If You Want to Constrain Putin, Do the Obvious

V ladimir Putin is engaged in the most extreme option he had available in Ukraine: a full-scale mechanized invasion of the country.

Many experts doubted Putin would go so far. He could instead have simply sent Russian troops to fully occupy the Donbas, the eastern province of Ukraine that included the breakaway Russian puppet “states” of Donetsk and Luhansk. NATO’s response would have been tepid, and Russia would have emerged with a solid win: the further dismemberment of Ukraine and the deepening of divisions within NATO about the seriousness of the Russian threat.

Instead, Putin has pushed all his chips into the middle of the table. Perhaps he believed he could count on what poker players call “fold equity” —  the probability that the other players will fold their hands and give you an easy win. Perhaps he thought he had “showdown value” — a hand good enough to win if someone called his bet.

In either case, the right thing for the United States to do now is to “come over the top” and raise the bet, by intelligently but firmly playing the long game in a way that takes advantage of our hole cards — the reservoirs of strength America still has but rarely uses to good effect.

First — and to state what should be obvious, but evidently isn’t — we should stop making important concessions to Russia. Last year, the Biden administration renewed the New START treaty, lifted sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and invited Putin to a summit meeting, all without exacting any concessions from Russia in return. Putin has responded by invading Ukraine. If the military operation goes badly, he may signal a willingness to negotiate. And if he does, nothing should be conceded to him unless and until Russia complies up front with our pre-conditions.

Second, we should continue harsh sanctions on Russia and should supplement them by targeting Putin’s primary source of revenue: Russia’s oil and gas industry. The fact that NATO members have not yet sanctioned the Russian energy sector highlights the unsustainable contradiction between their energy policies and their national-security interests.

In the future, the United States and Europe must prioritize developing other secure sources of affordable energy, because we cannot effectively use economic power to constrain an adversary on whom we are economically dependent.

Third, we should continue offering the Ukrainians whatever assistance they need, including — assuming the invasion succeeds — assistance with the longer-term resistance that they’ve been preparing for a scenario just like this one. That will require lines of supply that do not place American personnel at significant risk.

Fourth, the administration and Congress must immediately begin adjusting the budget of the Department of Defense so that it bears some actual relationship to the reality of the global threat environment.

The government is now almost six months into the fiscal year, but Congress still has yet to pass the FY 22 defense-appropriation bill, which means the Pentagon has been operating at last year’s budget level and with constrained programmatic authority. The bill should be passed immediately, with the top line adjusted upward to take into account the current high level of inflation and to allow the Army in particular to stop the bleeding in its procurement and modernization programs.

In addition, the administration should begin preparing an emergency supplemental request to fund the operations that the Pentagon will now have to conduct in Europe, including the efforts to resupply Ukraine and forward-position additional American forces. The Pentagon must not be forced to fund those efforts out of its regularly appropriated budget.

Looking further down the road, the administration will have to completely scrap its defense-budget proposals for FY 2023 and thereafter. The $770 billion top line it intends for FY 23 won’t even keep up with inflation, much less provide the funds to strengthen European and Asian deterrence in the near term while also building the force that will be necessary to deal with China in the longer term.

Finally, the obvious, unpleasant truth is that neither world opinion nor economic sanctions will by themselves deter aggressors who achieve outright military dominance. Right now, Putin has that dominance in the areas that he cares about, largely because at the same time NATO was admitting a number of new countries into the alliance, its member countries, including the United States, were reducing their armed forces and their contributions to alliance security.

As of 2013, the United States Army didn’t have a single tank on the continent. Putin made his first move against Ukraine, in Crimea, a year later. Since then, the United States has taken modest steps to strengthen deterrence in the region, but in 2016 the Army’s top leaders admitted that we were outgunned, outmanned, and outranged in Eastern Europe, and nothing of substance has changed since.

It will have to change now, and not just in Europe. Beijing intends to play the crisis in Ukraine more or less down the middle, protecting its junior partner without appearing fully to endorse the invasion. But China’s leaders will watch very carefully how the United States responds.

If the administration moves decisively and puts money behind its rhetoric, it’s at least possible that the Chinese may help constrain Russian ambitions in the future; the last thing they want is for America to use its economic strength to rebuild its armed forces. But if the United States does not take the steps necessary to respond to the challenge from Russia — a country with an economy a tenth the size of ours — Xi Jinping’s regime will draw fateful conclusions, not just about America’s resolve but about the ability of our leaders to even recognize and accept reality.

Beijing is already very close to achieving the capability to successfully invade Taiwan. If deterrence continues to fail — if America’s leaders continue to allow it to fail — the war in Ukraine, terrible as it is, may well be only the first taste of a very bitter brew we’ll have to swallow in the years ahead.