Americans need to ask difficult questions about our strategic priorities and face hard truths about our limited capacity to defend our interests.
Americans need to ask difficult questions about our strategic priorities and face hard truths about our limited capacity to defend our interests.
J oe Biden, like Donald Trump, has a tendency to occasionally voice uncomfortable — and unpopular — truths in a ham-handed and clumsy way. “I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades [Ukraine],” he said in his rambling January 19 press conference, which went on for just shy of two hours. “And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera.”
The comments sparked widespread outrage, particularly from the more hawkish corners of the American political scene. (Ukraine’s president weighed in, too: “There are no minor incursions and small nations,” he tweeted. “Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones.”) But in one important sense, the president was right: America and its NATO allies can’t seem to agree about what to do in Ukraine.
The White House itself has had a chaotic, and at times incoherent, response to Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions at the Ukrainian border. In December, Biden said that sending U.S. troops to Ukraine was “not on the table.” But after the backlash to his “minor incursion” comment, White House press secretary Jen Psaki released a statement assuring that “if any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border . . . it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our allies.” Now, the White House is weighing sending thousands of American troops and military equipment to NATO allies in Eastern Europe, and the Pentagon has placed 8,500 troops on “heightened alert” in the event of an escalation.
Our NATO allies can’t make up their minds, either. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain have all fought against efforts to impose new sanctions on the Kremlin. In the general population, a 2020 Pew Research poll showed a median of just 38 percent of citizens in 16 key NATO states who supported defending another NATO member state against a Russian attack, compared with 50 percent who opposed. And Ukraine isn’t even in NATO.
Notably, respondents in every single one of the 16 NATO states that were surveyed were more likely to say that the U.S. would defend them from a Russian attack than to say that their own country should.
With allies like these, who needs enemies?
Putin, for his part, denies that he plans to invade Ukraine. But no one really believes him. Recent weeks have seen 100,000 Russian troops gather at the Ukrainian border. Moscow is moving tanks, rocket launchers, and other military equipment to the area, deploying ships near the Ukrainian coast, and conducting naval exercises in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In the past, Putin has been explicit about his desire to reclaim Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, calling the fall of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” In 2014, he acted on those ambitions, annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in an attempt to reclaim — as he put it at the time — “historic Russian lands.”
From Russia’s perspective, the move wasn’t entirely irrational. Crimea, situated along Ukraine’s southern coast, is home to an ethnic Russian majority of about 60 percent. Russia founded the peninsula’s main port, Sevastopol, when Catherine the Great colonized the region. The port is home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet to this day.
To be sure, that doesn’t make Putin any less of an authoritarian thug. Regardless of one’s view on Ukraine, the West should be clear-eyed about the Russian president. Putin is a bad actor, both in his own country and on the world stage. The Ukrainian people deserve better.
Still, it is true that NATO has been steadily expanding into Russia’s supposed sphere of influence, admitting Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 2004; Croatia and Albania in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; and Northern Macedonia in 2020. Every expansion was made over the Kremlin’s objections.
Putin’s annexation of Crimea came after U.S.-backed protests replaced the previous Ukrainian regime with a pro-European Union government. NATO has been continually pulling Ukraine closer to its orbit, making it a “partner country” in its military alliance and leaving the door open for future full membership. In the midst of all this, Moscow has pressed for a drawdown in NATO military exercises in the region.
Putin’s demands were excessive, and so they were rejected. But the question remains: Why should America see Ukraine, which is not in NATO today, as relating to its direct security interests?
One answer could be America’s commitment to liberty and democracy. “We’re not truly secure unless we come together to respect both the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries and the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all people,” reads a statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Laudable ideals, to be sure; we all should hope for a world in which Ukrainians can enjoy them. But if we are “not truly secure” without the universal observance of “human rights and fundamental freedoms,” then we have never been — and never will be — secure. Liberty and democracy for all is a noble aspiration in the abstract, but an impossible standard in reality.
This line of argument often invites accusations of anti-Americanism. Realist critics of the Iraq War, for example, were regularly attacked as insufficiently committed to American ideals. But I love this country. And it’s precisely because I care about America that I want our foreign policy to be prudent and oriented toward our material national interests.
Herb Stein, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, coined a simple heuristic known as “Stein’s Law”: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” Maybe it’s true that our withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Putin in Ukraine, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board has argued. Maybe it’s true that, as many others have posited, a refusal to engage aggressively in Ukraine will embolden Chinese ambitions in Taiwan.
Maybe. But we need to ask difficult questions about our strategic priorities and face hard truths about our limited capacity to defend our interests. The American desire and ability to police the world order — apparent throughout the post–Cold War period of unchallenged U.S. dominance — seems to be fading.
Russia’s objections to NATO expansion might not matter as much if the West were strong and unified. But frankly, we can’t rely on many of our most powerful NATO allies. NATO’s biggest economic powerhouse, Germany, remains unwilling to meet its commitment to 2 percent of GDP spending on defense. Worse still, it has moved to strengthen ties with Moscow in recent years, pushing for the development of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to import natural gas directly from Russia.
It’s no wonder, then, that Germany has been so reluctant to aid its ostensible allies in resisting Russian advances. In fact, Berlin went so far as to block Estonia from sending military equipment to Ukraine. And Croatia has already announced that it would actually pull its troops in Eastern Europe — “to the last Croatian soldier,” its president said — in the event of a conflict with Russia. As Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote this week:
This partly vindicates critics of NATO’s promiscuous expansion, which included under its security umbrella states that have a significant native pro-Russian sentiment, and insignificant military resources. Countries like Croatia and Montenegro can contribute nothing meaningful to NATO except setting a standard for internal dissension.
As the polling showed, NATO countries seem to expect to freeload off American military power forever. But it is no longer strategically sensible to support that arrangement. In the face of a rising China, it’s long past time for America’s military focus to turn eastward — and for Europe to get its own house in order. The Chinese Communist Party is our primary geopolitical foe. If China takes Taiwan, it would be legitimately devastating for the U.S., and for the West more broadly. That’s where our resources and energy should be directed.
More to the point, it would be a reward of bad behavior if we went to bat for Ukraine when other NATO countries won’t. To do so would be a show of American weakness, not strength. American policy-makers should act accordingly.