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Our Cowardly Handling of Ukraine Could Come Back to Bite Us
If America has learned anything from foreign entanglements over the past century, surely it is this: enemy conflicts must be engaged only if our vital interests are at stake. A war worth fighting must have clear objectives and a path to victory.
Clearly in WWII, all options save winning were unthinkable. We did win and the modern classical liberal order was created.
We had no such resolve in Vietnam. Worried about riling China and with growing domestic programs to fund, we fought not to win but for containment and so lost to a determined foe. America was humiliated, forfeiting immense blood and treasure as well as our national self-confidence.
Meanwhile, the Cold War spanned 45 fretful years during which the world became more dangerous. Neither side could afford to fall behind in the nuclear arms race when Mutually Assured Destruction was our defense against annihilation.
Ronald Reagan’s idea of actually defeating the Evil Empire turned the tide. Massive arms superiority and strategic defense weaponry convinced the Soviets that future efforts were futile.
The Middle East wars were fought without particular strategic goals and no endgame. We seem to believe we could mitigate Islamist terrorism through nation-building and intervention in centuries-old intertribal conflicts. We finally beat a disgraceful retreat with little to show for our losses.
Yet these lessons of history seem lost on our current administration’s response in Ukraine. We don’t want our proxy, Ukraine, to lose but we’re not committed to winning either.
The heroic Ukrainians have fought to a virtual standoff. Yet, as a result of our indecisiveness, the outcome remains in doubt.
The seminal question was: why get involved at all? Is the Russian aggression basically a regional dustup, like our Middle East debacle? Or does a hegemonically ambitious autocrat represent an existential threat, analogous to the prelude to WW II?
Most Americans seem to realize this conflict has implications beyond the ancient Russian/Ukrainian grudges. If Russia successfully breaches Ukrainian sovereignty, it will be the end of the international rules based order that has sustained general peace and prosperity since WWII. Moreover, if nuclear weapons or their threat are decisive, it will embolden rogue states everywhere, including China and Iran.
President Zelensky has pleaded many times for faster delivery of air defenses and anti-missile systems. Yet our aid to Ukraine has been halting and inadequate. Not until late April did the Biden administration announce it would ship 90 desperately needed howitzers.
When the US finally decided to provide Ukraine with MLR (multiple launch rocket) systems, to defend against Russia’s unremitting air attacks,
only MLRs with a 70 km range, not the 300 km range necessary to reach Russian targets, were provided.
Too little, too late. Ukraine’s foreign minister lamented that if Ukraine had received more weapons earlier the situation today would be “much different… much better.”
Meanwhile, the unimaginable human toll, the death and destruction of Ukraine, continues to mount. Last month, the UN development agency announce that if the war continues, an astounding 90% of Ukrainians would be at or below poverty levels.
According to the UN refugee agency, 13 million people have been displaced, which has serious political and military consequences. When Ukrainians are scattered, it makes unity more difficult and Russian control easier. A hollowed-out Ukraine also enables Russia to take more Ukrainian territory at war’s end.
US hesitation to provide more robust help to Ukraine is based on the fear of escalation and possible nuclear war with Russia. Some have urged Ukraine into an armistice that involves territorial concessions.
But that wouldn’t stop the bear. Instead, it would incentivize further military incursions. Over-caution could actually increase the possibility of escalation.
Biden and NATO have repeatedly ruled out direct military involvement and nuclear deployment without getting any concessions in return. Our weakness sends a message to Russia and other aggressors that threatening nuclear weapons works to soften western resistance.
The free world must decide what it stands for and how to meet this moment. If we don’t thwart Russian ambitions now, it will likely get more dangerous in the future. Ukraine, for their survival and ours, deserves protection now.
Published in Foreign Policy, Military
Not sure what “the free world” means anymore.
As for America, this regional dust-up is not in our interests.
“It will likely get more dangerous in the future” sounds like a slogan without anything to support it. What will get more dangerous? Dangerous for whom? How is our survival (by which I assume you mean the United States, but correct me if I’m wrong about the “our” here) dependent on Ukraine’s?
There has been a lot of sloganeering and if you ask for explanations, all you get are snide insults about being a Putin-lover or a Chamberlain-like appeaser or something. (We will never run out of WWII analogs it seems.)
Please explain specifically how it is in the interests of the citizens of the United States to go to war against Russia (assuming, of course, that going to war with someone means defeating them — because why go to war if your intention is not to defeat the enemy — and how do we defeat Russia in the first place?)
How? Step by step process, please. Once again, I see empty rhetoric designed to whip up emotions and bang the war drums. How does seeking an armistice invite escalation?
I don’t know what the future holds, but we see a pattern. Russia annexes a piece of Georgia and the world moves on. Russia take Crimea and the world moves on. I suspect that if Ukraine had immediately capitulated this time, Russia would not have decided it is all done with territorial conquest. Even if in the end Ukraine concedes some land to Russia in the upcoming months, perhaps the price will have been high enough that Russia will not want to try again in a few years. If most of Russia’s neighbors continue arming up, that should also serve to dissuade them from dreams of cheap and easy conquest.
We either decide to fight Russia or let them have their way in Eastern Europe. There is no middle ground, unless Mr Biden pulls a Teddy Roosevelt and negotiates a peace treaty.
People have forgotten what happened when Hitler was not stopped in 1937 when Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, or what happened in 1938 when the “Great Powers” gave away parts of Chezoslovakia to Hitler. Those who forget history get to have it played out for them.
So many people think this is not our problem, but I feel the same way about that viewpoint that I do about the NeverTrumpers. The time to have acted was during the primaries. Everything they did after that was a betrayal of the Republican Party and our country.
This is a similar issue. The time to make that distinction, to decide what our interests were in that region, was during the Clinton administration. The Ukrainian people don’t deserve to suffer because we failed to control our bad president.
Everything we see today is a direct result of the Budapest Memorandum that Clinton convinced the Ukrainians to sign. Someone back then or any time since should have insisted that agreement be submitted to the Senate as a formal treaty. If it didn’t pass, the Ukrainians would have understood that they needed to protect themselves.
At some point over the last thirty years, some American somewhere in power should have acted to restore the nukes to Ukraine. If we chose to no longer honor that agreement, we should have done the decent thing and make sure that Ukrainians could protect themselves.
In a sane world, someone in the State Department or executive branch should have followed up on that and either abrogated it or developed it fully.
The United States and NATO had zero foresight about this. Now Ukraine is running out of personnel. All of the current options are terrible.
I think this was blown 20 years ago.
We should have given them a zillion dollars worth of defensive weapons and planning decades ago. Throwing every Tom, Dick, and Harry into NATO is nuts.
I don’t think that Ukraine is running out of personnel; they are outnumbered with artillery 10 to 1.
How about we get our Very Articulate Commander-in-Chief to go on live television (without teleprompters) and explain in detail why it is important for American citizens to sacrifice blood and treasure in a war against Russia?
That should be entertaining if nothing else.
Our military is falling far short of recruitment goals. Nobody wants to be a part of it under the horrific leadership we have today. (One that cares more about climate change and El-Jibbity signaling than it does about actually being a military.) And somehow, in our weakened state (weakened by our incompetent leaders — purposefully) we’re supposed to cheer on a new war against a nuclear-capable superpower?
What are you all smoking?
I mean, you all want a new war under this administration? Are you even thinking about the sort of people who will be leading it? Did the way they handled Afghanistan teach you nothing?
I can’t take it anymore.
Our interests are not served by going to war with Russia. Our interests may be served by Russia getting a worse shake in the Ukrainian war than they expected. I say may here because I have read some persuasive pieces lately that have caused me to rethink my position on this somewhat.
Russian hegemony in eastern Europe is not good for the US. It will destabilize the world and make things worse for us. It could cause them to attack a NATO ally and then we have a really hard choice. Face a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia or prove to the world that America’s word is worth a damn, which we have already done a fair bit of a job of doing mind you. It doesn’t become easier or safer for America in a world where we can’t be trusted. Should we have made those commitments? Probably not, but you can’t unscramble eggs.
The best outcome at this point for America is that the Russian’s lose a lot of men and equipment in Ukraine, There is some sort of negotiated settlement where Ukraine retains some amount of its coast and maybe some amount of its Eastern border, and the war ends. Then America needs to make real decisions about what our role in the world is. Maybe we should concede the world to Russia and China and stick to our knitting. I personally think that is a poor long term choice, but we don’t have a consensus in this country anymore and we need to come up with one.
I just heard an analyst on Clay and Buck say that.
I want to help Ukraine, but there was ZERO foresight and they didn’t do enough, soon enough.
This all should have been prevented 20 years ago.
Nobody knows how expansionist and evil they will be. They didn’t know 20 years ago, and they don’t know now. I would say there was some obvious policies for this and they weren’t followed.
Furthermore, I don’t know anything about it, but I strongly suspect we provoked them too much and they went crazy around 2003.
Best answer I’ve heard yet.
Though I’d correct your very first sentence to say that we’re already at war with Russia.
I also question the purpose of NATO if the practical result is that the U.S. gets dragged into various regional conflicts which we have no business being in. The EU already has some kind of mutual defense treaty. Maybe let NATO die and let the EU take over control of their own sphere.
“Our proxy”? I’m not sure what about this situation make this a proxy war for the U.S. as a nation but I do know that our Ruling Class as a whole are heavily invested in certain business ventures in the area and also have an interest in collecting their take* of the current $42 Billion slush fund just donated in the name of We the People before the jig is up…and don’t doubt for a minute there is more to come if time allows.
Any comment beyond that will have to wait since my sides are still hurting from the extended laugh I got from the bubblegum analysis from the “But, but, but…Hitler” crowd.
* “Take” – a similar term to profit – that I assure you in this case is well above the percentage reported by that evil Exxon Mobile.
Fair enough it is a proxy war though which is a little different. By the same token they have been at war with us for the past 6-7 years in Syria and were for 20 yrs in Afghanistan.
I am not completely sure I agree, but that conversation should have happened 30 years ago. I can see a compelling argument that we should have disbanded NATO at the end of the Cold War. Although Ukraine is an elegant example of why there is still a need for NATO, or something like it. I think we need to have those types of conversations in America. I just think that we need the war to be resolved, preferable in Ukraine’s favor, whatever that means before we have these conversations. In the end we need to have a consensus foreign policy. We haven’t had one since the end of the Cold War, so we stumble from crisis to crisis with a foreign policy that is in shambles and changes whenever we have a new president.
I don’t think that this is true.
I think that this is the Neocon narrative that has drawn us into one pointless war after another, unnecessarily. It’s expensive, in both lives and treasure. It mostly helps other countries, while harming the US. I don’t think that it’s been a good policy.
There have been a number of border adjustments over the years, without causing the collapse of the so-called “international rules based order.” Turkey in Cyprus, Israel in Palestine and Syria and Lebanon, the Soviets in Afghanistan, multiple American invasions and interventions.
The Russians took a small part of Georgia back in 2008, didn’t they? Then they took Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and supported the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014. And guess what? That “international rules based order” didn’t break down.
I think that Ukraine is teaching us a useful lesson about the difficulty of conquering a country. Russia seems to be winning, but slowly and at significant cost. It doesn’t seem likely to be a profitable enterprise for Russia. If they lack the forces to promptly conquer a relatively weak nation like Ukraine, I don’t see any reason to believe that they are a significant threat to stronger countries further west.
It is an unpleasant reality, but we should realize that if the Russian invasion fails badly, there will be a serious risk of nuclear escalation. As I understand it, this was our plan during the Cold War. We intended to use tactical nukes in central and eastern Europe, if a conventional land war against the Warsaw Pact was going badly. Why should we expect the Russians to behave any differently, if their war goes badly in Ukraine?
For the record, I don’t think that the Russians are going to be defeated in Ukraine. We’ll see.
It would be interesting to know if we have a historical example of appeasement actually working.
Appeasement was the Obama-Clinton policy toward Russia. Hillary’s famous misspelled “reset” button was intended to communicate that the US didn’t really care about Russia’s annexations of her neighbors’ territory. If Putin had any doubts about that, they were dispelled by the Obama administration‘s weak response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
It was, of course, quite natural for Putin to think of the Biden administration as Obama‘s third term — even before Biden overrode Trump’s ban on the Nordstream 2 pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine to carry Russian oil to Germany. As if to underline the point that NATO didn’t care what Putin did to Ukraine, at about the same time Germany closed half of its remaining nuclear power plants, signaling its eagerness to become even more dependent on Russian oil and gas than it already was.
If we wish, we can shed a crocodile tear or two for Vladimir Putin, who was led up the garden path by the foolishness of Angela Merkel and Joe Biden.
OK, now the pain has subsided…
Well, the “free world” has a natural leader. The last time We the People were led into a foreign war the nominal leader of the free world had nominated (and the US Senate had provided their blessing to) men of substance to the key positions. Like them or not, they were confident, knowledgeable, persuasive people who could speak to the country (and world) with authority and purpose. They made the case to that “free world” over and over again on solid logical and evidentiary bases.
Blinken and Austin, confirmed by votes of 78-22 and 93-2 respectively by the laughably unserious 50-50 US Senate, are NOT such men (or women). Maybe the Senate…and specifically the R side of that Senate…should have been a little less cowardly back then about doing their job instead of paying so much lip service to the fake insurrection narrative. Maybe then we would have a leadership team in place with half a brain between them and an least a fighting chance to argue your case.
I will repeat again a favorite passage from just last month:
Again, confirmed 78-22 and 93-2. Any thought of going “to war with the [leadership] we have” – to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld – should be suppressed at all cost. Pushing this talking point under a headline intimating that it is cowardly (or unpatriotic) not to is unconscionable and grotesque…
There, I’ve spent way too much time on another one of the “dump and run” Main Feed posts by “real” writers. <<SPIT>>
Why? As a result of requiring and announcing that unconditional surrender was the only option, this may have killed far more Americans and allied troops than would have died otherwise. There was an attempted military coup in Germany and essentially the policy was that it would not have mattered if it had been successful, there was no basis for negotiations. The only thing dumber that we did was the Morgenthau Plan which caused a major shift in the German forces Americans had to fight at the end of the war. It was one of Stalin’s more successful intelligence operations run against the US.
It wasn’t a matter of convincing the Soviets of anything. Oil prices collapsed, Soviet debt skyrocketed, bad harvests required more imports of food stuffs, and no more bank loans. They went bankrupt.
Contrast that with what is happening today. Increases in oil prices due to stupid American policy is financing Russia’s war in Ukraine. This can be directly traced to the sanctions which were supposed to collapse the Russian economy. Instead, it is doing enormous damage to western economies. Inflation was already bad and the sanctions have only exacerbated the economic problems. And western governments are on the verge of falling. Boris has gone down. Macron is a lame duck. Biden is a lame duck. What is happening in the Netherlands and Germany with their policies that are removed from reality?
Reagan’s first task was getting the economy in shape before he turned his attention to the Soviet Union. We are on exactly the opposite track.
What does ‘international rules-based order’ mean? We went off Breton Woods in 1972. And papered over what should have been an end to it. Prior to 1991, the world was divided into three – the west, the Soviet Block, and everybody else. What’s happening now is that we’re going back to that. The Soviets never bought into the ‘international rules-based order’ which essentially means the United States is the hegemon. Why would you expect that to continue? Why should it continue? While it’s clear that the elites of the United States benefit from this, it’s far from clear that anybody else does. It’s under the ‘international rules-based order’ that we sent all our manufacturing which employed large numbers of Americans to China with the only beneficiaries being America’s elites. So basically, good riddance.
The United States and Nato do not have the ability to supply the howitzers in sufficient number to make any difference in Ukraine. We don’t make enough of them, fast enough and don’t have the ability to turn a switch and make a bunch more. We shipped off our manufacturing capability to China all in the name of that holy ‘international rules-based order’. We also don’t have the ability to manufacture the munitions for the fire rates necessary to even match the Russians.
Because the fools in the Biden administration and the Republicans in Congress who keep voting to send more money to Ukraine have not thought things through, the administration and Congress are once again showing what a feckless group they are.
We keep goading countries like Ukraine to do stupid things like not negotiate which has the effect of killing a lot of Ukrainians and demonstrating to the world that the United States is a paper tiger. That is what is dangerous. There has been a clear path forward since 2015 through the Minsk accords to settle the problems, but the same group of clowns in the Obama administration who are once again wreaking havoc are at it again. They opposed it and have warmly embraced war in an effort to dislodge Putin. Hopefully, the result will be they will be dislodged after the fiascos of Afghanistan and Ukraine, back to back. They are a true menace to the United States. And that goes for many Republicans in Congress.
The Budapest memo was not a mutual defense agreement like NATO. It was a non-aggression agreement. The US agreed to not disrupt the territory of Ukraine and we mostly kept to that. Having a full treaty would not help Ukraine.
What does this mean? Why is “yet” used here? Did conflicting US signals change the behavior or outcome or non-outcome in some way?
Jerry you are correct. I would say that 99% of Americans cannot distinguish between spoken Ukrainian and spoken Russian. Furthermore, they cannot distinguish between their churches or names of people/places. 4 months into war and Americans struggle to find Ukraine on a map. I bet more Americans know that the Biden family took bribes from Ukraine than can name two cities there.
We knew this would happen
Russia took Chechnya in 2000 under Clinton
Russia took Ossetia in 2008 under W
Russia took Crimea in 2014 under B Hussein and Slow Joe
Russia took naught in 2017-2020 under DJT, I wonder why?
Russia was set up to take Ukraine in 2021 and dad-gum, as soon as Slow Joe gave them the money, impetus and permission to do so, they did.
So let’s not plead “How could we have known?”
This is not my war, not our war. I don’t want my grandsons or yours dying over the world’s biggest cash laundering system. Let Europe solve Europe’s problems. If we must get involved, it should only be if American safety is fundamentally threatened, which it presently is not.
And now Europe has set its self up for an energy and commodity crisis after printing zillions of dollars. Trump warned them and they laughed.
Angela Merkel is a communist and a menace to the West. So is that other Prime Minister that’s now on the GASPROM board of Directors.
Electricity and energy is going up and it’s destroying the German export ability.
They will print another zillion Euros.
Because Trump was Putin’s puppet or something. It was always a lie but trying to still spread it after the time-line you show is laughable. I think the line now is that Putin didn’t need Ukraine because Donny gave him everything he wanted. Sure.
Trump likes to tell a story about how he was at Mar-a-Lago having dinner with Xi when he received word that the US had wiped out a group of Russian mercenaries in Syria. I think this probably sent a message to both Xi and Putin. What Trump never tried to do was belittle either leader publicly. That is actually a pretty canny move. Something one wishes our current leaders and diplomats would understand. He would attack China rhetorically, or Russia but not Xi or Putin. You don’t have to negotiate with China or Russia. You have to negotiate and communicate with Xi and Putin and needlessly antagonizing them, while great for virtue signaling in the US and Europe, is pretty pointless to actually getting what you want. On the other hand casually mentioning in a state dinner that you had a bunch of their citizens killed and then moving politely on to the next course probably made quite the impression.
I’m reminded of the Biden administration insulting the Saudis and then begging for their oil.
Can’t imagine why they said no.
Do you know of a good source to follow to keep track of Biden’s foot-dragging on aid to Ukraine?