By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

To Recognize The Stakes

Yesterday, Zelensky made this first trip abroad since the war began at the cost of a long journey rather than going to Warsaw, Paris, or London. Zelensky’s visit, however, recalled an earlier visit to Washington that started 81 years ago Thursday by another leader of a dark, bomb-ravaged nation, desperate for US help to turn the tide toward victory over totalitarianism, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed Congress on December 26, 1941. Zelensky borrowed one of the great statesman’s most significant lines, presenting himself as the symbol of a nation’s defiance.

While Putin vows to ‘knock down’ US Patriot missiles supplied to Ukraine, Putin dismisses weapons as outdated.

The US has announced new military assistance to Kyiv, including the delivery of (something Zelensky repeatedly asked for the past five months) a Patriot missile battery system, which would need extensive training initially.

Yet on February 24, 2022, most Americans agreed that the United States had no vital interests in Ukraine. “If somebody in this town would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “they should speak up.” Few did.

Yet the consensus shifted when Russia  INVADED  Ukraine. Suddenly, Ukraine’s fate was important enough to justify spending billions of dollars in resources and enduring rising gas prices; enough to expand security commitments in Europe, including bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO; enough to make the United States a virtual co-belligerent in the war against Russia, with consequences yet to be seen. All these steps have so far enjoyed substantial support in both political parties and among the public. An August poll found that four in ten Americans support sending U.S. troops to help defend Ukraine if necessary. However, the Biden administration insists it has no intention of doing so.

Russia’s invasion has changed Americans’ views of Ukraine, the world, and the United States’ role. For more than a dozen years before Russia’s invasion and under two different presidents, the country sought to pare its overseas commitments, including in Europe. A majority of Americans believed that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” according to the Pew Research Center. As pollster Andrew Kohut put it, the American public felt “little responsibility and inclination to deal with international problems that are not seen as direct threats to the national interest.” Yet today, Americans are dealing with two international disputes that do not directly threaten the “national interest” as commonly understood. The United States has joined a war against a tremendous aggressive power in Europe and promised to defend another small democratic nation against a great autocratic power in East Asia. U.S. President Joe Biden’s commitments to defending TAIWAN if it is attacked—in “another action similar to what happened in Ukraine,” as Biden described it—have grown starker since Russia’s invasion. Americans now see the world as a more dangerous place. In response, defense budgets are climbing (marginally), economic sanctions and limits on technology transfer are increasing; and alliances are being shored up and expanded.

 

History Repeats

The war in UKRAINE has exposed the gap between how Americans think and talk about their national interests and how they behave in times of perceived crisis. It is not the first time Americans’ perceptions of their interests have changed in response to events. For more than a century, the country has oscillated in this way, from periods of restraint, retrenchment, indifference, and disillusion to periods of almost panicked global engagement and interventionism. Americans were determined to stay out of the European crisis after war broke out in August 1914, only to dispatch millions of troops to fight in World War I three years later. They were determined to stay out of the burgeoning crisis in Europe in the 1930s, only to send many millions to fight in the next world war after December 1941.

Then as now, Americans acted not because they faced an immediate threat to their security but to defend the liberal world beyond their shores. Imperial Germany had neither the capacity nor the intention to attack the United States. Even Americans’ intervention in WORLD WAR II was not a response to a direct threat to the homeland. In the late 1930s and right up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, military experts, strategic thinkers, and self-described “realists” agreed that the United States was invulnerable to foreign invasion, no matter what happened in Europe and Asia. Before France’s shocking collapse in June 1940, no one believed the German military could defeat the French, much less the British with their powerful navy. The defeat of both was necessary before any attack on the United States could even be imagined. As the realist political scientist Nicholas Spykman argued, with Europe “three thousand miles away” and the Atlantic Ocean “reassuringly” in between, the United States' “frontiers” were secure.

These assessments are ridiculed today, but the historical evidence suggests that the Germans and the Japanese did not intend to invade the United States, not in 1941, and most likely never. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a preemptive effort to prevent or delay an American attack on Japan; it was not a prelude to an invasion of the United States, for which the Japanese had no capacity. Adolf Hitler mused about an eventual German confrontation with the United States, but such thoughts were shelved once he became bogged down in the war with the Soviet Union after June 1941. Even if Germany and Japan ultimately triumphed in their respective regions, there is reason to doubt, as the anti-interventionists did at the time, that either would be able to consolidate control over vast new conquests any time soon, giving Americans time to build the necessary forces and defenses to deter a future invasion. Even Henry Luce, a leading interventionist, admitted that “as a pure matter of defense—defense of our homeland,” the United States “could make itself such a tough nut to crack that not all the tyrants in the world would dare to come against us.”

President Franklin Roosevelt’s interventionist policies from 1937 on were not a response to an increasing threat to American security. What worried  ROOSEVELTwas the potential destruction of the broader liberal world beyond American shores. Long before either the Germans or the Japanese were in a position to harm the United States, Roosevelt began arming their opponents and declaring ideological solidarity with the democracies against the “bandit nations.” He declared the United States the “arsenal of democracy.” He deployed the U.S. Navy against Germany in the Atlantic, while in the Pacific, he gradually cut off Japan’s access to oil and other military necessities.

In January 1939, months before Germany invaded Poland, Roosevelt warned Americans that “there comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” In the summer of 1940, he warned not of invasion but of the United States becoming a “lone island” in a world dominated by the “philosophy of force,” “a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.” It was these concerns, the desire to defend a liberal world, that led the United States into a confrontation with the two autocratic great powers well before either posed any threat to what Americans had traditionally understood as their interests. The United States, in short, was not just minding its own business when Japan decided to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet and Hitler declared war in 1941. As Herbert Hoover put it at the time, if the United States insisted on “putting pins in rattlesnakes,” they should expect to get bitten.

 

Duty Calls

The traditional understanding of what makes up a country’s national interests cannot explain the actions the United States took in the 1940s or what it is doing today in Ukraine. Interests should be about territorial security and sovereignty, not the defense of beliefs and ideologies. The West’s modern discourse on interests can be traced to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when first Machiavelli and then seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, responding to the abuses of ruthless popes and the horrors of interreligious conflict in the Thirty Years’ War, looked to excise religion and belief from the conduct of international relations. According to their theories, which still dominate our thinking today, all states share a common set of primary interests in survival and sovereignty. A just and stable peace requires that states set aside their beliefs in the conduct of international relations, respect religious or ideological differences, forbear from meddling in each other’s internal affairs, and accept a balance of power among states that alone can ensure international peace. This way of thinking about interests is often called “realism” or “neorealism,” It suffuses all discussions of international relations.

Most Americans largely followed this way of thinking about the world for the first century of their country's existence. Although they were a highly ideological people whose beliefs were the foundation of their nationalism, Americans were foreign policy realists for much of the nineteenth century, seeing danger in meddling in the affairs of EUROPE. They were conquering the continent, expanding their commerce, and as a weaker power in a world of imperial superpowers, they focused on the homeland's security. Americans could not have supported liberalism abroad even if they had wanted to, and many did not want to. For one thing, there was no liberal world out there to support before the middle of the nineteenth century. For another, as citizens of a half-democracy and half-totalitarian-dictatorship until the Civil War, Americans could not even agree that liberalism was a good thing at home, much less in the world.

Then, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the United States became unified as a more coherent liberal nation and amassed the necessary wealth and influence to impact the broader world, there was no apparent need to do so. From the mid-1800s on, western Europe, especially France and the United Kingdom, became increasingly liberal. The combination of British naval hegemony and the relatively stable balance of power on the continent provided a liberal political and economic peace from which Americans benefited more than any other people. Yet they bore none of the costs or responsibilities of preserving this order. It was an idyllic existence, and although some “internationalists” believed that growing power should come with growing responsibility, most Americans preferred remaining free riders in someone else’s liberal order. Long before modern international relations theory entered the discussion, a view of the national interest as a defense of the homeland made sense for a people who wanted and needed nothing more than to be left alone.

A Fence Painted In Ukrainian Flag Colors In Washington, D.C., July 2022

Everything changed when the British-led liberal order began to collapse in the early twentieth century. The outbreak of the WORLD in August 1914 revealed a dramatic shift in the global distribution of power. The United Kingdom could no longer sustain its naval hegemony against the rising power of Japan and the United States, along with its traditional imperial rivals, France and Russia. The balance of power in Europe collapsed with the rise of a unified Germany. By the end of 1915, it became clear that not even the combined power of France, Russia, and the United Kingdom would be sufficient to defeat the German industrial and military machine. A balance of global power that favored liberalism was shifting toward antiliberal forces.

The result was that the liberal world that Americans had enjoyed virtually without cost would be overrun unless the United States intervened to shift the balance of power back in favor of liberalism. It suddenly fell to the United States to defend the liberal world order that the United Kingdom could no longer sustain. And it fell to President Woodrow Wilson, who, after struggling to stay out of the war and remain neutral in traditional fashion, finally concluded that the United States had no choice but to enter the war or see liberalism in Europe crushed. American aloofness from the world was no longer “feasible” or “desirable” when world peace was at stake and when democracies were threatened by “autocratic governments backed by organized force,” he said in his war declaration to Congress in 1917. Americans agreed and supported the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” by which Wilson did not mean spreading democracy everywhere but meant defending liberalism where it already existed.

 

Conflict Of Interests

Americans have struggled to reconcile these contradictory interpretations of their interests—one focused on the security of the homeland and one focused on the defense of the liberal world beyond the United States’ shores. The first conforms to Americans’ preference to be left alone and avoid the costs, responsibilities, and moral burdens of exercising power abroad. The second reflects their anxieties as liberal people about becoming a “lone island” in a sea of militarist dictatorships. The oscillation between these two perspectives has produced recurring whiplash in U.S. foreign policy over the past century.

Which is more right, more moral? Which is the better description of the world, the better guide to American policy? Realists and most international theorists have consistently attacked the more expansive definition of U.S. interests as lacking restraint and, therefore, likely to exceed American capacities and risk a horrific conflict with nuclear-armed great powers. These fears have never yet proved justified—Americans’ aggressive prosecution of the Cold War did not lead to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and even the wars in Vietnam and Iraq did not fatally undermine American power. But the core of the realist critique, ironically, has always been moral rather than practical.

In the 1920s and 1930s, critics of the broader definition of interests focused not only on the costs to the United States in terms of lives and treasure but also on what they regarded as the hegemonism and imperialism inherent in the project. What gave Americans the right to insist on the security of the liberal world abroad if their security was not threatened? It was an imposition of American preferences by force. However objectionable the actions of Germany and Japan might have seemed to the liberal powers, they, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, were trying to change an Anglo-American world order that had left them as “have not” nations. The settlement reached at Versailles after World War I and the international treaties negotiated by the United States in East Asia denied Germany and Japan the empires and even the spheres of influence that the victorious powers got to enjoy. Americans and other liberals may have viewed German and Japanese aggression as immoral and destructive of the “world order.” Still, it was, after all, a system that a superior power had imposed on them. How else could they change it except by wielding the power of their own?

As the British realist thinker, E. H. Carr argued in the late 1930s, if dissatisfied powers such as Germany were bent on changing a system that disadvantaged them, then “the responsibility for seeing that these changes take place . . . in an orderly way” rested on the upholders of the existing order. The growing power of the dissatisfied nations should be accommodated, not resisted. And that meant the sovereignty and independence of some small countries had to be sacrificed. Carr argued that the growth of German power made it “inevitable that Czechoslovakia should lose part of its territory and eventually its independence.” George Kennan, then serving as a senior U.S. diplomat in Prague, agreed that Czechoslovakia was “after all, a central European state” and that its “fortunes must, in the long run, lie with—and not against—the dominant forces in this area.” The anti-interventionists warned that “German imperialism” was being replaced by “Anglo-American imperialism.”

Critics of American support for Ukraine have made the same arguments. Obama frequently emphasized that Ukraine was more important to Russia than the United States, and the same could be said of Taiwan and China. Critics on the left and the right have accused the United States of engaging in imperialism for refusing to rule out Ukraine’s possible future accession to NATO and encouraging Ukrainians in their desire to join the liberal world.

There is much truth in these charges. Whether or not U.S. actions deserve to be called “imperialism,” during World War I and then in the eight decades from World War II until today, the United States has used its power and influence to defend and support the hegemony of liberalism. The defense of Ukraine is a defense of liberal hegemony. When Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and others say that the United States has a vital interest in Ukraine, they do not mean it will be directly threatened if Ukraine falls. They mean that the liberal world order will be threatened if Ukraine falls.

 

The Rulemaking

Americans are fixated on the supposed moral distinction between “wars of necessity” and “wars of choice.” In the rendering of their history, Americans remember the country being attacked on December 7, 1941, and Hitler’s declaration of war four days later but forget the American policies that led the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor and led Hitler to declare war. In the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, Americans could see the communists’ aggression and their country’s attempts to defend the “free world.” Still, they did not recognize that their government’s insistence on stopping communism everywhere was a form of hegemonism. Americans equated the defense of the “free world” with the defense of their security. They regarded every action they took as an act of necessity.

Only when wars have gone poorly, as in Vietnam and Iraq, or ended unsatisfactorily, as in World War I, have Americans decided, retrospectively, that those wars were unnecessary and that American security was not directly at risk. They forget how the world looked to them when they first supported those wars—72 percent of Americans polled in March 2003 agreed with the decision to go to war in Iraq. They forget their fears and insecurity at the time and decide they were led astray by some nefarious conspiracy.

The irony of both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq is that although in later years they were depicted as plots to promote democracy and, therefore, as prime examples of the dangers of the more expansive definition of U.S. interests, Americans at the time were not thinking about the liberal world order at all. They were thinking only about security. In the post-9/11 environment of fear and danger, Americans believed that Afghanistan and Iraq posed a direct threat to American security because their governments either harbored terrorists or had weapons of mass destruction that might have ended up in terrorists’ hands. Rightly or wrongly, that was why Americans initially supported what they would later deride as the “forever wars.” As with Vietnam, it was not until the fighting dragged on with no victory that Americans decided that their perceived wars of necessity were, in fact, wars of choice.

But all United States’ wars have been wars of choice, the “good” wars, and the “bad” wars, the wars won and the wars lost. Not one was necessary to defend the United States' direct security; all, in one way or another, were about shaping the international environment. The Gulf War in 1990–91 and the interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s and Libya in 2011 were all about managing and defending the liberal world and enforcing its rules.

American leaders often discuss defending the rules-based international order, but Americans do not acknowledge the hegemonism inherent in such a policy. They do not realize that, as Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, the rules are a form of hegemony. They are not neutral but are designed to sustain the international status quo, which for eight decades has been dominated by the American-backed liberal world. The rules-based order is an adjunct to that hegemony. If dissatisfied great powers such as Russia and China abided by these rules for as long as they did, it was not because they were converts to liberalism or because they were content with the world as it was or had inherent respect for the rules. It was because the United States and its allies wielded superior power on behalf of their vision of desirable world order, and the dissatisfied powers had no safe choice other than acquiescence.

 

Reality Sets In

The long period of great-power peace that followed the Cold War presented a misleadingly moving picture of the world. In times of peace, the world can appear as international theorists describe it. The leaders of China and Russia can be dealt with diplomatically at conferences of equals, enlisted in sustaining a peaceful balance of power because, according to the reigning theory of interests, the goals of other great powers cannot be fundamentally different from the United States goals. All seek to maximize their security and preserve their sovereignty. All accept the rules of the imagined international order—all spurn ideology as a guide to policy.

The presumption behind all these arguments is that however objectionable Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping might be as rulers, state actors can be expected to behave as all leaders have always allegedly behaved. They have legitimate grievances about how the post–Cold War peace was settled by the United States and its allies, just as Germany and Japan had legitimate grievances about the postwar settlement in 1919. The further presumption is that a reasonable effort to accommodate their legitimate grievances would lead to a more stable peace, just as the accommodation of France after Napoleon helped preserve the peace of the early nineteenth century. In this view, the alternative to the American-backed liberal hegemony is not war, autocracy, and chaos but a more civilized and equitable peace.

Americans have often convinced themselves that other states will follow their preferred rules voluntarily—in the 1920s, when Americans hailed the Kellogg-Briand Pact “outlawing” war; in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when many Americans hoped that the United Nations would take over the burden of preserving the peace; and again in the decades after the Cold War, when the world was presumed to be moving ineluctably toward both peaceful cooperation and the triumph of liberalism. The added benefit, perhaps even the motive, for such beliefs was that if they were true, the United States could cease playing the role of the world’s liberal enforcer and be relieved of all the material and moral costs that entailed.

Yet this lovely picture of the world has periodically been exploded by the brutal realities of international existence. Putin was treated as a crafty statesman, a realist, seeking only to repair the injustice done to Russia by the post–Cold War settlement and with some reasonable arguments on his side—until he launched the invasion of Ukraine, which proved not only his willingness to use force against a weaker neighbor but, in the course of the war, to use all the methods at his disposal to wreak destruction on Ukraine’s civilian population without the slightest scruple. As in the late 1930s, events have forced Americans to see the world for what it is, and it is not the neat and rational place that the theorists have posited. No extraordinary powers behave as the realists suggest, guided by rational judgments about maximizing security. Like great powers in the past, they act out of beliefs and passions, anger and resentment. There are no separate “state” interests, only the interests and beliefs of the people who inhabit and rule states.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi displaying a pin in Washington, D.C., March 2022

Consider China. Beijing’s evident willingness to risk war for Taiwan makes little sense in terms of security. No reasoned assessment of the international situation should cause Beijing’s leaders to conclude that Taiwan’s independence would pose any threat of attack on the mainland. Far from maximizing Chinese security, Beijing’s policies toward Taiwan increase the possibility of a catastrophic conflict with the United States. If China declared it no longer demanded unification with Taiwan, the Taiwanese and their American backers would cease trying to arm the island to the teeth. Taiwan might even disarm considerably, just as Canada remains disarmed along its border with the United States. But such straightforward material and security considerations are not the driving force behind Chinese policies. Matters of pride, honor, and nationalism, along with the justifiable paranoia of an autocracy trying to maintain power in an age of liberal hegemony—are the engines of Chinese policies on Taiwan and many other issues.

Few nations have benefited more than China from the U.S.-backed international order, which has provided markets for Chinese goods, as well as the financing and the information that has allowed the Chinese to recover from the weakness and poverty of the last century. Modern China has enjoyed remarkable security during the past few decades, which was why China spent little on defense until a couple of decades ago. Yet this is the world China aims to upend.

Similarly, Putin’s serial invasions of neighboring states have not been driven by a desire to maximize Russia’s security. Russia never enjoyed greater security on its western frontier than during the three decades after the end of the Cold War. Russia was invaded by the west three times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. It had to prepare for the possibility of a western invasion throughout the Cold War. But at no time since the fall of the Berlin Wall has anyone in Moscow had reason to believe that Russia faced the possibility of attack by the West.

That the nations of eastern Europe wished to seek the security and prosperity of membership in the West after the Cold War may have been a blow to Moscow’s pride and a sign of Russia’s post–Cold War weakness. But it did not increase the risk to Russian security. Putin opposed the expansion of NATO not because he feared an attack on Russia but because that expansion would make it increasingly difficult for him to restore Russian control in eastern Europe. Today, as in the past, the United States is an obstacle to Russian and Chinese hegemony. It is not a threat to Russia’s and China’s existence.

Far from maximizing Russian security, Putin has damaged it—and this would have been so even if his invasion had succeeded as planned. He has done so not for reasons concerning security or economics or any material gains but to overcome the humiliation of lost greatness, to satisfy his sense of his place in Russian history, and perhaps to defend a particular set of beliefs. Putin despises liberalism much as Stalin and Alexander I and most autocrats throughout history despised it—as a pitiful, weak, even sick ideology devoted to nothing but the petty pleasures of the individual when it is the glory of the state and the nation that should have the people’s devotion and for which they should sacrifice.

 

Breaking The Cycle

That most Americans should regard such actors as threatening to liberalism is a sensible reading of the situation, just as it was sensible to be wary of Hitler even before he had committed any act of aggression or begun the extermination of the Jews. When great powers with a record of hostility to liberalism use armed force to achieve their aims, Americans have generally roused themselves from their inertia, abandoned their narrow definitions of interest, and adopted this broader view of what is worth their sacrifice.

This is truer realism. Instead of treating the world as made up of impersonal states operating according to their logic, it understands primary human motivations. It understands that every nation has unique interests peculiar to its history, geography, experiences, and beliefs. Nor are all interests permanent. Americans did not have the same interests in 1822 that they have two centuries later. And the day must come when the United States can no longer contain the challengers to the liberal world order. Technology may eventually make oceans and distances irrelevant. Even the United States itself could change and cease being a liberal nation.

But that day has yet to arrive. Despite frequent assertions to the contrary, the circumstances that made the United States the determining factor in world affairs a century ago persist. Just as two world wars and the Cold War confirmed that would-be autocratic hegemons could not achieve their ambitions as long as the United States was a player, so Putin has discovered the difficulty of accomplishing his goals as long as his weaker neighbors can look for virtually unlimited support from the United States and its allies. There may be a reason to hope that Xi also feels the time is not suitable to challenge the liberal order directly and militarily.

The bigger question, however, has to do with what Americans want. Today, they have been roused again to defend the liberal world. It would be better if they had been roused earlier. Putin spent years probing to see what the Americans would tolerate, first in Georgia in 2008, then in Crimea in 2014, all the while building up his military capacity (not well, as it turns out). The cautious American reaction to both military operations and Russian military actions in Syria convinced him to press forward. Are we better off today for not having taken the risks then?

“Know thyself” was the advice of the ancient philosophers. Some critics complain that Americans have not seriously debated and discussed their policies toward either Ukraine or Taiwan, and that panic and outrage have drowned out dissenting voices. The critics are right. Americans should have a frank and open debate about what role they want the United States to play in the world.

The first step, however, is to recognize the stakes. The natural trajectory of history in the absence of American leadership has been perfectly apparent: it has not been toward a liberal peace, a stable balance of power, or the development of international laws and institutions. Instead, it leads to the spread of dictatorship and continual great-power conflict. That is where the world was heading in 1917 and 1941. Should the United States reduce its involvement in the world today, the consequences for Europe and Asia are easy to predict. Great-power conflict and dictatorship have been the norm throughout human history, the liberal peace a brief aberration. Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay.

In November 2022, General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent shockwaves through Western capitals when he declared that the war in Ukraine was unwinnable by purely military means. Milley suggested that Ukraine is now in a position of strength and that this winter might be the moment to consider peace talks with Russia. He also recalled World War I, when the adversaries’ refusal to negotiate led to millions of additional deaths, suggesting that failure to “seize” the moment could lead to significantly more human suffering. His remarks challenged not only the position of Kyiv but also many of its Western backers, including Poland, the Baltics, North America, and the United Kingdom, which have endorsed Ukraine’s pursuit of complete military victory. As Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas argues in Foreign Affairs, “The only path to peace is to push Russia out of Ukraine.” She concludes that Russia’s defeat, Ukrainian membership in NATO, the trial of Russia’s political and military leadership for war crimes, and the payment of damages are essential to peace. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ten-point peace plan unveiled in November takes the same approach.

If Milley’s comments were controversial, they pointed to a more significant problem with seeking complete victory. Complete victory could require a very long  WAR,, and it would also mean that its ultimate duration would depend on political factors beyond the West’s control. For those calling for complete victory, the West must keep supplying Ukraine with the weapons and resources to continue fighting, wait for Russia to lose, and, ideally, for Putin to go.

But a grinding war of attrition has already been hugely damaging for Ukraine, the West, and Russia. Over six million Ukrainians have been forced to flee, the Ukrainian economy is in freefall, and the widespread destruction of the country’s energy infrastructure threatens a humanitarian catastrophe this winter. Even now, Kyiv is on financial life support, maintaining its operations only through billions of dollars of aid from the United States and Europe. The energy costs in Europe have risen dramatically because of the disruption of usual oil and gas flows. Meanwhile, despite significant setbacks, Russian forces have regrouped and have not collapsed. The best plausible outcome for Ukraine would be the retreat of Russian forces to the lines of control that existed before the February 2022 invasion. But even if the Russians are swept back to the status quo ante, many Ukrainians fear that Moscow will retrench and regroup, waiting for the next opportunity to invade. It is unclear whether military deterrence would be enough to secure the resulting peace.

Then, what is needed is a coherent political plan to end the suffering and reassure Ukrainians that Russia will not begin a new war at the earliest opportunity, even if PUTIN remains in power. That will require the Russians to accept a defeat and the Ukrainians to accept that complete victory may be unobtainable. But suppose those goals are to be achieved. In that case, Western populations will need to accept the end of Russia’s pariah status and its “return to Europe” while providing credible security assurances to Kyiv. In other words, the West must formulate a central policy vision that obviates the desire of Ukraine and its staunchest supporters to have Russia smashed and neutralized. If the United States and its partners fail to lay out such a plan, the chances for Milley’s scenario will grow a war of attrition, the danger of escalation and catastrophe, and a troubled aftermath to the war.

 

Russian Resilience

Although it lacks the broad and deep support that Ukraine has received from its partners and allies, Russia is stronger than many would have predicted. Its army, economy, and leader all seem stable. Through repeated defeats that have dispirited the Russian military, it has survived. The coming winter will be a crucial test of the Russian army’s ability to endure, but military experts do not predict its collapse. Many more defeats and retreats would be needed to change this assessment.

The same is true of Russia’s economy. Many confidently predicted that Russian trade and industry would be crushed by the weight of sanctions imposed by Western governments. Such extreme economic pressure, it was suggested, could be sufficient to force Moscow to withdraw from Ukraine. But economic pressure is rarely enough to end a war. Russia’s economy has shrunk in 2022, but by just three percent, significantly less than some had predicted, and its financial system has proved sustainable and macroeconomically stable. Russia is cut off from many Western supply chains, but it has an extremely large current account surplus, which allows the country’s companies and government to find much of what they need elsewhere. During the COLD WAR, sanctions did not force Moscow to withdraw from Eastern Europe; today, they are unlikely to force Russia to withdraw from Ukraine. The price cap on Russian oil set by the G-7 in early December may hit Russia’s import revenues, but even Western optimists are uncertain how effective it will be. If, despite Western pressure, Russia’s war machine remains funded and equipped, the result will be a bloody stalemate.

As the main architect of this war, Putin is also aware of the potential consequences of defeat. His misreading of the history of Ukraine and Russia led him to assume that his invasion would experience quick success. But although Putin may misunderstand the origins of the Ukrainian nation, his grasp of the important lessons of the twin collapses of the Russian and Soviet states is strong. The Russian Empire fell in 1917 when its ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, abdicated. The Soviet state collapsed after President Mikhail Gorbachev’s military and security leaders betrayed him, and he lost control of the capital. Putin has ensured that he remains in firm control of the military, the security services, and the Russian population. The capital is calm and well-fed, and the Kremlin has ensured that no army of unhappy conscripts is stationed nearby, as was the case in March 1917. Instead, those who might have led a revolution have fled abroad, while rebellions in Dagestan or Buryatia—poor and remote areas in the Caucasus and Siberia, respectively—could be managed.

Most Russians support the Russian government and are not ready to accept defeat. Many regards Crimea and its stronghold of Sevastopol as worth fighting for. And for many, Putin remains the guarantor of Russian sovereignty and stability. To ELITE  and even many ordinary Russians, the outcome that the Ukrainians and their backers dream of—the defeat of the Russian army and the downfall of Putin—is a political nightmare, threatening economic chaos and lawlessness.

Given this complicated dynamic within RUSSIA, it is unlikely that military defeats can be enough to make the Kremlin sue for peace. But the West’s current approach to letting the war continue, though morally satisfying and politically popular, is risky. It subjects Ukrainians to the continual horrors of conflict. The death toll and financial cost of fighting will continue to rise. It feeds Putin’s narrative that Russia is in an existential battle with the West, and it encourages Russian nationalists’ belief that Russia must either win or perish. Western denunciations of Russia’s war crimes will not be enough to change Russian minds. Although increasing numbers of Russians no longer trust their government and media, they do not trust their Western counterparts.

Today, those Russian elites who mistrust the West's intentions and Putin’s may regard the prospect of peace as worse than the continuation of the war. Ordinary Russians may agree: they have accepted their government’s explanation that Western sanctions were imposed to crush the Russian people. Western commentators have fueled this view by arguing that the Russians must be punished for what their country has done to Ukraine. Those Russians with access to the Western media on the Internet do not accept that Russia is a “terrorist state” or an “imperialist nation.” Russian elites and ordinary Russians believe it is in their best interests to rally around the flag.

Of course, political change in an autocratic system can be quick and complete. The power of Russia’s aging dictator rests on sowing and maintaining fear, apathy, cynicism, and mistrust among the country’s elites. With more Russian defeats and further mobilization, millions of Russians may begin to blame Putin, just as their predecessors blamed Tsar Nicholas and Gorbachev. Combined with a crisis of morale, apathy, and exhaustion among the troops, such a shift in public opinion could generate a political crisis. It would be when Russian political elites would have to decide whether to compromise with the West or fight to the end.

 

Map And Carrots

In November 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points convinced Germany’s leadership that they would be fairly dealt with and persuaded them to accept an armistice. This compromise ended WORLD WAR I. The weakness of the German army and its leaders' realization that Germany had lost the war increased the attractiveness of Wilson's proposals. Rather than allow the remnants of their forces to be annihilated and their country invaded, they accepted Wilson’s terms that promised not to punish Germany. This is the approach that the West must follow today. The West must be prepared to offer a map for the Russian elites and general population, outlining how they can end their isolation, free themselves of sanctions, and remove their pariah status.

This map should begin by explaining the risks of continuing the war. It should make clear that Russia cannot win. Ukraine’s Western-supplied military equipment is superior, and its forces are determined. If Moscow keeps fighting, it will sustain more defeats and casualties and place itself in increasing danger of calamitous and violent collapse. The plan must gently explain that Russia's future will be one of economic degradation; it risks becoming a weakened dependence on China. By accepting that it must end the war, the Russian government will spare itself the humiliation of a larger unraveling.

Then the map must outline the gains Russia will make if it chooses the path of de-escalation. Specific content will have to be determined through discussion, but some elements are apparent. First, a pledge that Russia’s sovereignty and integrity will be respected after a peace settlement with Ukraine. As unlikely as it may sound today, a framework other than NATO should be convened to ensure Russia’s place in Europe’s security architecture. Revisiting Gorbachev’s vision of “a common European home,” marked by rapprochement rather than deterrence, and dismissed by both the West and Russia today, is necessary. Second, the map must affirm that Western governments will recognize and respect Russia’s leadership, provided Moscow rigorously obeys the UN Charter and international law and honors Russia’s international treaties, agreements, and commitments. Third, the West should lay out a timetable for returning Russia’s frozen financial assets after demands for demilitarization and withdrawal are met. Finally, the map must declare that, after the war's end, all international economic obstacles will be removed.

Until now, the West has used only sticks to coerce Russia to stop the war. The map must include some carrots, as well. The road to a peaceful settlement should be linked to gradually lifting sanctions. But the giant carrot is international legitimacy. The West will have to grant international recognition to some people and groups that constitute part of today’s regime. The Russian side at future peace talks will not consist of democrats, antiwar activists, and leaders in exile. Members of the military and the Russian bureaucracy will inevitably sit at the negotiating table. Providing at least some Russian leaders who will opt for peace with a choice between The Hague tribunal and the chance to create a new peaceful Russia would be a powerful stimulus for the road to peace and an end to the war.

 

Selling Peace

A vision for a postwar Russia should be aligned with a Western vision of a postwar Ukraine without diluting the boundary between an aggressor and a victim. Though Western populations will take some convincing, persuading Ukraine to agree on the map and the carrots for Russia will be challenging. Zelensky’s plan focuses on justice and retribution for Ukraine; it is about coercing Russia to comply. Ukraine and its eastern allies do not want to let Russia off the hook and oppose any security guarantees to Moscow. They will demand peace terms be announced only after Russia accepts its defeat and perhaps even after Putin is gone. The U.S. government and other Western powers must explain that such a fundamental approach will prolong the fighting and Ukraine’s suffering. Publicizing a map toward negotiations now, while Putin continues his barbaric war and millions of Ukrainians suffer, does not constitute appeasement of Russia or condone Moscow’s aggression. On the contrary, it would be a prudent, strategic, and realist political move by the West and Ukraine to address the growing number of Russians who prefer peace but abhor a choice between war and defeat.

Crimea is a problem. Ukrainians are determined to recapture the peninsula, which they regard, justifiably, as stolen Ukrainian territory and a beachhead for Russian aggression. The West, however, has serious reasons to fear that Putin would do whatever it takes to prevent the fall of Crimea. The peninsula is the greatest obstacle to any talks between Moscow and Kyiv. An explicit Western demand to return Crimea as a precondition for peace talks will only rally more Russians to the side of war. Sometimes it is a wise strategy to leave an intractable subject for future negotiations.

The longer this war continues, the worse its consequences. World War I toppled great empires and dynasties across Europe, sowed the seeds of WORLD WAR II , and led directly to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Historic feuds between Germany and France over Alsace-Lorraine and between Serbia and Croatia over Bosnia led to lethal consequences for both sides. The wounds of these conflicts took generations to heal.

Before February 24, 2022, most Americans agreed that the United States had no vital interests in Ukraine. “If somebody in this town would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “they should speak up.” Few did.

Yet the consensus shifted when Russia INVADED  Ukraine. Suddenly, Ukraine’s fate was important enough to justify spending billions of dollars in resources and enduring rising gas prices; enough to expand security commitments in Europe, including bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO; enough to make the United States a virtual co-belligerent in the war against Russia, with consequences yet to be seen. All these steps have so far enjoyed substantial support in both political parties and among the public. An August poll found that four in ten Americans support sending U.S. troops to help defend Ukraine if necessary. However, the Biden administration insists it has no intention of doing so.

 

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