- The New Rules with Alan Pentz
- Posts
- Getting Real About Ukraine
Welcome back to The New Rules!
Let’s dive in…
This is a long one so here’s the TL;DR:
The US has intervened in countries globally since the end of the Cold War with few consequences.
That era is ending as other countries like China, India, and Russia have grown in power and wealth.
Conflicts like those in Ukraine will continue to occur.
The US needs to resist the temptation to get involved and focus on its major competitor: China.
I know I risk losing many subscribers when addressing this war, but understanding The New Rules requires us to examine difficult and polarizing material. I want to be clear upfront that my take reflects what I see as reality, not what I personally want. I need one of those compound German words for something that is true but you don't like or must accept grudgingly.
A New Era
We are emerging from a long period during which US power and wealth were so overwhelming that we could do almost anything with few long-term consequences. Our invasion of Iraq is the prime example of a war of choice that resulted in disaster, served no US interest, and that we walked away from when we tired of it.
Afghanistan was more complicated given the September 11th attacks, but we certainly engaged in fruitless nation-building activities and overstayed our welcome for no benefit to the US, and again walked away.
It's true that we paid dearly in US casualties and increased deficits, and many dead civilians in those countries paid the ultimate price as well. However, the US paid no real geopolitical price. We moved on virtually unscathed, and the same people who got us into those messes are running our foreign policy today.
As a country, we are used to fighting these kinds of wars of choice. We can invade, shoot missiles, supply and train one side, etc., without much cost-benefit analysis. We've forgotten what it's like to fight when we have no choice or at least deeply believe we have no choice. I'd say the last real existential war the US fought was World War II. We are approaching the 100-year anniversary of that war. It's been a long time.
That's why we fail to understand Russia. We think they should be like us, but they aren't. They don't border Canada and Mexico.
Ukraine
I find the thinking in DC and many western capitals about the Russia/Ukraine war suffers from an excess of arrogance and a refusal to accept constraints. I fully condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a clear violation of international law and a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. However, the reality is Putin isn't going to stop until he occupies the pro-Russian eastern provinces and wrecks the rest of the country.
And there's not much we can do about that. Ukraine will eventually run out of soldiers, and we aren't going to engage directly. Even if Ukraine somehow turned the tide, Russia would go nuclear before it would give up.
As former President Obama wisely said in 2016, Russia has "escalation dominance." Its government will do whatever it has to, including dying, to win. We won't and nor should we. That's as true in 2024 as it was in 2016.
It's because of this differential in escalation dominance that I believe the US and the West have been playing with fire in Ukraine since 2008.
As the foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer constantly points out, this all started back in 2008. That's when NATO pledged to consider admitting both Georgia and Ukraine into NATO at its summit in Bucharest. Until this point, NATO and Russia had pretty good, if uneasy, relations. NATO had been steadily increasing its membership since the fall of the Soviet Union and moving farther and farther east towards Russia. Russia could do little about it except complain.
But this time was different. Both Georgia and Ukraine border Russia and were both members of the Soviet Union. No Russian misses the simple fact that NATO was formed to contain and oppose Russia. To have NATO extend to countries bordering Russia itself is intolerable to Russians. Even democratic dissidents like the late Alexander Navalny were deeply opposed to NATO expansion.
If Russia wasn't opposed enough to having NATO at its borders already, all its government has to do is look at other countries NATO has gotten involved in. The US and NATO actively supported democratic movements that toppled governments in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.
Until last Spring, Victoria Nuland was the US Deputy Secretary of State and in charge of its policy apparatus. This was the same person (then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs) who flew to Kyiv to hand out cookies to demonstrators in the Maidan Square during the 2013-2014 successful uprising against a then pro Russian government.
I agree that the Ukrainian movement to move toward the West and democracy is inspiring. But living on the border of a nuclear armed regional power limits what you can do. If we aren’t going to actually fight to preserve that independence then all we are doing is raising false hopes. Additionally the Russians and Putin don’t forget because they think they are next on the hit list.
Both before and after that fateful Bucharest Summit, Putin and Russia issued multiple warnings to the West, making clear that any such expansion would be seen as an existential threat to Russia.
We just ignored them, and Putin made good on the threats. In 2008, he invaded Georgia, devastating the country; in 2014, Russia occupied Crimea; and then Putin invaded Ukraine proper in 2022.
Again, Putin and Russia were not justified in launching these invasions, but we were never going to be able to stop them. Knowing that, I think we should have worked harder to avoid them. If we had pledged not to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine, I believe there was a possibility both wars could have been avoided.
Core Interests
We have no core interests in Georgia and Ukraine. Our main enemy is China and we need to focus there-not in a relatively unimportant set of countries bordering Russia.
Others disagree with me on what I think is tenuous evidence. The common counter-arguments usually revolve around some version of Putin wanting to recreate the former Soviet empire. He's mad for power and conquest, etc. Or Peter Zeihan's theory that Russia wants to occupy every invasion route into Russia before their demographic collapse makes that impossible.
I don't dispute that Putin might want to reunite the former Soviet Union or plug all those gaps, but the collapse in demographics and economics is already well underway. The idea that Russia is a serious threat to Europe doesn't strike me as plausible.
Germany alone has 3-4 times the GDP of Russia, and the European Union has many times the population. Putin doesn't have the resources to even occupy Ukraine. It would require hundreds of thousands of soldiers he doesn't have, and the idea that he could do that and then somehow invade Poland is a fever dream.
It's true that European weakness has encouraged Putin. Germany, in particular, needs to get its act together, but it wouldn't take that long for it to get a substantial capability, and for now, the US offers a military blanket that makes Russian aggression irrelevant.
Putin himself knows this. His real goal is to wreck Ukraine so there's not much worth admitting to NATO. He'll bite off a chunk of the most pro-Russian areas in the East for sure, but he doesn't have the resources to go much beyond that. We can just look to Georgia for a model. Russia occupied the pro-Russian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia but settled for wrecking the rest of the country without occupying it.
A Better Path
We in the West need a better understanding of these existential wars. It will help us make better decisions and cost us much less in the long run. For the US, the major threat is China. We are going to need all the power and wealth we have to face down that threat. In that conflict, we'll need allies like Japan, Vietnam, India, South Korea, and Australia, among others. That conflict isn't coming; it's already here.
It's possible that the UK and maybe France would help in a confrontation with China, but their impact would be minimal. They are so far away, and their populace is unlikely to see facing down China as their fight. German support is even more unlikely given the ties between the two countries. NATO is no longer that important to the US. Europe itself is declining in significance as an economic and military power, as I wrote about recently.
Rather than engaging in a proxy war with Russia, we should be trying to woo it into a coalition against China instead of forcing it into an alliance. Russia has a history of conflict with China as long as the border between the two nations. Sadly, we've lost that possibility for at least another decade or two given the Ukraine War.
We in the West are still trapped in the old rules, even as those rules have gone from irrelevant to now dangerous. Trying to run the world isn't our job anymore. To be honest, it never was. We just faced a global adversary in the Soviet Union so we took on a more global mission. The mission was defeating the Soviets, not policing the world.
Unfortunately, our military and foreign policy elites got used to it and kept going even after that global adversary disappeared. Now we need to make calculations based on US interests. That's sad for justice and international law, but the alternative is even worse.
If we keep going down this path, we will waste our precious resources in conflicts that don't matter to us only to find ourselves exposed in conflicts that do. We've already lost a key border country to China in a quixotic campaign for a free Ukraine. Our balance sheet can only tolerate so many of those losses. The costs of our current strategy and the power of the other players are too great for such fantasies.
I deeply sympathize with the plight of the people of Ukraine. It's awful, but that doesn't mean it's the US's job to fix it. We need to stay focused on China. Germany and the EU can handle Russia.
The sooner we learn these lessons, the better for all of us. That does not mean the US needs to "retreat" from the world. My opponents love to call people like me isolationists. In fact, I think we should engage more. Let's hire more diplomats and try to find better solutions to conflicts, and clearly, I want to engage fully in Asia. I don't think that's isolationist. It's just prioritization, and that's what I think US foreign policy elites have failed to do. They are fantasists and very dangerous ones at that.
Alan
P.S.
P.P.S.
Reply