When Ukraine emerged from the corpse of the Soviet Union, a significant arsenal of Soviet-era nuclear weapons was left on its territory. The Clinton administration devoted much of its diplomatic energy to persuading Ukraine, along with Kazakhstan and Belarus, to return those weapons to Russia.
As President Clinton told the Irish news service RTÉ last week, the Ukrainians resisted American pressure to denuclearize: “They were afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia.” But Americans, as Mr. Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright once put it, “stand tall. We see further than other countries into the future.” And so the Clinton administration pushed another message on the Ukrainians: The rules-based international order would protect Ukraine’s future better than anything as anachronistic as nuclear weapons.