It is very likely that the US and its G7 partners are once again congratulating themselves on their Ukraine policy.
At their recent summits, the US and its allies broadened the range of sanctions on Russia and secondary suppliers, (i.e. China), agreed to a loan of $50bn to Ukraine backed by seized Russian assets, and President Joe Biden met his Ukrainian counterpart to sign a security pact which offers some more combat aircraft and anti-missile systems.
Nevertheless, any self-congratulation is both undeserved and possibly marks the upper limit on what the West will do. Each step offers some practical assistance, but taken as a whole does not amount to a strategy on the future of the current conflict.
The US still seems determined that nobody should win this war. For its part, Europe still cannot get its act together and understand that it is now under comprehensive and systematic attack by means of cyber, information, and infrastructural strikes, subversion, murders, and espionage, or what professionals call grayzone or gray area actions.
Meanwhile, the help offered by the West is shot through with qualifications — yes $50bn is a big number but Ukraine needs at least $100bn a year to keep fighting; yes, the US signed a security pact but it’s devoid of genuine guarantees; and yes, toughened sanctions are helpful, but the regime as a whole is profoundly flawed and wide open to Russian abuse.
Despite rising defense spending in Europe, the continent still has no coherent defense policy or strategy, and it is unlikely to get one at NATO’s upcoming summit. Here the US-Ukraine security pact’s shortcomings stand out.
Congress will probably not uphold it, nor will a Trump Administration. Moreover, it eschews commitment to what Ukraine needs, i.e. NATO membership and its attendant guarantees. Clearly, the West understands and yet fails to act, on the knowledge that a successful Putin (and likely his successor) will not stop at Ukraine, and will make further territorial demands on Europe. That much is clear from Putin’s so-called peace plan, which amounts to Russian victory and Ukrainian surrender.
Worse yet, this pact prevents any discussion of NATO membership for Ukraine on the grounds that the just-signed US-Ukraine document settles the matter. The agreement also reveals that despite almost three years of war, too many Western officials, including Americans, have still failed to understand what we are confronting. And should Donald Trump win the upcoming election the situation will likely worsen given his own negative outlook on Ukraine, as well as that of his entourage and most Republicans. Thus, for all the virtue-signaling, the fact remains that elementary strategic truths have not yet penetrated much elite discourse.
First, a Russian victory or non-defeat, which amounts to the same thing, represents not only the loss of Ukraine. It represents an invitation to more grayzone wars throughout all of Europe and the utter discrediting of NATO.
Second, it represents a victory for China because its ally will have prevailed while the West showed its lack of appetite for great power competition of the most rigorous type. At the same time, Russia, though an international menace, is already being reduced to an economic if not a strategic colony of China. So if European officials increasingly view the Russo-Chinese alliance as a growing threat to Europe, they need to follow the logic of that conclusion by ensuring Ukrainian security with the means to victory, including NATO membership. For if Ukraine falls, the pressure on Taiwan, and other Asian states, e.g. South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and India, will grow commensurately.
The recently broadened sanctions, the fruit of many US warnings, is a positive step. But we should harbor no illusions that it will terminate or noticeably reduce Chinese support for Putin.
Only the prospect of a Ukrainian victory and thus a Western triumph too will induce Beijing to think that it might be betting on the wrong horse.
The trio of recent accords constitutes an astrategic series of lowest-common-denominator agreements providing only stopgap answers to Ukraine’s plight. Indeed, the NATO summit in July is unlikely to go further despite the rhetoric emanating from the G7 and the Biden administration.
Unfortunately, there really is no substitute for victory here, not least because the war underscores the genuine indivisibility of international security.
Hence the need for a broad and unstinting strategy to give Ukraine what it needs to win, i.e., to expel Russian forces and become a NATO and EU member.
Instead, what we have is a timorous strategy of half-steps. And half-steps, as we should have long ago learned, are merely a repudiation of strategy and a recipe for defeat.
Stephen Blank Foreign is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
