Biden’s priority is to contain the war. Putin is aiming to win it.
Biden’s priority is to contain the war. Putin is aiming to win it.
I t has become evident the Biden administration has embraced conflict “containment” as its principal objective in dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to this theory, while it would be nice if Ukraine survives the war, that is not of fundamental importance. What is critical, as far as the Biden administration is concerned, is that the war not spread to involve other parties, notably the U.S. and NATO. Thus, Biden has ruled out providing NATO air support, a no-fly zone, old Warsaw Pact MiGs, or even Patriot anti-missile batteries on the supposition that such aid might sufficiently anger Russian dictator Vladimir Putin such that he lashes out at the United States or our NATO allies, thereby drawing us into the war.
There are a number of flaws in this strategy. In the first place, it leaves Putin not only with the initiative, but also the authority to set the rules as to what the U.S. is permitted or forbidden to do in defense of the free world. In the second place, it is based on the conceit that Putin requires a provocation or legal justification to launch an attack on anyone. This is certainly untrue. If Putin deems something is in his interest, he will do it, without any regard for how it might conform to international law, prior treaties, global public opinion, or whatever. Thus the mental gymnastics being performed about such questions as under what rubric which weapon systems might be sent to Ukraine are totally nonsensical. Putin will strike Poland if he thinks it will help him win the war. It obviously won’t, so he hasn’t. We are therefore tying ourselves up in knots for no reason.
But the biggest problem with Biden’s strategy is that it fails to look ahead. Let us therefore consider consequences.
There are three potential outcomes to the war:
- Putin wins, and NATO accepts the result, dropping sanctions and returning to business as usual. This is Putin’s preferred outcome. If adopted, it would lead quickly to the discrediting of NATO and possibly further Russian incursions into Eastern Europe and Central Asia, potentially including the Baltic states. While Western leaders have shown themselves remarkably spineless during the current crisis, I doubt they would capitulate to this extent, as the feedback they receive from their focus groups would preclude it. This leads to the second possible outcome.
- Putin wins, but NATO does not accept the outcome, perpetuating Russian economic ruin. This would preserve NATO, but lead to total Russian economic dependence on China. This is China’s preferred scenario, and the most probable outcome of Biden’s current policy. It would result in Chinese domination of the Eurasian supercontinent, and with it, the world. As this would also be a strategic catastrophe, we must find a way to reach the third alternative.
- Ukraine wins. This is the only scenario that has the potential to lead to a positive outcome for the West. If Ukraine wins, Putin could fall, leading to a new government in Russia tilting to the West. That would be a huge victory that would greatly improve our odds in dealing with the long-term challenge from China. But even if Ukraine merely drives the invaders out and Putin remains in power, the beast will have been tamed. We will then have the discretion to maintain sanctions or not, as we deem fit, and will have set a very powerful example to deter China, Iran, North Korea, or anyone else from indulging in such aggression in the future.
In other words, it is in America’s vital interest that Ukraine prevails.
The Biden administration’s strategy to prioritize containing the war over winning it does not completely rule out such an outcome, but it does not make it likelier. Indeed, the Biden administration knew well in advance that the invasion was coming. That being the case, the right move would have been to make use of the three months of advance notice to airlift weapons to Ukraine, as I wrote in these pages in January. Arming Ukraine to the teeth in advance might well have deterred the invasion, by letting Putin know it wouldn’t be an easy win. If not, it certainly would have put the Ukrainians in a much better position to repel the attack.
However, the Biden administration priority is to contain the war, and the best way to assure that would be to have it end quickly. As a result, not only was there no serious effort to deliver arms to Ukraine until public opinion forced it after the invasion began, but the Biden administration also made other moves clearly anticipating a quick Ukrainian defeat. These included trying to discourage Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky from addressing the Munich conference of Western leaders held immediately before the invasion, publicly predicting that Kyiv would fall within 48 to 72 hours of the attack, having our ambassador very publicly flee the capital, and urging Zelensky to do likewise — a cowardly move that, had it been done, would have taken the heart out of Ukrainian resistance.
Then we come to the issue of the transferring of MiG fighter aircraft from NATO Eastern European countries to Ukraine. This deal, it turns out, was blocked by Biden himself. The cover story first issued to rationalize this decision was that the MiGs would not be useful to Ukraine, and that they would be much better off with more anti-aircraft weapons. Then, however, when it was proposed to send the Ukrainians better anti-aircraft weapons, including Patriot missile batteries, it was explained that these would do no good, either, because most of the slaughter in Mariupol, Kharkhiv, and other Ukrainian cities was being done by the Russians using old-fashioned artillery. But MiGs can be used to silence artillery, and do many other things as well, such as eliminate convoys like the 40-kilometer-long Russian one currently stalled north of Kyiv. The delivery of MiGs was not blocked because they would not be useful. It was blocked because they would be too useful.
Furthermore, the MiGs are not the only critical hardware being held back. NATO has many other weapon systems that would be extremely useful to Ukraine that are not being sent. These include not only Patriot anti-missile defense systems, but Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) — short-range and mobile ballistic-missile launchers. These can throw a 500-pound (nonnuclear) warhead 200 miles, and are GPS-guided so they can’t miss. If we sent these to the Ukrainians, they could turn columns of Russian tanks roaming the country and the batteries of Russian artillery besieging Ukrainian cities into masses of flaming wrecks.
Moreover, there is no reason to limit the aircraft the West sends Ukraine to Soviet-era MiGs. The American F-16 Fighting Falcon went into service in the 1970s, and over 4,600 have been produced. While these are no longer being bought by the U.S. Air Force, they are pretty good, certainly much better than Poland’s old MiGs. I know a number of fighter pilots, and they tell me the F-16 is a very easy plane to learn to fly. Ukrainian fighter pilots could be rapidly trained to fly them. The top-scoring squadron on either side during the Battle of Britain was Squadron 303, consisting of exiled Polish pilots flying Hurricanes. While Hurricanes were inferior to Britain’s famed Spitfires, the Poles flew them to greater effect, not only because they were used to flying worse craft back home, but because more than anyone else, they understood the existential threat. The same is likely to prove true of Ukrainian pilots flying F16s.
The United States has delivered F-16s to many non-NATO countries around the world, including such questionable nations as Pakistan and Venezuela. There is no reason why we couldn’t deliver them to Ukraine as well. A gift of a few hundred would almost certainly decide the war.
We have the means, readily at hand, that would provide victory. What, then, is holding us back? The line being offered is that we must not do anything that makes Putin too unhappy, because then he supposedly might decide to attack NATO. This makes no sense, however. Putin is having enough trouble taking on Ukraine now, and would have even more were Ukraine properly equipped. The last thing he needs is for NATO forces, armed not only with thousands of better fighters, but ground-attack aircraft and bombers (for example F-35s, A-10s, and B-52s) as well to fully enter the fray. It is Putin who, above all, needs to limit the active combatants to Russia and Ukraine.
As for the scare talk about nuclear war, this will be deterred by the same thing that has deterred Kremlin use of nuclear weapons since 1949: the threat of U.S. nuclear retaliation. Indeed, accepting the idea that Russia could use nuclear weapons without incurring total destruction would effectively eliminate the value of our nuclear deterrent. There is nothing more dangerous that we could do.
In any case, there is no getting around the fact that losing in Ukraine would make Putin unhappy, regardless of whether defeat is inflicted on him by Ukrainians using American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles or Ukrainians using American-made F-16s. Is our boundary condition therefore to be that the U.S. must not do anything that might cause Russia to lose?
This cannot be. It is in the vital interest of the entire free world that Ukraine defeat Putin’s invasion. I use the term “free world” advisedly. This is a term that was once widely used, and needs to come back into play. It was once understood that there is something called the “free world,” which is composed of all those who subscribe to the belief that people have intrinsic rights, as opposed to those others based on the idea that human beings are just so much livestock, owned and operated by their governments, or those who own such governments. It was understood that this free world — which looks to America for leadership — needs to be defended, because the people who compose it are not something separate from us. They are us.
This is a key distinction — more important, in fact, than whether a country has a formal alliance or other commitment with the U.S. We’ve bugged out of plenty of those, including, since the 2014 invasion, our commitment to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. But while the Ukrainians are not a part of NATO, they are very much part of the free world — and are willing to fight for it. In letting them be defeated, we are letting our brothers and sisters in arms be defeated.
This is no small matter. The Biden policy embraces defeat. It leads not only to a crushed and devastated Ukraine. It also leads to either a shattered NATO, or, more probably, to a besieged West heavily taxed to try to maintain some semblance of independence in a Chinese-dominated world. Neither of those outcomes is acceptable.
The only way out for us is victory. We must do what is necessary to achieve it.