French president Emmanuel Macron made headlines by saying he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Europeans sending troops to Ukraine.
He also said that Europe needed to prepare itself for Russia to attack NATO countries in a few years’ time.
On the one hand, it is good to see Macron reckon with the actual military reality. More than any piece of equipment or weapons system, Ukraine is short of men. Analysts like Edward Luttwak have been banging the drum for Ukraine to revoke the passports of military-age men who won’t return to fight, to induce more of them to come home.
On the other hand, this is precisely the credibility trap I’ve been warning about for over two years now. Policy-makers knew early on there were hard limits on what Europe and America were willing to commit to the Ukrainian cause. Realists warned them that these limits would likely mean some kind of Russian victory, as Russia would invest mighty amounts of blood and treasure to prevent Ukraine from fully detaching itself from Russia and ensconcing itself in Western security and economic institutions. In their rhetoric, Western policy-makers didn’t just commit to turning back Russian advances into Ukrainian territory but occasionally hinted that the war would end with Putin’s downfall. This was a trap they laid for themselves. As I wrote two years ago: “The White House, by continuing to over-invest U.S. honor and credibility in an outcome that it is unwilling or unable to bring about, is setting us up to come out as the ‘losers’ of a war we never really joined.”
Macron now senses the price of this “loss” and is talking desperately of how to avoid it. If Western publics were reluctant two years ago, how much more so now, with Ukraine’s military being cut to pieces? Or with Russia outproducing the entire world on shells? Brinksmanship requires some level of credibility.
If Europe really believes Russia will begin attacking NATO countries, they need to begin a desperate and well-coordinated industrial and military buildup, one that would leave the United States not as their primary defender but as a balancer of last resort. Such a buildup would likely deter Russia by itself, considering its terrible losses in Ukraine. And it would likely silence NATO criticism in the United States. For now, only Poland is making such a commitment.