The Perilous Pursuit of Complete Victory in Ukraine
U.S. policymakers should listen to Gen. Clausewitz, not Gen. MacArthur.
October 19, 2023
Alex Babenko/AP Photo
An assault unit commander from Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade passes by the body of a dead Russian soldier at the front line in Andriivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine, September 16, 2023.
In the spring of 1951, demanding that the Truman administration attack Communist China directly in order to win the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur wrote, “In war, there is no substitute for victory.”
Ever since, wiser analysts, including many serving and ex-soldiers, have critiqued the intellectual flaws and profound dangers implicit in this claim. It continues, however, to exert a sinister grip on the minds of many generals, and still more on those of hawkish civilians far from the battle lines. This is to be seen once again in all too much of the Western debate—if it is one—concerning the war in Ukraine.
The first point to be made in response to MacArthur’s dictum is that there has always been one obvious “substitute for victory.” It is called defeat; and on a number of notable occasions in history, it has been won precisely when armies attempted to turn a qualified victory into an absolute one. A smashing battlefield victory used to be called “Napoleonic,” but the emperor’s victories were linked to a megalomaniac ambition to dominate the whole of Europe that eventually led his armies to disaster in Spain and Russia.
In MacArthur’s own case, the attempt to turn his victorious expulsion of the Communist army from South Korea into the conquest of the whole of North Korea brought China into the war, as Beijing had warned that it would. The result was a severe U.S. defeat that could easily have become catastrophic, and MacArthur’s attempt to reverse that defeat by a vast and perilous extension and escalation of the war.
Above all, MacArthur’s dictum violates that even more famous statement by an intellectual soldier, Gen. Carl von Clausewitz, that “war is a continuation of policy by other means.” The formulation of that policy must be a matter for the national government, because it involves the interests of the state and society as a whole, and the capacity and will of that society to mobilize.
In other words, the first task of the U.S. government, or any responsible government, is to identify political goals and tailor strategy accordingly. This applies also to proxy wars. For as the United States found to its cost in Vietnam after 1965, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan after 1979, it can be all too easy for the second to slip into the first.
A U.S. administration has been elected by the sovereign American people and sworn an oath of allegiance to that sovereign people, and no one else. Above all, then, the question is whether the war involves U.S. interests and goals so vital, and so irreconcilable with those of the adversary, that no limited victory or compromise peace is tolerable.
There have indeed been wars in which only total victory could be accepted. The Second World War was one (which is why hawks refer solely and incessantly to that conflict); the U.S. Civil War was another. Such wars have been relatively rare. On the whole, one side either begins with limited objectives or reduces its objectives as a result of military failures. The other side can then adjust its own objectives accordingly.
Assuming that the survival of the United States is not at stake, the next question concerns the balance between the risks and costs of victory on the one hand, and the likely benefits on the other. In wars involving major powers, the advent of nuclear weapons has introduced a wholly new element to the assessment of risk and cost. As all U.S. presidents (and the leaders of India and Pakistan) have recognized, in a war involving a large-scale nuclear exchange, even a U.S. “victory” would come at such an appalling cost that no possible benefits could make it worthwhile.
The first task of the U.S. government, or any responsible government, is to identify political goals and tailor strategy accordingly.
Even without the threat of nuclear annihilation, there have been numerous cases where the losses to the victors were such as to make eventual victory hard to distinguish from a limited defeat. The most notable example was the First World War, where both sides’ search for total victory destroyed several of the losing powers, and crippled even the British and French so-called victors.
The U.S. must also take stock of available resources, and determine whether they are adequate to achieving total victory. Here, the willingness of the American people to make serious sacrifices is a vital asset, and should be appraised without illusions. In the Civil War and the Second World War, that popular will was present. In Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, many ordinary Americans recognized that the Korean and Vietnamese Communists and the Taliban did not pose an existential threat to the United States.
Hence, in every overseas war since 1945, the attempt by powerful elements in the U.S. foreign and security establishment (including Gen. MacArthur) to portray that war as existential, and colossally to exaggerate both the power and the universal menace of the other side. Local wars over the control of a particular country or piece of territory are portrayed as existential struggles on which the fate of the United States depends. Initially, the Blob may be able to get away with this—but unless the mass of the U.S. population really can see that the war is truly existential, their will diminishes as the casualties and costs increase.
When President Biden declares that “the future of freedom” is at stake in Ukraine and American commentators call the war there “an existential struggle for the West,” it is folly (if proponents believe what they are saying) or demagogic dishonesty (if, as seems more likely, they do not). The same charge was repeatedly used in the disastrous pursuit of total victory in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Even 1945 involved a kind of compromise peace, since the U.S. and its allies had no choice but to accept that their fellow victor, the Soviet Union, would control eastern Germany. Yet the public perception that the end of World War II represented absolute victory has also had a mesmerizing effect on American thinking.
None of Washington’s subsequent wars have ended in complete U.S. victory. In Vietnam and Afghanistan, a failure to address these considerations eventually led to outright U.S. defeat.
Yet in the proxy war in Ukraine, the Biden administration and most of the U.S. and transatlantic commentariat have reverted to the default mode of “total victory.” Urged on by the U.S., the G7 declared that “a just peace cannot be realized without the complete and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops and military equipment, and this must be included in any call for peace.”
To mobilize public support for total victory, they have also reverted to the familiar trope of colossal exaggeration of the global significance of the war in Ukraine and the threat that Russia poses to the U.S. and the West. This has been so even though Russia’s military failures and the colossal disproportion of forces between Russia and NATO should make it obvious that a successful Russian invasion of NATO lies in the realm of fantasy.
U.S. officials have repeatedly stated that even a cease-fire should not be negotiated without a complete withdrawal of Russian troops, and that a decision to negotiate is entirely a matter for the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian government, however, has formally ruled out both negotiations with Russia and acceptance of even temporary and provisional Russian control over any territory. The present U.S. administration stance is therefore in effect to reject any talks, and as yet there are no indications that this position has shifted as a result of the failure of the Ukrainian offensive.
This amounts to a strategy of total victory—one for which Ukrainians, not Americans, are supposed to do the dying. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has declared that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” However, to guarantee this even in the medium term requires the crippling or even destruction of the Russian Federation.
No conceivable Russian government will give up Crimea and the eastern Donbas unless the Russian army had already been completely defeated in the field. Russian officials and commentators have told me that they regard Sevastopol as just as vital to Russian security and pride as Pearl Harbor is to the United States. To withdraw from the eastern Donbas would also be a crushing humiliation that would mean that a large part of the population would have to flee or face prosecution for treason and collaboration by the Ukrainian authorities. To avoid such a total defeat, there is a very high risk that Moscow would escalate drastically, leading to the risk of a spiral of escalation and the use of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the military situation on the ground in Ukraine is beginning to resemble the bloody stalemate on the Western Front of 1915–1917. This creates multiple risks for the United States, Europe, and Ukraine itself. These risks in turn lead to the question of whether they are worth running in pursuit of what is likely in any case to prove an illusory total victory, or whether it would be better to aim at a compromise peace that would secure the independence of by far the greater part of Ukraine.
Three dangers are especially worth noting. First, growing economic hardship in Europe as a result of the war and sanctions could lead to widespread social and political unrest. State election results in Germany (and the national election in Slovakia) show a surge in support for extreme rightist parties, motivated in part by opposition to a continuation of unqualified support for Ukraine.
Not only could this lead in future to European insistence on a compromise peace, but if it leaves key European economies and European democracy gravely weakened, this will be a blow to U.S. interests that could greatly outweigh the gains we can realistically hope for from the war in Ukraine. We should not forget the number of times when U.S. success or failure in war has depended critically on the resilience of U.S. allies.
The second danger is that, as with France, Britain, and Italy in 1915–1917, in a strategy of complete victory encouraged by Washington, the Ukrainians will bleed themselves white in repeated failed offensives, and that this will eventually open the way for a devastating Russian counterattack that will cost Ukraine much more territory.
Should this happen, the third and greatest danger of all is that to avoid the humiliation of “losing Ukraine,” a U.S. administration will feel impelled to intervene directly in the conflict, leading to the strong possibility of mutual nuclear annihilation.
In view of all this, would it not be more advantageous for America—and even, in the end, for Ukraine—to pursue not a total, but a qualified victory? A cease-fire involving territorial compromise would in fact represent a very great victory for Ukraine and the West. It would imply the failure of the Russian government’s plan in February 2014 to subjugate the whole of Ukraine and the defeat of the subsequent Russian effort to split off the southern and eastern half of Ukraine.
Such an agreement could truly be called a historic Ukrainian victory, since it reverses the dominant pattern of almost 400 years of Russian-Ukrainian history. It is understandable that Ukrainians, who have suffered so much from Russia’s invasion, would aim for more. On the part of Americans, it looks like hubris—and hubris, we should remember, is often shadowed by Nemesis.
In the fall of 1950, Gen. MacArthur’s pursuit of total victory in Korea produced a severe U.S. defeat, which could easily have involved the complete loss of the war. He then attempted to salvage the situation by trapping the Truman administration into full-scale war with China, possibly including the use of nuclear weapons. Truman weighed the costs (including moral), benefits, and risks involved, and fired MacArthur. Biden could learn from Truman’s example when it comes to some of his own civilian officials, who share MacArthur’s reckless ambition without his intermittent tactical genius.