Understanding is not agreeing
A friend of mine called me not long ago, upset because he just had a big argument with his girlfriend. My first instinct was to take his side, to think something like, well, she can be difficult. Then almost immediately a second thought crept in: yes, but what did you do that made her react like that?
Over the years I have learned to distrust both of those instincts. The truth is rarely as simple as one person being right and the other being wrong. Someone gets angry, someone lashes out, someone attacks, but none of that happens out of nowhere. Something triggers it. Nobody just wakes up and decides to fight for no reason at all. There is usually a history behind the moment you actually see.
That is easy enough to accept on a small scale, between two people who love each other. It gets much harder to accept when I zoom out and look at something far bigger: a war between countries, thousands of lives lost, an entire region reshaped. But I think the same principle holds, even there.
Take the war in Ukraine. I have no difficulty saying that Russia invading Ukraine was wrong. Whatever came before it, whatever the arguments, the invasion brought enormous suffering and the loss of thousands of lives. There is no need to dress that up or look for excuses.
But that does not mean we should stop looking at what came before it.
After the end of the Cold War, NATO expanded eastwards. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999. In 2004, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia followed. In 2008, NATO stated that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members.
There is also a complicated history around the conversations between Western leaders and the Soviet leadership during the negotiations over German reunification in 1990. There was no treaty saying NATO could never expand eastwards, but there were certainly conversations and assurances that later became a source of deep disagreement.
Now imagine turning the situation around for a moment. Imagine Russia building military bases in Mexico or Canada, or Mexico announcing that it intended to join a military alliance led by Russia. How do you think Washington would react?
The comparison is not exact, of course. History, geography and the relationships between the countries are different. But it does make one thing easier to understand: countries do not look at military alliances only through the eyes of the country joining them. They also look at what those alliances mean from their own borders.
At the same time, it is worth remembering why countries like Poland or the Baltic states wanted to join NATO in the first place. Decades under Soviet control were not something any of them wanted to risk repeating, and for them, NATO membership was itself a response to fear, not a threat.
None of this makes the invasion of Ukraine acceptable. But perhaps that is not the point.
The point is that things rarely happen in isolation, whether it is a marriage, friendship, or a war. By the time something reaches the point where people are shouting, or dying, there is usually a history behind it. Decisions made years earlier, fears that accumulated, promises that were understood differently by different people, actions one side saw as defensive and the other saw as threatening.
You can understand that history without taking sides. I think we sometimes need to do exactly that.
Because if we only ask who is right, we may understand very little about why something happened in the first place. And if we ever want conflicts to end, whether it is a marriage, a friendship or a war, understanding how they developed is rather important.
Understanding is not agreeing. It is simply trying to see the whole picture before deciding what we think.
