August 23, 2023 -
Information Clearing House
- "
Responsible Statecraft"
- A forever
war seems to be brewing in Ukraine.
Last week, I
argued that given the failure of
Kyiv’s summer offensive to reclaim
significant territory from Russia and
given the maximalist rhetoric that the
U.S. government and NATO allies had been
using since last year to sell the public
on open-ended military support, the war
in Ukraine was in danger of being
prolonged again, well past the date that
the Biden administration had appeared to
set last year.
This increasingly looks to be the
case. On Saturday, the Financial Times
reported that “U.S. officials are
privately girding for what increasingly
looks like a war of attrition that will
last well into next year,” echoing an
earlier Wall Street Journal
report that “military strategists
and policymakers across the West are
already starting to think about next
year’s spring offensive” and about “how
to prepare for a protracted conflict.”
It may well become “a protracted
struggle that lasts several more years,”
the Journal
warned on Sunday, noting that
Ukraine’s goal of retaking all the
territory it lost now “appears a distant
prospect.”
Writing in POLITICO, former
Democratic congressman and Obama
administration State Department official
Tom Malinowski — now a senior fellow at
the McCain Institute —
argues that “for the war in Ukraine
to end on terms consistent with American
interests and ideals, Ukraine must be
seen to have won, and Russia’s invasion
must go down in history as a decisive
failure.”
In particular, Malinowski points to
President Joe Biden’s declaration in
February this year that “Ukraine will
never be a victory for Russia — never.”
On Aug. 10, an unnamed senior
official told
CNN that “we don’t know how much
longer this war is going to go on,” but
that the White House “won’t be bashful
about going back to Congress beyond the
first quarter of next year if we feel
like we need to do that.”
In other words, the United States and
NATO are moving the goalposts again in a
war that has already been
characterized by steady mission
creep. At least some of their Russian
counterparts appear to feel the same,
with former Russian President and Deputy
Security Council Chairman Dmitry
Medvedev recently
saying that “should it take years or
even decades, then so be it.”
Yet this begs the question of when it
will ever be considered a good time to
wind down the war. The
Ukrainian government and its
supporters maintain that it’s a lack
of advanced military weapons that have
hobbled its offensive, even as
military experts
insist no weapon would be a
“magic bullet” against the dug-in
Russian defenses and that the reasons
for Kyiv’s military failures
run deeper. This is not an
unreasonable take given the
significant amount of
Western-supplied heavy weaponry
destroyed in the offensive’s opening
weeks alone.
If the next offensive similarly
fails, will a ceasefire be pushed back
again? How many years might this go on
for?
Even if Kyiv does stage a successful
operation against Russian forces in the
future, it’s not clear it will lead to
an end of the war. For one, Moscow may
decide to launch its own
counter-offensive to erase whatever
gains Ukrainian forces have made,
starting perhaps an endless cycle of
military toing-and-froing. Or we could
have a repeat of last fall, when Kyiv
and its NATO backers, emboldened by the
major gains made in Ukraine’s September
counter-offensive,
rejected the idea of talks to insead
pursue “total victory,” at ultimately
disastrous cost.
Even now, Ukrainian leaders and many
of its Western supporters still maintain
the maximalist goals of restoring the
country’s pre-2014 borders, which
includes retaking Crimea.
Ironically, a prolonged war is
exactly what at least some NATO
officials had
hoped for from the start in order to
trap Russia in its own Afghanistan-like
blunder, with the New York Times
reporting in March 2022 that the
administration “seeks to help Ukraine
lock Russia in a quagmire.”
But a prolonged war will not be good
for Ukraine, which has already suffered
breathtakingly vast
human and
economic costs from a protracted
war, and which falls further
and further into debt with every
month. And it will not be good for the
rest of the world either, feeding into
worldwide cost-of-living shocks while
carrying the already
twice-averted
possibility of a catastrophic
NATO-Russia war that could turn
nuclear.
Meanwhile, should the war drag on
into next year, it may become a sore
political issue in the 2024 election.
President Biden came into office
promising an end to “forever wars”
and to
launch a new era of “relentless
diplomacy,” while his likely opponent,
Donald Trump, has staked out a
pro-diplomacy position on the war,
making a protracted war in Ukraine a
potential political liability.
Meanwhile, as the
U.S. public and
Republican lawmakers increasingly
sour on more military aid to Ukraine,
the president risks having U.S.
involvement in the war end not on his
terms, but with Congress cutting off
further funding. All the while, there is
the unpredictability of war policy
during the campaign season, potentially
raising pressure on the administration
to escalate Washington’s involvement,
lest a perceived defeat threaten Biden’s
chances for re-election.
Even U.S. officials are now quietly
admitting that Joint Chiefs Chair
Gen. Mark Milley “had a point” when he
called for Kyiv to make the most of its
gains by suing for peace late last year,
and that “we may have missed a window to
push for earlier talks.” Now may not be
too late to do so.
But if the administration continues
to drag its feet, it risks trapping not
just Russia but the United States and
Europe into yet another endless
conflict, guaranteeing ongoing horror
for the Ukrainian people and keeping the
specter of nuclear catastrophe looming
above the rest of the globe.
