Is Biden Setting Us Up to Lose a War We Never Really Joined?

W e often blame the fog of war when faced with a lack of clarity about what precisely is happening on the ground in a given conflict. But the more honest truth is that during war, interested governments blow enough smoke to make the atmosphere impenetrable.

If you have only been following developments in the Ukraine war through Twitter or White House briefings, you likely believe that the war is an unmitigated disaster for Russia, and that Ukraine may even be winning as it starts to mount successful counter-attacks on Russian positions. And increasingly, you also likely believe that the war is going to result in the downfall of Vladimir Putin.

And you aren’t alone — many American experts are right there with you. Relying almost entirely on White House briefings and the Facebook posts of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Institute for the Study of War declared grandly on March 19, “Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war.”

It is far from the only rosy assessment. Almost daily, the Biden administration gives its own briefs on the progress of the war and its estimates of Russian losses. NATO analysts provided an estimate that Russia had suffered 40,000 casualties — somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 killed, and the remainder lost to desertion or Ukrainian capture. That would amount to more than one-fifth of the initial Russian invading force. “We are seeing a country militarily implode,” one professor who studies air power told Vox.

The historian Niall Ferguson even reported last week that in an off-the-record meeting, he’d heard indications that American officials were starting to buy into the rosy picture painted by their own briefings:

I have evidence from other sources to corroborate this. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”

Finally, on Saturday, Biden ad-libbed a line in his militant speech in Poland: “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.”

Well, color me skeptical. It is easy to believe that Russia’s forces have been unusually disorganized, that they lack morale, and that they are suffering grave losses. It’s even plausible that, in the long run, the war’s costs on Russia might ultimately land on Vladimir Putin. But there are good reasons to be cautious in predicting the future of the conflict, particularly if you are a U.S. policy-maker.

The first is that Russian casualty estimates are rarely given with estimates of Ukrainian casualties. Some of the talking points used to give the impression of Ukrainian success, like “the Russians haven’t taken any big cities yet,” are familiar from their use in our own recently concluded Afghan misadventure. And as we saw in that case, the Taliban didn’t take cities with block-by-block fighting; they waited until taking them was a fait accompli.

What’s more, nobody writing reports about Ukraine’s “defeat” of the initial invasion knows or has access to Russia’s actual war plan, without which it’s impossible to know for sure whether Russia really has already failed.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky keeps sending up strong signals that he is willing to make some significant concessions to Russia in exchange for an end to hostilities, which is not what we’d expect someone who was decisively winning a war to do.

Anyone who raises doubts about the reports of Ukrainian triumph is likely to face torrents of abuse on Twitter and in comment sections. This is predictable, in part because people feel genuinely invested in the outcome, and think that wide recognition of Ukraine’s success is a pre-condition for yet more Ukrainian success. The more that influential people resign themselves to Russia’s grinding out something like victory, the more likely it becomes that the West pushes Zelensky to negotiate from a weak position.

But it is a serious problem for the United States that the White House and the Biden administration, in the absence of any strategy that could guarantee such an outcome, are continually feeding the belief that Russia will fail and Putin will fall.

Commitment to this belief could limit the Ukrainian government’s options for negotiating a settlement. It also risks embarrassing the United States itself. If Russia holds some kind of victory parade in an eastern-Ukrainian city, Putin will be able to cite President Joe Biden’s own words in claiming that he has not only beaten Ukraine, but that he has survived an American attempt at regime change in the Kremlin.

In other words, the White House, by continuing to over-invest U.S. honor and credibility in an outcome that it is unwilling or unable to bring about, is setting us up to come out as the “losers” of a war we never really joined.