By Mark Episkopos, Responsible Statecraft, 11/13/24
The enduring truism of electoral politics, unflinchingly even if uncritically repeated, that Americans don’t vote on foreign policy, was repudiated this election cycle.
While no single foreign policy issue commanded anything near voters’ concern for domestic challenges, the twin spiraling crises in Europe and the Middle East led a large swathe of the electorate to conclude that foreign policy is too important to be left to the technocrats.
President-elect Trump deftly exploited this lingering anti-establishment sentiment first by picking JD Vance as his running mate and then by defining himself against Harris — who did everything she could to advertise the Democratic party to anti-Trump neoconservatives, up to and including by christening Liz Cheney a core campaign surrogate — as the anti-war candidate.
The difficult but necessary work of resolving the Ukraine war, the most dangerous and destructive conflict on the European continent since 1945, now falls to the incoming Trump administration. But doing so requires coming to grips with, and rejecting, the shibboleths and superstitions that have characterized the established approach to Ukraine.
When diagnosing the crises facing U.S. foreign policy, it pays to consult the prior generation of American diplomats. As is well known, the Cold War exercised a disciplining effect on its American and Soviet figurants. The neck to neck nature of that rivalry, coupled with what both parties recognized as the catastrophic consequences of direct confrontation, meant that neither side was in a position to dictate to the other.
The two superpowers were bound to a shared logic of strategic caution that permitted and, indeed, necessitated competition on the margins but harshly discouraged an uncompromising “winner takes all” mentality on existential questions of war and peace.
This provided fertile ground for the development of a decision-making community eager to learn from their mistakes, obsessively grasping for even the most minute ways in which U.S. policy can be refined or reformed. It is not brute coercive force but rather a persistent open-mindedness, tempered by a nagging recognition and respect for the limits of American power, that produced such exertions of political genius as the long telegram and policy of detente that enabled the U.S. to contend on favorable footing with its Soviet competitor.
To draw the obvious connection between this culture of purpose-driven introspection being a rare commodity in past decades and the cascade of foreign policy blunders visited upon America since 1991 could very well be seen as an exercise in reaching for low-hanging fruit. It’s not a charge of which I wish to acquit myself. The prudence and foresight exercised by policymakers in the not-so-distant past does offer an instructive parallel to the contemporary challenges facing the U.S. — there is no shame in repairing to old wisdoms.
Yet the pervasive nescience gripping parts of Washington has been replaced by something even worse: a kind of shallow, performative introspection that draws all the wrong lessons in service of a failing status quo.
This strain is fast becoming the prevalent bar in the swan song of Kyiv’s maximalist battlefield program. Ukraine is losing the war, we are told, because its Western backers dithered in their provision of lethal aid; because the White House paid too much heed to Moscow’s red lines; and because NATO would not formally commit itself to “victory,” defined as Russia’s unconditional battlefield capitulation.
The lessons stemming from these conclusions are simple. The Pentagon should have emptied its stockpiles to aid Ukraine even if doing so would have exposed critical vulnerabilities in its own preparedness — as a lawmaker put it in the war’s early days, “if it shoots, send it.”
Western countries, the argument goes, should have stampeded as a matter of principle over anything Moscow may regard as a red line. Even to try to balance our aid for Ukraine with the real and serious risk of escalation, as the Biden administration attempted to do with its escalation management model, is decried by these voices as surrendering to Russian “nuclear blackmail.”
Still, and for many of the same reasons, this war has taken on a metaphysical superstructure that blots out and renders impossible any meaningful debate. We are told against all the weight of all available evidence that the wanton slaughter unfolding in eastern Ukraine and, more recently, Russia’s Kursk region, is part of a noble crusade for democracy. And it is a global crusade, for Russia’s “victory” in Ukraine will impel Putin’s Westward march and give Xi Jinping a “green light” to attack Taiwan.
But when has wartime mobilization ever made a country less corrupt, more free, or more liberal? To the extent that democracy requires stability, it is not at all clear that Ukrainian institutions have benefited from the indefinite continuation of a war that has ravaged the country’s economic outlook and thrust it into a demographic crisis.
The notion that the Chinese are waiting to see who controls which part of western Donetsk —as opposed to gauging factors much closer to home, like the balance of forces in the Asia-Pacific and Taiwan’s deterrent capabilities — is hardly deserving of sober commentary. Nor can Beijing interpret the West’s clear signal that it will not fight for Ukraine as taking a stance on Taiwan, as the latter occupies an entirely different tier of strategic significance in U.S. policy thinking.
Finally, as I previously explained along with my colleagues George Beebe and Anatol Lieven, there is not a shred of evidence that Moscow demonstrates either the capability or the intention to launch a war of aggression against any NATO state; indeed, doing so would contradict Russia’s strategic aims behind invading Ukraine in the first place.
The problem is not just that the Ukraine war is the most propagandized, ideologized conflict since Iraq, though it is that, too. It is, moreover, that the military and political realities governing this conflict have become dangerously unwound from security discourses in most Western governments.
Any effort to disentangle the West from this quagmire can only but start with acknowledgement of simple truths: Ukraine could not, cannot, and will not prevail over Russia in a full-scale conventional war, if victory is defined as the complete ejection of Russian forces from Ukraine’s 1991 borders solely by military means; Ukraine is decisively losing this war of attrition and no amount of Western military aid can reverse its trajectory of collapse; Russia’s total, unconditional defeat cannot be brought about by any means short of a full-on war between NATO and Russia, whereas Washington and European capitals have concluded and continually reaffirmed over the past three years that they will not go to war over Ukraine.
It isn’t difficult to tell where this leads, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept after three years spent submerged in an ocean of denial and conceit. It is long past time for Washington to come up for air on Ukraine.
American, European, and Ukrainian interests are best served by a U.S.-led effort to swiftly reach a negotiated settlement, something President-elect Trump rightly identified as one of his key foreign policy priorities. The administration should be candid with the American people that this process will be complex and challenging, as peace talks always are, but the cost of inaction, of failing to rise to the occasion, is infinitely greater.
President-elect Trump has secured a powerful mandate to stop this war and, in doing so, strengthen not just America’s European posture but its global standing. The time to seize it is now.