Fighting for Ukraine Is a Losing Proposition

The worst thing that the U.S. could do would be to make a security guarantee for a country where it has no vital interests.

Fred Kagan is on the warpath as usual:

Americans and Europeans must understand that Ukraine’s independence is of vital import — for ourselves as well as Ukraine — and must act accordingly. That is also the best way to deter Putin.

Kagan’s column is as wrong as can be, but it is useful as a window into the mindset of Russia hawks. First, he begins by exaggerating the stakes by making it seem as if Ukraine’s existence as an independent state is at risk, and then he exaggerates the importance of that independence to the West (“vital import”). If Russia takes any new military action in Ukraine, it is extremely unlikely to extend to the invasion of the entire country, and it isn’t going to occupy or absorb all of it. Russia hawks have to oversell the threat and they have to inflate the interests that the U.S. and its allies have at stake, because otherwise their preferred policy of confrontation would make no sense. His main recommendation is having the U.S. and NATO make a commitment to fight for Ukraine, which is as fanciful as it is wrongheaded. It is fanciful because there is rightly no appetite in the U.S. or most of Europe to fight a major war for a non-ally, and it is wrongheaded because it would be a ruinous war that serves no U.S. or allied interests.

Kagan argues that an independent Belarus and Ukraine are valuable because they created a “buffer” between Russia and central Europe, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him that having them as a buffer between Russia and NATO is exactly what Moscow wants. In other words, the Russian government is opposed to NATO involvement in Ukraine and further NATO expansion because they want to have that buffer. They believe Ukraine is being turned into a Western satellite, and they don’t like that. It doesn’t make sense for them to eliminate that buffer and create more places where their territory borders on NATO. It’s also worth noting that a “Russian takeover of Ukraine” would provoke a significant insurgency, which Western governments would presumably support, and that would become a huge drain on Russian resources for years and possibly decades to come.

The worst thing that the U.S. could do would be to make a security guarantee for a country where it has no vital interests. If it honored the guarantee, it could end up fighting a costly war that it didn’t need to fight. If it made the guarantee and then thought better of it later, it would still be a humiliation when the bluff was called. The wiser course is to engage with Russia and discuss which of its proposals the U.S. and its allies can take seriously and which ones they will not. As usual, Kagan would have the U.S. accelerate towards an unnecessary war without thinking through any of the serious pitfalls and costs that would come with it. The Biden administration would have to be insane to listen to what he is saying.

Anatol Lieven has reminded us that a war over Ukraine would be bloody and probably one that U.S. and allied forces would be hard-pressed to win. Despite the last twenty years of failure, most hawks assume that the U.S. will be successful if it chooses to intervene somewhere, and they think the only important question to answer is whether the U.S. will intervene or not. It is conceivable that the U.S. could choose to fight for Ukraine and then lose that fight. It would be considerably worse for U.S. and allied security if our government chose to fight Russia on such unfavorable ground for a peripheral interest than if it refrained. Even a “limited” war with Russia could not possibly be worth the expected costs, and we should remember that wars usually end up costing much more than anyone anticipates at the beginning.