The primary reason to avoid war with Russia isn’t humiliation but the fear of escalation to avoid humiliation.
Dan McLaughlin says that it’s worth going down fighting in Ukraine.
It’s an argument that engages beyond the moralisms.
Dan writes:
Michael’s position, explicitly stated, is that the U.S. and NATO do more damage to their credibility by fighting Russia in Ukraine and losing than by not fighting at all and letting Russia win.
One, I’ve never said anything like the U.S. should “let Russia win” — this is an inference. I think it highly likely that Russia will obtain some of its objectives in the war — likely the territorial ones. But even in the absence of American help, I do not believe Russia has ever sent enough men to pacify the whole of Ukraine. I believe that attempting to swallow Western Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. While it is something Russia could try, that would leave it severely wounded and would probably end in disaster. I believe that while it has the will to impose an adverse settlement on Ukraine, there is a pyrrhic quality to any victory. And that it would be so even if it was a smaller war against a Ukraine that was resisting not with loaned heavy weaponry but with an insurgency, guerrilla tactics, and flying columns.
Dan continues:
His [My] reasoning, if I can fairly summarize it, is that we are unnecessarily dissipating our credibility by staking it on a fight we are likely to lose — and that our defeat would add to Russian prestige, detract from our own, and lead Russia’s neighbors to readjust their behavior to Moscow’s benefit as they come to see Russia as more of a strong horse and the Western alliance as more of a paper tiger.
While there is some worry of Russia gaining prestige, it’s not the primary reason to avoid a needless war with Russia. Russia’s model is unattractive, and so its military victories aren’t going to persuade other nations to align with it. Russia’s only advantage on the global stage vis-a-vis America is found when it is seen as a status-quo power, whereas America is an unpredictable revolutionary one, setting fires it can’t put out (Iraq, Arab Spring). The Global South has basically stayed unaligned in this conflict I believe for this reason.
The primary reason to avoid war with Russia isn’t humiliation but the fear of escalation to avoid humiliation, one that is occasioned by the way some Ukraine hawks conflate and blur the credibility of NATO with the successful defense of Ukraine. How many hundreds of columns have assured me that if Ukraine is defeated, Russia will be emboldened and take on Poland next? If hawks really believe that, then, contra Dan’s reassurance that nobody wants NATO troops in Ukraine, we will be told that we have to put them in to fight in Ukraine or we’ll be putting them in Estonia and Poland next.
Secondarily, even if we do not find ourselves pot-committed in Ukraine, more than enhanced Russian prestige, I fear the waste of resources and the prodigal attitude toward the patience of Americans to engage in losing proxy wars.
Thirdly, I also fear the long-term moral costs of assisting Ukraine’s more repressive forms of nationalism, and engaging in war with Russia. People remember their defeats, and they don’t always learn the moral lessons you wish they would.
Finally, more than my fear of losing a war we shouldn’t have fought, I dread “winning” almost as much, and taking on Ukraine as a giant financial and security liability going forward. I believe doing so will make the West poorer, make Ukraine’s rebuilding more difficult, will tend to spread Ukrainian corruption to Western institutions, and generally be a project that Russia has ease in disrupting.
I take issue with Dan’s characterization of the history. We didn’t do nothing in response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. We put Russia under massive sanctions. We did so even though EU authorities concluded that Georgia had provoked the conflict. (“EU investigation says Tbilisi launched indiscriminate assault on South Ossetia.”) We also participated for years in covert assistance at overthrowing Russia’s ally Assad in Syria, hoping to deprive Russia of its naval assets in the Mediterranean. Once again, our foreign-policy blob had far outrun public opinion which was massively against what would have been a bloody and awful regime change in Syria. Again Russia intervened there and triaged its outcome. We didn’t do “nothing” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we did more sanctions and we tried a strategy of building up Ukraine to have the largest army in Europe save for Russia’s. Of course Ukrainians want as many weapons to defend themselves now. But, Dan has to assume that Russia would have undergone this costly invasion anyway, even if NATO wasn’t involved. I don’t share that assumption. Just as we could tolerate an unaligned Cuba that wasn’t a serious military threat to us, but not one that carried a nuclear arsenal, so Putin decided that he could not have Ukraine become a de facto member of NATO with a huge NATO-funded military. And that is what Ukraine, after 2014, would appear to be to any serious Russian leader.
When the history of this war is written, it was the outside influences hoping to profit from Ukraine, forcing upon its government all-or-nothing deals to turn West or back East, that destabilized and militarized its internal politics and made any modus vivendi impossible.
Ukrainian voters continued to seek that modus vivendi, to turn back the separatists and the ultra-nationalists when they voted for Zelensky. Too late, now it was a dare to see which power would compel the outcome it wanted to see. With no consensus in Europe about integrating Ukraine into NATO or the EU, and certainly none on ejecting Russia from Sevastopol, obviously Russia would have not only an upper hand, but a practical outcome at which it could aim.
Dan writes:
I take Michael’s point that engaging in the war runs the risk that we end up bailing out and showing yet again that our will to fight can be outlasted, but we can avoid that end simply by continuing to support the Ukrainians so long as they are willing to keep fighting — and doing so while continuing to aid Israel and Taiwan.
Okay, but the bill for doing so is much higher than what we just saw passed in the Congress last week. Nobody in the current White House seems to believe the promised level of support for Ukraine is sufficient for Ukraine to hold the line or make gains. Meanwhile, the promised aid takes up the production lines needed to fill back orders for Taiwan and replenish our own weapons stocks. When you’re committed effectively to dramatically expanding the number of countries that get a guaranteed defense from America, you have to commit to the dramatically expanding expense of doing so. Even if we appropriated the money, actually physically building out the industry — hiring and training the workers — could take years.
In two years ,we’ve seen a climbdown from the giddy talk that the Ukraine war would end with regime change in Russia. Now, we’re being told about the the upsides of a losing outcome. I expect in years to follow, we will acknowledge the opportunity costs and the waste of resources and life.