"Their blood, our bullets": the US cold, hard calculus in Ukraine
Rather than attempt diplomacy with Russia, the US opts for a prolonged "stalemate" in Ukraine.
To close out the year of its proxy war against Russia, Washington greeted a visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with lavish praise and pledges of more weaponry. A chorus of voices hailed Zelensky as the second coming of Winston Churchill. The lame-duck Congress approved an additional $45 billion in Ukraine-related spending, most of it on weapons, bringing the official US price tag for the proxy war to more than $105 billion.
The public fawning over Zelensky was belied by sobering admissions in private. Buried in the bipartisan jingoism was the quiet assessment that more US weapons will not turn the tide on the battlefield.
While Zelensky, in meetings with Biden and Congressional leaders, tried “to argue that Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright,” that prospect is one that “U.S. officials privately say is highly unlikely,” according to the Washington Post.
The dim U.S. assessment likely factored in its decision to deny Zelensky the bulk of his weaponry wish list. While Zelensky’s “triumphant visit to Washington ended with promises of billions more in U.S. support,” the New York Times noted, he did not obtain “what he wanted most: American battle tanks, fighter jets and long-range precision missiles.” The U.S. rebuff came just days after Ukraine’s top military officer, General Valery Zaluzhny, complained that “I need resources” – including “300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers” – in order to expel Russian forces to pre-invasion lines.
The one new promised weapons system, a lone Patriot missile battery, is also less impactful than advertised. While the Patriot “will help fill a gap in Ukraine’s patchwork air defenses,” the Wall Street Journal observed, “it won’t be deployed immediately, nor dramatically change the balance in the war, according to current and former officials.” It will take months for Ukrainian forces to be properly trained, “making it unlikely the Patriot system will be sent to Ukraine before the spring.” As for Ukraine’s current air defenses, “the number of [Russian] attacks is so overwhelming that plenty get through,” the New York Times adds. “There is little prospect that will change anytime soon.”
By contrast, the long-predicted depletion of Russia’s military capacity – much like the long-predicted collapse of its economy – has yet to materialize. The Ukraine war “is consuming ammunition at rates unseen since World War II,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Ukrainian forces “are now running out of antiaircraft missiles amid a relentless aerial onslaught by Russia, according to experts and intelligence officials.” In fighting in the eastern Donbas, “Russia was using more ammunition in two days than the entire stock of the British military,” according to the UK’s Royal United Services Institute. Expelling Russia from their positions in “more than 15% of Ukraine’s territory will require an even greater flow of military support—possibly more than the West is willing and able to bear.”
The West appears to be increasingly less willing. According to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, “We simply don’t have the stocks to supply, nor do we make the munitions that much of their equipment fires.” But rather than see these critical military shortfalls as a reason to negotiate with Russia, Murphy instead reached a different conclusion: the U.S., he said, has “to be perhaps willing to fund a stalemate for a period of time.”
The desired “stalemate” is a safe bet for the near future. “Putin’s unwillingness to fight NATO directly has been key to the alliance’s ability” to provide “the very supplies that have kept Kyiv in the fight,” the New York Times explains. “Putin has shown he will accept high levels of international support for Ukraine, as long as those weapons are used in Ukraine.” The “critical calculus” for US officials, therefore, is “whether Mr. Putin will see a weapons system as something meant to attack Moscow, or something meant to be used inside Ukraine.” Accordingly, the US aim is to “not to give Mr. Putin an excuse to expand the war.”
While it is welcome that US officials are actively trying to prevent a direct war with Russia, the stated rationale also exposes their calculus toward Ukrainian lives: so long as NATO “weapons are used in Ukraine”, the US is happy to “[keep] Kiev in the fight.” Therefore, the US willingness to “fund a stalemate” – while privately acknowledging that a Ukrainian victory “is highly unlikely” – is perfectly in line with its openly admitted goal for the proxy war: send weapons not to defend Ukraine, but to “weaken” Russia.
While Biden administration officials continue to insist that the proxy war is a “struggle for democracy,” their more candid neoconservative allies have no need for such lofty rhetoric.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell marked Zelensky’s visit by declaring that assistance to Ukraine is “a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests.”
Complaining about the Ukraine effort’s “price tag,” retired veteran US official Anthony Cordesman wrote recently, “ignores the fact that the war in Ukraine has become the equivalent of a proxy war with Russia, and a war that can be fought without any U.S. military casualties.”
Correct: it is the Ukrainians who are suffering the casualties, and by the calculus of D.C.’s leadership class, their lives are of secondary importance to cold, hard, American interests.
Timothy Ash of the UK think tank Chatham House explains the logic further. “In cold, geopolitical terms,” he writes, “this war provides a prime opportunity for the US to erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to US lives.” In Ash’s estimation, every dollar in US military spending on Ukraine is causing at least “two-to-three” times that amount in damage to Russia. Accordingly, “[w]hen viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, US and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.” The proxy war’s bank-per-buck is so tremendous, Ash concludes, that the “US military might reasonably wish Russia to continue deploying military forces for Ukraine to destroy.”
As for the Ukrainian lives that reasonably might not wish to get destroyed by Russia, they are unworthy of consideration in Ash’s “cold” calculus.
So is everyone else who lives are deemed subordinate to the cold, hard interests of NATO state elites. This includes Africa, which is grappling with its biggest food crisis to date, one exacerbated by the Ukraine war and the ensuing sanctions that restrict Russian exports. In Europe, The Economist estimates that around 147,000 more people (4.8% above average) would die in typical winter temperatures this year if electricity prices remain at current levels.
The US response to these woes was recently captured by veteran Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. As Europe “faces a winter of heating and electricity shortages, rising prices and sagging economic growth,” Ignatius wrote, “the message from Washington will be: Stay the course.” When cold, hard American interests are at stake, those who suffer the consequences apparently have no other choice.
Oliver North, the former Reagan administration official convicted for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal, recently explained why he believes so passionately in staying the course. The Ukraine proxy war, North told Fox News, “is very much like what Ronald Reagan did back in the 80s.” Invoking Reagan-backed “freedom fighters” – the death squads in Central America and the mujahideen (later Al Qaeda) of Afghanistan -- North added: “Those people were willing, as the Ukrainian people are, to use their blood and our bullets.” As a bonus, most of the money “is spent here in the United States” on weapons contractors, North stressed. (US arms makers are undoubtedly pleased with this arrangement, as their joint sponsorship of a Ukraine state dinner in Washington recently underscored).
Plus, North added, the Ukraine war will send “the right message” to China over its dispute with Taiwan, where the US should be sending “the same kinds of weapons systems that we’re now providing to the Ukrainians.”
These are the cold, hard hegemonic interests that the US is defending in Ukraine. As Ukraine faces its second winter under an even more ferocious Russian onslaught, the apparent calculus is that not enough blood has been spilled.