Russia and Ukraine Have Incentives to Negotiate. The U.S. Has Other Plans.
The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2023
By Christopher Caldwell
Mr.
Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of
“Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the
West.”
The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1
Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious
problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as
we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have
lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style
battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively
stable fronts.
Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I
was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold
out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an
intact economy and superior military technology. At the same time,
Russia has its own problems; until recently, a shortage of soldiers and
the vulnerability of its arms depots to missile strikes have slowed its
westward progress. Both sides have incentives to come to the negotiating
table.
The Biden administration has other plans. It is betting
that by providing tanks it can improve Ukraine’s chances of winning the
war. In a sense, the idea is to fast-forward history, from World War I’s
battles of position to World War II’s battles of movement. It is a
plausible strategy: Eighty years ago, the tanks of Hitler and Stalin
revolutionized warfare not far from the territory being fought over
today.
But the Biden strategy has a bad name: escalation. Beyond a
certain point, the United States is no longer “helping” or “advising”
or “supplying” the Ukrainians, the way it did, say, the Afghan
mujahedeen during the Cold War. It is replacing Ukraine as Russia’s main
battlefield adversary. It is hard to say when that point will be
reached or whether it has been already. With whom is Russia at war —
Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and
Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?
This
sudden policy lurch has the look of an accident. The Biden
administration sought for weeks to convince Chancellor Olaf Scholz of
Germany to provide Ukraine with his country’s Leopard 2 tanks. It was a
hard sell. Back in the 1980s when Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat, was
campaigning for European disarmament as a member of his party’s Young
Socialist wing, he probably didn’t picture himself in the role of the
first chancellor since Hitler to send German tanks into battle on the
Russian front.
Mr. Scholz refused to release the Leopards unless
the United States released its own best tanks. His desire to move in
lock step with the United States surely has something to do with
Germany’s dark past. But it may also rest on fears of being rolled.
Twice this century, Germany has refused to be dragged into a war to
protect the world from an evil dictator: Chancellor Gerhard Schröder led
the opposition to George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003, and in 2011,
Mr. Schröder’s successor, Angela Merkel, dissented from the
Anglo-Franco-American view that an invasion of Libya would be required
to stop Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from committing a genocide. The German
view proved wiser in both instances.
Perhaps this crusade is
different. Perhaps not. Mr. Scholz, in the end, acquiesced in the
request for tanks. But by insisting that the United States also pledge
its own tanks, he offered at least token resistance.
In an age of
smart devices, robotics and remote control, the United States’
involvement in the war has always been greater than it appeared. The
computer-guided rocket artillery that Ukraine has received from the
United States may seem analogous to the horses and rifles that a
government might have sent to back an insurgency in the old days. They
look at first like traditional weapons, albeit advanced ones.
But
there is an important difference. Most of the new weapons’ destructive
power comes from their being bound into an American information network,
a package of services that keeps working independently of the warrior
and will not be fully shared with the warrior. So the United States is
participating in these military operations at the moment they happen. It
is fighting.
Last spring, Ukraine shocked the Russian navy by
using American targeting information to sink the Moskva, a Black Sea
missile cruiser. Only months into the war did Russians face up to the
fact that officers using their personal cellphones were regularly
getting blown up. This past New Year’s Eve, a dormitory full of fresh
Russian army recruits in the city of Makiivka was hit by missiles at the
crack of midnight, presumably just as the young men were calling their
friends and loved ones to wish them the joys of the coming year. The
attack killed 89, according to Russian authorities — more than 300,
according to the British Ministry of defense, which accused Russian
authorities of “deliberate lying” about the attack to minimize their
losses.
After such episodes, Russia’s leaders are unlikely to
feel that the resistance they are meeting comes from Ukraine. The role
of the United States is considerably more active than merely responding
to Ukrainian “requests” for this or that. Having itself designed the
weaponry in most cases, the United States may have a better sense of
which tech solutions are appropriate to local battlefield challenges.
Abrams
tanks require experienced technicians for training and repair. Will
these technicians be brought onto the battlefield from the United
States? Then we will have a situation analogous to the introduction of
“advisers” into Vietnam in the early 1960s. “This is not an offensive
threat to Russia,” President Biden said of the Abrams tank shipments
last month. He’s entitled to his opinion, but it is probably not shared
by the Russian leadership.
President Biden’s own advisers are
divided on how aggressively to pursue the war. Some even propose to
chase Russia out of Crimea. That would promise a new kind of mission for
NATO: the conquest, annexation and garrisoning of a population that
doesn’t want it.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has to do with a
complicated set of post-Cold War historical trends (like America’s
striking post-Cold War rise and its more recent relative decline) and
economic accidents (like the vicissitudes of fossil fuel prices). But it
is also the latest chapter of an ongoing geostrategic story in which
the plot has changed little over the centuries: The largest country by
area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world. The most
reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade
routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of
Europe. There, or thereabouts, Russian forces clashed with the armies of
many Turkish sultans in the 17th and 18th centuries, Lord Palmerston of
Britain in the 19th and Hitler in the 20th.
Speaking last week
at the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Germany at the battle
of Stalingrad, President Vladimir Putin of Russia described the present
war as a similar effort. Russians say the war is about preventing the
installation of an enemy military stronghold on the Black Sea, strong
enough to close off what has for centuries been Russia’s main access to
the outside world. Without Ukraine, Russia can be turned into a vassal
state. That NATO intends to bring about the subjugation, breakup or even
extinction of Russia may be true or false — but it will not sound
implausible to a Russian.
Many Americans cannot resist describing
Mr. Putin as a “barbarian” and his invasion of Ukraine as a “war of
aggression.” For their part Russians say this is a war in which Russia
is fighting for its survival and against the United States in an unfair
global order in which the United States enjoys unearned privileges.
We
should not forget that, whatever values each side may bring to it, this
war is not at heart a clash of values. It is a classic interstate war
over territory and power, occurring at a border between empires. In this
confrontation Mr. Putin and his Russia have fewer good options for
backing down than American policymakers seem to realize, and more
incentives to follow the United States all the way up the ladder of
escalation.
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion
writer for The Times and a contributing editor at The Claremont Review
of Books. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America
Since the Sixties.”