How to Break the Cycle of Conflict With Russia

To judge from recent developments around Ukraine, the United States’ post–Cold War policy toward Russia’s neighbors might seem like a failure. Moscow has deployed more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, and U.S. efforts to de-escalate the situation have so far come up short. But Europe’s most serious security crisis in decades is not the result of Washington’s failure to achieve its core objectives in the region but, paradoxically, a symptom of its runaway success.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has sought to bolster the sovereignty of what used to