America prevailed against the USSR by risking conflict, not by creating a force field around a battlefield within which the Russians could do as they pleased.
The United States prevailed against the Soviet Union by risking military conflict, not by creating a force field around a battlefield within which the Russians could do anything they pleased.
A s Russia escalates the breadth and violence of its assault on Ukraine, the Biden administration has rejected measures to expand aid to the beleaguered defenders. The White House has settled for providing limited military supplies, under a severe misunderstanding of the legal and political rules that govern great-power conflict.
To his credit, President Biden has performed a masterful job in unifying NATO to take a strong initial stand against Russia. Vladimir Putin no doubt has been taken aback not just by the ferocity and nationalism of the Ukrainians, upon which all else depends, but also by the swift response of the U.S. and its allies. Sanctions are isolating Russia from the international economy, crashing its finances, and devaluing the ruble. NATO allies are sending the Stingers, Javelins, and drones that have allowed Ukrainians to protect their major cities and inflict steep losses on Russian troops.
But Biden won’t do more. He made clear even before the invasion that he would not consider the use of troops or other military force. “That’s a world war — when Americans and Russians start shooting at one another, we’re in a very different world than we’ve ever been in,” President Biden said in early February. Out of similar fears of direct superpower conflict, administration officials have steadfastly refused to consider imposing a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine. Air supremacy over Ukraine would require U.S. and NATO air forces to shoot down Russian aircraft and destroy air-defense systems.
Strategists will debate for years whether openly taking the military option off the table undermined deterrence of the Russian invasion. But with no troops on the horizon, economic sanctions and military aid remain the only avenues to assist Ukraine. The highest-profile idea is for Poland to send MiG jet fighters to Ukraine, whose pilots are trained to fly them, with the United States replacing the Polish inventory with American F-16s. Other ideas include creating a new Lend-Lease program for Ukraine, expanding training and outfitting of Ukrainian troops along the border with NATO countries, and providing Ukraine with upgraded, longer-range air-defense and anti-armor systems. More-aggressive ideas include sending NATO troops to defend western Ukraine and sending humanitarian flights to supply major cities.
These proposals have met with skepticism from the Biden administration, which is concerned that Russia might consider the U.S. and its NATO allies to be “co-belligerents” open to attack. Earlier this week, Russia’s deputy foreign minister declared that Moscow considers NATO supply columns to be “legitimate targets.” On Sunday, Russia issued a more concrete threat by bombing a Ukrainian training facility just ten miles from Poland, where U.S. troops had deployed as recently as December.
Co-belligerency, however, is a stalking horse for other fears. International law raises no obstacles to helping Ukraine. Russia has already violated international law by launching an invasion of Ukraine without any viable claim of self-defense or authorization from the U.N. Security Council (the two occasions in which the U.N. Charter permits the use of force). Instead, the United States and its allies have international law on their side. Ukraine has the core right of self-defense under Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, which itself only codifies longstanding customary law. The United States and its NATO allies have the right to assist Ukraine in its right to defend itself against aggression. Indeed, international law after World War II expanded the right of self-defense to include the collective, not just the individual state. The very first article of the U.N. Charter declares that the purpose of the body is “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” By providing military aid to Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies are fulfilling the core purpose of the U.N. Charter, even as the mechanisms of the U.N. (the Security Council) have failed again to halt a war of aggression.
Whether the U.S. and NATO can enter the war legitimately (what international law calls the jus ad bellum question) is a question separate from that of what rules govern military operations once hostilities have broken out (jus in bello). Even though the U.S. had no plausible self-defense claim or U.N. Security Council authorization for its 1999 air war against Serbia, it could still fight the war legally by intentionally attacking only military targets with a low chance of collateral civilian harm. Now that war has begun, Russia could claim the right to pursue Ukrainian forces across its borders into other countries, just as the United States used special forces and drones to attack al-Qaeda terrorists hiding in Pakistan. It could attempt to stop military aid from crossing the Ukrainian border, just as the United States did in its wars in Korea and Vietnam. Transferring MiGs from Poland to Ukraine will not suddenly transform NATO into a co-belligerent. If it wanted to, Russia could already widen the war into Poland or Hungary. The threat of NATO’s military escalation, not international law, is stopping Putin for now.
Understanding that international law neither prohibits aid to Ukraine nor protects NATO countries from Russian attack renders irrelevant some of the more imaginative proposals for aid. Some suggest that the U.S. move MiG fighters (and presumably other equipment) near the Polish—Ukrainian border for surreptitious pickup by Ukrainian pilots. Others would ship massive amounts of U.S. military equipment, such as armor and artillery, not just short-range defense systems, in a 21st-century Lend-Lease program. These efforts look back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to help the Allies during World War II, as a means to evade the fear that Russia will determine American aid to rise to the level of co-belligerency.
But observers who advance such arguments misunderstand the reasons behind FDR’s moves. FDR indeed parked U.S. fighters next to the Canadian border, where Canadian pilots might fly them off; “lent” military equipment to the allies (how could it be returned after use?); and, most controversially, traded 50 “over-age” destroyers for rights to British bases in the Caribbean. But FDR did not worry about becoming a co-belligerent — in fact, as we now know, he ordered the U.S. Navy to aggressively guard convoys to Britain in hopes of sparking an incident with Germany. Rather, FDR launched these legal acrobatics in order to evade the Neutrality Acts, which Congress had designed to prevent exactly what FDR with all his foresight badly wanted: U.S. entry into World War II. Congress today, unlike in 1939 and 1940, displays a more militant posture toward conflict than does the president. Instead of seeking to keep the U.S. neutral, Congress has voted billions in military and civilian aid for Ukraine and has pushed the administration into levying harsher sanctions, such as the recent ban on Russian oil and gas imports. Unlike the case in World War II, fears of co-belligerency or domestic neutrality acts pose no obstacle to more-ambitious aid programs to Ukraine.
The refusal of the Biden administration to consider more-aggressive aid also reflects a misunderstanding of political as well as legal rules governing international conflict. Biden’s fear of direct superpower conflict learns the alleged lessons of the Cold War. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, for example, the United States supplied the mujahideen with arms but did not send in any armed forces (other than intelligence agents). Fighting wars through proxies in Korea, Vietnam, and Central America kept any superpower frictions from sparking an escalation into nuclear war. Putin’s declaration of a Russian nuclear alert at the start of the Ukraine war allegedly signaled a warning to Biden against pursuing steps that could lead to direct conflict.
Such thinking learns the wrong lessons from the Cold War, just as worries about co-belligerency misunderstand post—World War II international law. Moscow, for one, did not bear the sensitivities about co-belligerency that plague the Biden White House. In the Korean War, Soviet pilots in new MiG jets fought the U.S. Air Force in the skies. The Soviet Union’s Chinese ally, Mao Zedong, sent an estimated 250,000 troops to push General MacArthur’s troops back to the 38th parallel in a war where Chinese casualties ultimately totaled almost a million. In the Vietnam War, Soviet “advisers” not only supplied the North with arms but helped defend Hanoi with advanced anti-aircraft defense systems. Soviet “advisers” probably caused the deaths of thousands of American servicemen in both conflicts.
Nor did the United States follow a general policy of avoiding the possibility of superpower conflict. Instead, some of America’s most noteworthy successes in the Cold War involved the threat of escalation. In 1948, President Truman launched the Berlin airlift to fly over the Soviet troops that, on Stalin’s orders, had cut off access to West Berlin. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, American tanks faced off eyeball-to-eyeball with Soviet troops until Khrushchev ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall. And in 1962, President Kennedy imposed a naval “quarantine” — a legalism invented to pretend that the U.S. had not imposed a blockade, which under international law constituted an act of war — around Cuba to prevent the Soviets from shipping in medium-range nuclear missiles. In Berlin and Cuba, the United States all but dared the Soviet Union to attack American troops deployed in its face. Eventually, the Soviets restored access to West Berlin and withdrew their nuclear forces from Cuba. The United States prevailed by risking military conflict, not by creating a force field around a battlefield within which the Russians could do anything they pleased.
The Cold War teaches the opposite lesson from the one learned by Biden, who drew his principles as a young anti-war Democratic senator in the wake of Vietnam. It is instead the logic taught by the theoreticians of nuclear war, such as Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn, which modern game theoreticians have further refined. In a world where either side could theoretically escalate a conflict into a nuclear exchange, they examined how nations could resolve their conflicts. They suggested that the nation willing to credibly trigger an uncontrollable escalation toward full war would have the upper hand. Resolve and will became as important as military capability in the nuclear age. Knowing that one side believed its interests were so dear in a dispute that it might risk nuclear war might even deter the other side from entering the conflict at all. If Russia knew that JFK was willing, through the quarantine, to set off a chain of events that might uncontrollably escalate to nuclear war, it would not have sought a conflict at all. Better to withdraw, reach a settlement that contains some benefits (such as the U.S. agreeing to withdraw nuclear missiles from Turkey and not to invade Cuba), and avoid the costs of war.
Putin, it seems, has read his game theory — or perhaps his reptile brain gives him an instinctive understanding. Nevertheless, in order to halt his campaign to destroy Ukraine and perhaps end its independence, President Biden must respond in kind. The U.S. could plan to support an insurgency if Kyiv fell and thereby to inflict on Russia far worse casualties than anything we suffered in Iraq. But an Afghanistan-Iraq–style insurgency would begin only after Russia had succeeded in destroying the Ukrainian military, overthrown its government, and turned much of its population (slightly larger than that of California) into refugees. If the United States wishes to stop Moscow from succeeding in its immediate war goals, it must credibly signal that it is willing to escalate. That could involve not just supplying weapons to Ukraine but also unlocking the transfer of military jets and considering other ways to airlift materials to crucial cities.
While risky, and perhaps counterintuitive, such a course would place the onus on Putin, who would have to decide whether to attack NATO forces and risk escalation into a European war. Even Stalin and Khrushchev, who held much stronger conventional hands (though not nuclear), stepped back from confrontations before they could run out of control. The threat of escalation contains the means of de-escalation. But in order to start the move toward a stable peace, Biden must first unlearn the false lessons he has drawn from the Cold War.