The big-name think tanks have generally been in lockstep in support of Joe Biden’s and the blob’s foreign policy of taking on Ukraine as a permanent financial, security, and political dependent of the West. So I was cheered to see a RAND Corporation report by Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe, “Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.”
Readers of my columns will be familiar with most of the arguments about the costs and risks to the United States of our Ukraine policy. But in this report, they are carried on at length and dispassionately:
The debate in Washington and other Western capitals over the future of the Russia-Ukraine war privileges the issue of territorial control. Hawkish voices argue for using increased military assistance to facilitate the Ukrainian military’s reconquest of the entirety of the country’s territory. Their opponents urge the United States to adopt the pre-February 2022 line of control as the objective, citing the escalation risks of pushing further. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated that the goal of U.S. policy is to enable Ukraine “to take back territory that’s been seized from it since February 24.”
Our analysis suggests that this debate is too narrowly focused on one dimension of the war’s trajectory. Territorial control, although immensely important to Ukraine, is not the most important dimension of the war’s future for the United States. We conclude that, in addition to averting possible escalation to a Russia-NATO war or Russian nuclear use, avoiding a long war is also a higher priority for the United States than facilitating significantly more Ukrainian territorial control. Furthermore, the U.S. ability to micromanage where the line is ultimately drawn is highly constrained since the U.S. military is not directly involved in the fighting.
Indeed. If the American people are not willing for America to become a belligerent in this war, then, whatever hot air is blown about the “the liberal world order,” there are hard limits on our ability to control the outcome of the conflict. The report also helpfully comes with charts:
Read the whole thing.