Our two interests in this war are to keep the war limited and to see Putin punished. These interests are in direct tension with each other.
Our two interests in this war are to keep the war limited and to see Putin punished. These interests are in direct tension with each other.
R ussia’s invasion of Ukraine has set off a chain reaction in Europe and America. Some of this reaction is quite welcome, namely the German government’s decision to reverse almost every policy of the previous 20 years and commit to a diversity of energy resources and robust investment in its national security. Some of it is quite noble, the outpouring of generosity — particularly from Poland, in assisting the flood of Ukrainian women and children streaming over the border.
But the rest — well, I’m worried.
In President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, he reassured Americans that everything was going to be okay. And he seemed to reassure Americans that somehow Ukraine would triumph in its conflict with Russia because freedom always wins. He cast it as a worldwide “battle between democracy and autocracy,” but one that American troops absolutely would not fight.
This mirrors the same nonsensical position taken by so much of the American commentariat and the foreign-policy blob, which is that Russia’s assault on Ukraine jeopardizes the entire seven decades of investment in the American-led liberal world order, but the only thing we’re going to do about it is impose sanctions.
This is untenable. And it is precisely what is pushing legislators such as Adam Kinzinger to propose setting up a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which translates into getting into an air-power war with Russia, with all the potential for global escalation that entails.
And let’s talk about those sanctions for a moment. First, they were not joined to positive inducements aimed at Russia. In times of crisis, threats like sanctions are often best paired with potential rewards. Do what we don’t want, and face the consequences. Desist entirely, and achieve something else.
Instead the sanctions were imposed afterward as a punishment. They land most heavily on the Russian people themselves. There was no hint of what Russia could do to cause the sanctions to end. And the kind of damage they did does not end when the sanctions are lifted. It was a kind of financial Hiroshima, instantly lowering the living standards for over 140 million people. The kind of economic collapse that they herald resembles precisely the 1990s meltdown that brought Putin to power and allowed him to transform the Russian state. In our haste to hit back, did we go beyond pressuring the regime to destabilizing it, and making the situation more volatile?
The sanctions are so severe that they may do blowback damage to the global economy, and they carry some downside tail risk to the American-dollar system itself. This sanction of Russia’s Central Bank was an entirely new, and quite devastating, weapon. And the debut of such a weapon will cause a mad race among nations to figure out ways to counter it, or contain its damage. To unveil this terrible power in the global reserve currency is to give every nation on earth (even our own), at least some interest in a Plan B. Perhaps China will take this moment to begin constructing that Plan B in earnest.
There is also no way to escalate from this weapon short of getting troops involved. This means that we are now spectators and have to be even more inventive in the coming weeks if we want to try to influence Russian behavior in the conduct or conclusion of this war.
Speaking of escalation: NATO countries have begun looking for ways of feeding more weapons, possibly even fighter jets, to Ukraine’s army. This is understandable. Russia and America have grudgingly accepted this behavior from each other in previous wars. America did not overtly escalate against Russia or China when those nations were finding ways of supporting the Vietnamese communists. Russia did not go directly after America, though we funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
But there is no rule of war that requires Russia to simply treat this behavior as fair play. Russia could declare tomorrow that supplying Ukraine’s army with additional weapons during the war is itself the act of a belligerent.
Our two interests in this war are to keep the war limited and to see Putin punished. These interests are in direct tension with each other and will require determined statesmanship to balance. President Biden has committed himself rhetorically to both of these goals, but our strategy is not yet built to achieve it. We need to be thinking right now about how to give Russia off-ramps between the annihilation of Ukraine and the annihilation of its own government.