New York Times: the US is not trying to defeat Russia
New York Times: the US is not trying to defeat Russia
An unpopular take on the war in Ukraine is finally going mainstream.
Anastasia Edel, today in the New York Times:
Despite having the resources to end this war on Ukraine’s terms, the West clearly lacks the will to win. For Vladimir Putin, victory is now firmly within reach — irrespective of who is in the White House next year.
This has not been a popular take among liberals, who have preferred to believe that the US is steadfastly committed to waging World War III against Putin. (Just a few days ago Michael Crowley was still calling Joe Biden’s efforts in Ukraine “Churchillian”.) It hasn’t been popular on the left, either, since so many on the left have also convinced themselves that the US was willing to fight a reckless ever-escalating World War III against Putin. Whether the US is a high-minded defender of democracy or a bellicose aggressor, the one thing it seems everyone can agree on is that our ruling class war ready for a direct conflict.
But on this point at least, Edel is right: the US just isn’t in it to win it. Our ruling class may have all kinds of motives for intervening, base and noble, but it was never in their interests to risk more than a bare minimum of blood and treasure. And this isn’t just clear now; it’s been clear for a long, long time. Here’s how I put it barely a year into the war:
Hawks generally define victory against Russia as a return to 2013’s territorial status quo ante, but this would clearly require an escalation of intervention by NATO that’s several orders of magnitude beyond what any member nation has proposed. A massive surge in ground forces to uproot the Russian military and push it back across the border, meaning NATO boots on the ground; massive ground-up investments in air defense, and a bolstered naval presence in the Black Sea; and massive investments in border security and COIN. With NATO member nations already growing restless about current levels of spending it’s extremely difficult to imagine anything even remotely like this.1
Some of our ruling class may like the idea of Ukrainian accession into NATO and the EU, and some of them may like the idea of murdering Russians in a proxy war for years on end, but no one ever wanted the economic hit that could come from a hot world war. The idea was always to cause as much trouble for Putin as they could with limited wartime subsidies, which could act as a stimulus for the US and which would provide leverage for the West to further liberalize the Ukrainian economy. If Ukraine could use that to win the war then good on them, but victory was always a secondary interest for the US and one that was plainly unattainable as the scope of Russia’s ambitions became clear.
That this line is finally going mainstream is bad news for the hawks. As I put it in an email to Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara a week or so ago,
no one is actually calling for the level of intervention it would actually take to return to 2013 borders...Once you establish this point, which is more a factual question than anything, all the dominos fall towards cutting a deal ASAP.
The logic is inescapable: since the US isn’t committed to the fight Ukraine can’t win, and since Ukraine can’t win negotiations are the only way that we can possibly save Ukrainian lives. The only alternative — absolute, crushing defeat — is unacceptable. This is the winning antiwar argument because it stands on a fact that even the NYT can no longer ignore, and because it finesses entirely all of the complicated debates about who is to blame for what. Anyone who gives a damn about the people of Ukraine should be making this point, often and loudly.
For the record, when critics accuse me of “spreading information,” this is what they invariably mean: me delivering bad news about Ukraine before it’s been adopted as conventional wisdom by liberals. Today I’ll make another prediction: sooner or later, the hawks are going to start complaining that we didn’t have the will to win in Ukraine, and they’re going to forget entirely that this is what they were scolding me for saying years before they finally figured it out.