, the origins of which lie in Ukraine, The Eagle and the Trident deserves a wide readership. It contributes materially to our understanding of international affairs in the present tense.

Historically, Ukraine has tended to fall between the cracks of American foreign policy. Shortly after Soviet Union collapsed, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney hoped that “an independent Ukraine … could serve as a check on Russian power,” Pifer recalls. At the same time, Secretary of State James Baker “strongly resisted new commitments to Ukraine.” In particular, he resisted anything resembling an American security guarantee. Cheney and Baker had arrived at mutually exclusive positions: For a militarily weak Ukraine to serve as a check on Russian power it would need expansive American backing. Cheney’s vision proved too hard-edged for the 1990s, when Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were able to cooperate with one another.

During this period, the United States also placed too heavy an emphasis on nuclear disarmament, Pifer argues. Ukraine possessed the world’s “third largest nuclear arsenal” after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its denuclearization was a precondition for normalcy as an independent post-Soviet state, for not going the way of Iran and North Korea. Yet, in Pifer’s view, Ukraine’s denuclearization was too narrow an American priority. It came at the expense of backing reform in a country that never had a 1989-style revolution. After 1989, Ukraine’s political fate would diverge dramatically from that of its more fortunate European neighbors—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. For the past 25 years, Ukraine’s stubborn poverty and “endemic corruption” have been crushing.

For a militarily weak Ukraine to serve as a check on Russian power it would need expansive American backing.

In the 1990s, Washington expected that all post-Soviet states would inevitably transition to democracy. The operative question—for Russia, for Ukraine—was when not whether they would make this transition. Though Cheney and Baker differed on the kind of security commitment to offer Ukraine, they both supported the project of “Westernizing” Ukraine. Pifer characterizes the core American objective in the following words: to see Ukraine “develop as a stable, independent, democratic state, with a growing market economy and increasing links to the West.” Washington wanted to “increase Ukraine’s links with the West,” to assist in “anchoring Ukraine to the West,” to guide Ukraine in its “westward course,” to see “its integration into the Euro-Atlantic community,” to assist in its “European aspirations,” and to honor the “importance of Ukraine drawing closer to Europe.”