It looks increasingly like the U.S. is more interested in undermining Russia’s power than in saving Ukrainian lives. The U.S. needs to help end the war, not escalate it into a disastrous global confrontation.
Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman on the House Armed Services Committee, made a rather shocking assertion on Fox News recently. “We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians,” Moulton said. “We’re fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia, and it’s important that we win.” Former defense secretary Leon Panetta has said something similar, commenting that “we are engaged in … a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not.”
The Biden administration, for its part, has vigorously denied that it is engaged in a “proxy war,” calling this a “Kremlin talking point.” The label “proxy war” is a little vague anyway, although the Washington Post says that one reason the label shouldn’t be applied is that “the core U.S. objective is helping Ukraine achieve a goal it set for itself: to fend off the expanded Russian invasion.” In other words, if we have Ukraine’s interests at heart, we’re not waging a proxy war, while if we are using Ukraine to further our own ends, the label is more apt. But as the Post acknowledges, over time there has been a shift in the way the Biden administration has talked about its goals. High-ranking U.S. officials have suggested that our country’s government does not just want to see Russia withdraw from Ukraine, but wants to “weaken” Russia to the point where it does not possess sufficient military power to invade a country ever again (which would require decimating Russia militarily and economically) and also wants Putin to be removed from power and put in the Hague. The Post acknowledges that the Biden administration’s statements have “suggested U.S. interests had escalated from simply helping Ukraine achieve its own battlefield aims to getting something seen as geopolitically desirable in Washington” and that this certainly “edges” the conflict “in the direction of being a proxy war.”
An important question here is whether the United States, despite its rhetoric, is actually trying to set its own policies on the basis of what Ukraine wants and needs, or on the basis of the outcome the U.S. wants and needs. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in a recent interview with Current Affairs, in the 1980s the United States funded Islamist mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in part to bleed and weaken the Soviet Union. While there may have been noble rhetoric about aiding the people of Afghanistan, in reality the U.S. cared about its rivalry with the Soviets, not the millions of civilians who died in the Afghan conflict. “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War,” Zbigniew Brzeziński says he told Jimmy Carter. Fueling a violent conflict in a small country in order to weaken a larger adversary is, of course, morally unconscionable.
There is a way, then, that the U.S. could be providing massive amounts of support to Ukraine without actually being interested in helping Ukraine, and in fact having a somewhat sociopathic and Machiavellian attitude toward Ukraine.1 Veteran diplomat Chas Freeman has said that this is precisely the attitude the U.S. appears to have toward Ukraine: instead of trying to facilitate a diplomatic settlement, the U.S. is “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian,” meaning that we are content to see the fighting continue so long as Ukrainians, rather than Americans, die. Freeman says that there are clearly those in the United States who think a long war would be preferable to a short one, because the longer the war goes on, the more it will weaken Russia (of course, it will also destroy Ukraine, but that is only one factor in the U.S. geopolitical calculus).
Indeed, there is evidence that the U.S. might actively prefer the continuation, or even the escalation, of the war to a diplomatic settlement. The Washington Post recently reported on the “awkward reality” that “for some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.” Surely no moral person could speak of an end to the killing coming “too early,” but the Post indicates that for some NATO countries, the objective goes beyond trying to get the Ukrainians a deal with Russia that both sides are prepared to accept. Indeed, the Post says that if the Ukrainians did try to strike a deal with Russia, it would have to be “within limits” set by NATO in order for NATO countries to support it, since if the deal was perceived to concede too much to Russia, NATO countries would be jittery about it. Indeed, international relations scholar John Mearsheimer predicts that “If the Ukrainians decide to cut a deal and allow Russia to win in some meaningful sense, the Americans are going to say that’s unacceptable.” If that’s the case, then it is not really true that the United States simply defers to Ukraine’s desires. We have our own interests.
Indeed, for confirmation of Moulton’s observation that “we are not just at war to support the Ukrainians,” we can look at articles in leading opinion journals. Foreign Policy recently ran a piece called “Yes, the United States Should Weaken Russia,” in which the pretense of caring about Ukrainians was all but abandoned, and the author (a professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute and fellow at the Atlantic Council) said our approach should be to undermine Russia in order to help “U.S. interests”:
To reduce Russia’s ability to threaten vital U.S. interests on a whim, Washington should aim to erode Russian power by competing directly with Moscow and engaging in its zero-sum game. … This change in approach will necessarily mean more U.S. and allied troops with more advanced capabilities permanently stationed in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, the Baltics, and Romania. … The West clearly needs a new strategy toward Russia, and Austin’s comment [that the U.S. should weaken Russia] should serve as a blueprint. The United States should seek to go beyond competing with or deterring Russia as suggested in recent strategies and instead seek to erode its power over time in the military, diplomatic, and economic spheres. It’s the only strategy that will roll back Russia’s ability to threaten vital U.S. interests.
And the interests of Ukraine? Shouldn’t the U.S. be crafting policy right now on the basis of what helps Ukrainians, rather than what helps (vaguely defined) “U.S. interests”? You might assume that what’s good for us and what’s good for Ukraine coincide, but that’s not necessarily the case. As Chomsky pointed out, all the talk of regime change in Russia disincentivizes Putin to end the war, because it indicates that the U.S. posture toward him will be the same regardless of what he does in Ukraine. The Guardian notes that the present U.S. posture “suggest[s] that even if Russian forces withdrew or were expelled from the Ukrainian territory they have occupied since 24 February, the US and its allies would seek to maintain sanctions with the aim of stopping Russia reconstituting its forces.” James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued that by not making it clear how Putin can get sanctions lifted, we create an ambiguity that is “dangerous because it risks obscuring the existence of an off-ramp for Putin.” If the West’s position is that it will try to topple Putin’s government, and that nothing Putin can do will change this, it places him in a struggle for survival. Boris Johnson’s spokesperson has said directly that the sanctions “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” (Downing Street later walked back the statement.) If Putin will be sanctioned if he ends the war and sanctioned if he doesn’t, then sanctions are not being used as pressure to end the war.