Noah Rothman writes that the situation in Ukraine is deteriorating and that it would be bad for America if we invest a lot of resources only for Russia to win anyway.
The hard-nosed realist set has very little use for the concept of honor in the conduct of foreign policy. Such types seem forever surprised when they discover that other countries, the American people, and even this very presidency seem to value intangible concepts like honor, fidelity, and respect. Russia is meting out a humiliation to the United States, first at the negotiating table and now over the skies of Ukraine. It would be foolish to expect the voting public not to notice, much less to not care.
I don’t know if I qualify as a hard-nosed realist, but can I say, “I told you so”?
Three years ago, I wrote “How to Lose Big in Ukraine”:
This mismatch is quite clear. Consistent with the theory that Russia ultimately cares more about this conflict, it is acting vigorously to achieve an acceptable end. Meanwhile, the United States, unable to rally the deep passions of the American people to take significant risks in this conflict, must satisfy itself with hoping that more of the same failed strategy will yield a marginally less humiliating outcome. Our policy-makers in the executive branch and across the blob of NGOs are cut off from the people whom the Constitution authorizes to declare war through their elected representatives. Cut off this way, these policy elites have involved American honor, treasure, and credibility in a conflict the American people are unwilling to take charge of themselves and end victoriously.
One risk of making your rivals’ wars more costly is that you just might make their eventual victory even larger. If the Ukrainian army fails to make a crucial strategic retreat, and is broken in the cauldrons of the Donbas, the United States will have made Russia’s victory much costlier, but also much more significant than it otherwise would have been. Putin will be able to claim he defeated not just the nationalists in Ukraine, but the Western powers that funded and trained their army from 6,000 to nearly half a million men. [Emphasis added]
The problem was not the fact that we could not deliver on the implicit promises we made to Ukraine. The problem was that we made these implicit promises without ever thinking seriously about whether we could live up to them. The people who have to answer for Ukraine’s parlous state today are those who made these false promises, not those who noticed the moral hazard a long time ago.