The Ukraine war on the ground is progressing reasonably satisfactorily for the anti-Russians. The Kremlin evidently agreed with the ineffable Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Mark Milley’s estimate that Russia would occupy Kiev within three days. They are now four weeks late and have made no progress in the last week.
Nobody, apparently including the chairman of the joint chiefs (the sage of Kabul), noted that Ukraine has a fully trained-up and equipped army of 300,000 and approximately 300,000 reservists who are already well-proved in battle. American and other foreign observers seemed also not to grasp that Ukraine has been a large armaments manufacturer since before World War II and was already awash with sophisticated anti-tank and anti-low-flying aircraft weapons when the invasion came last month. Russia has already lost more combat dead in Ukraine than the United States lost at Iwo Jima: at least 8,000, and it has over 20,000 additional casualties. It’s left with approximately 120,000 trigger-pullers, which would not be more than a quarter of the number of well-armed and trained Ukrainians the Russian army is facing.
To extract himself from this quagmire, Russian President Vladimir Putin can negotiate for de facto control of the Russian-speaking 15 percent of eastern Ukraine and assurances that Ukraine would not join NATO but will in its new borders be securely guaranteed by NATO and Russia: all of its neighbors. Trying to plaster urban Ukraine from the air will not get a satisfactory outcome for Russia. That is not really a military objective and will only strengthen Ukrainian resolve and will not impede Ukrainian gains on the ground against outnumbered and demoralized Russian forces. Even in World War II, reducing virtually every city in Germany and Japan to rubble did not, as far as can be determined, significantly shorten the war. Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses will be far more substantial than the air defenses of Germany and Japan from 1943 to 1945, and unlike in Germany and Japan, most of Ukraine’s civil urban population can flee to safety. However indifferent Putin might be to the public relations consequences of such a barbarous and pointless campaign, China in particular would not stay the course if Putin‘s exit strategy was to try (unsuccessfully) to bomb Ukraine into the Stone Age.
NATO is right to ignore the bluster about nuclear escalation and World War III; it won’t happen. Russia has no capacity to conduct such a war from its GDP, which is smaller than Canada’s, and Putin has not prepared for such an effort. All previous nuclear-armed Russian leaders from Stalin on have recognized the insanity of a nuclear exchange. The world is full of unrealized fears.
The challenge for the West is to supply Ukraine adequately to ensure that it can resist Russian escalation, without appearing to be cynically fighting the Russians to the last dead Ukrainian. An enunciation of intent to provide Ukraine with such assistance while urging good faith compromise negotiations would provide a third-of-a-loaf for the Kremlin. This will become ever more tempting as the alternative of open-ended escalation to a very uncertain outcome emerges as the only other option for Putin.
The United States will have to develop a bipartisan consensus on war aims, what will be less challenging than selling it to the Western Alliance. In this task, the Democrats and Republicans will have to do some quick and sensible strategic thinking and override their fringe-groups. The Republicans are bedeviled on both flanks: the continuators of the Cold War and Mideast interventionists are calling for a variety of hare-brained initiatives, from Sen. Lindsey Graham’s demented exhortation to encourage the assassination of Putin (he would be much more difficult to “take down” than the President of the United States), to levels of escalation that would inevitably lead to exchanges of fire between NATO and Russia. It’s not an act of appeasement to avoid such a confrontation, and the war aims of the Alliance can be achieved without such a risk.
The advocates of this last course of action are less frequently “neocons” as they are described by their opponents, and they are more frequently the heirs of the Bush, Romney, and McCain Republicans who were often insufficiently wary of hurling America into combat in secondary theaters. Everyone is coming out of the woodwork, and the old Pat Buchanan Paleo-Conservative isolationists seem to have kidnapped a bevy of Fox News commentators. Laura Ingraham, generally commendably sensible and a genuine student of Russia and a Russian-speaker, last week likened the Russian progress towards Kiev to that of the allies in their timetable for taking Baghdad. Of course, this comparison is completely spurious. The idea that Russia is on an inexorable march to any such success as the allies enjoyed in their assault on Iraq is utter nonsense. Tucker Carlson’s pro-Russian comments became so embarrassing, he seems to have stopped them.
The Democrats are no more united and the administration’s flip-flops, such as over the transfer of Polish aircraft to Ukraine, are more obvious. The president has inflicted an avalanche of tired pieties on the world about defending every square inch of the territory of NATO, none of which has been threatened. The Russian invasion is condemned in suitable strictures, but the ill-considered indiscretion that Putin is a war criminal, which may technically be true, merely makes a reasonable and early end to the conflict more difficult. Biden tipped his hand when he offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an escape from Ukraine, assuming he was a dead pigeon, as Milley foretold. Everyone in Washington has been scrambling to keep up with events, and the polls show that the country sees that Biden didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen in Ukraine. He floundered unconvincingly between alternatives driven by the rippling of the Congress, wildly blaming Putin for gasoline price increases, but has by some combination of luck and insight helped unite the alliance and gradually raised assistance to Ukraine as that country’s military fortunes surpassed expectations. In general, the Democrats have only been pushed by public opinion and heavy bipartisan congressional pressure to raise America’s assistance to a level capable of avoiding the success of Putin’s effort to eliminate Ukraine entirely as an independent state.
The architects of American policy must realize that full Russian success would be another crushing defeat of the West, that what is at stake is the continued eastward expansion of the Western World, and that illegal applications of force between nations must be discouraged and that in this case it is essential to the security of the world that the post-Soviet recognition of the status of the former republics of the USSR be settled. These goals cannot be accomplished without the United States. It is as absurd to rush pell-mell towards war with Russia as it is to wash our hands of Ukraine because of its failings as a self-administering country and watch passively as it’s trampled underfoot by the hobnailed jack-boot of the successor to Stalin’s Red Army when Putin finally shapes it up sufficiently.
The best we can hope for is to stay the course beside Ukraine, developing an influence that can support a survivable compromise when one is available at the negotiating table. Negotiations will, as always, follow the results on the ground. It’s unlikely that either U.S. political party will gain any electoral edge from this. But by a miracle of good fortune and not sagacity, the United States and its reinvigorated Allies have a good chance of emerging from this outrageous war somewhat strengthened and vindicated.
