No one wants to hear about Ukraine again, but we need to talk about Ukraine again. The Republican debate the other week highlighted the problem. And the problem is simple. There are no good answers, but all the candidates are going to have to pick one anyway. This is one giant Slavic Schiff sandwich, and everybody’s got to take a bite.
But there is no point in muttering about how if Biden was not such an incompetent half-wit who had humiliated us in Afghanistan Putin would never have invaded, or observe that Putin never invaded when Trump was in charge. We are where we are, and the current situation is a mess. The Ukrainian offensive spearheaded by Western-trained and equipped units has not made the breakthroughs our generals hoped for. The Russians have done what Russians do, dig in. Their defenses are tough, and the Ukrainians are not skilled enough in combined arms operations to break through them. What you have, for now, is a bloody stalemate like the western front of World War I.
Yeah, this could go on for a long, long time, or worse, it could change rapidly. That’s my fear. Anyone who knows Russian military history knows the Russians get kicked around early in the war, fire their bad generals, train a new army, and then come back and win. That could happen here. True, Russia’s population is shrinking, but with a couple hundred million of them they have a nearly endless supply of cannon fodder. The Ukrainians don’t. In a stalemate, the Russians gather forces until they are ready to launch an overwhelming offensive at the time and place of their choosing. And there is no guarantee the Ukrainians can hold.
So, we have to do something. We have to adopt a strategy, and none of the options are good. Let me give you a course of action briefing as we would do for our general in the Army as part of our military decision-making process. There are four, and they all suck, but some are more sucky than others.
Course of Action One is do whatever it takes to get the Ukrainians to win the war outright, by which I mean driving the Russians out of the Ukrainian territory that they occupy. The advantage to this is that we would get an unequivocal win and humiliate Putin while showing Western strength to Xi and other uppity potentates. The disadvantages are that it would require an incredible investment of money and arms, and it’s not clear that normal Americans and Europeans are ready to empty their arms depots and fund an exponentially greater amount of aid than the massive amounts they’ve already provided. It could create a political backlash that scuttles the plan before it can be executed.
It will also take time to train the UKRs up, and during that time the Russians will be building up their own forces and improving their defenses. This course of action would also require a bunch of new Ukrainians to join up. It’s unclear whether they have enough bodies, so this option might require US and allied (maybe) intervention to pull off. That’s a whole other thing. Regardless, the bloodshed would be immense on both sides, and there is no guarantee of victory. If the Ukrainians lose massive gamble, they might lose the whole war. Alternatively, if the Ukrainians are winning, there’s no guarantee that Putin wouldn’t just drop a hot rock to stop the offensive. After all, that’s Russian doctrine. So, it’s risky. Very risky. Especially if it works.
Course of Action Two is the opposite – basically, just walk away. Wash our hands of the whole mess. The advantage is that if we abandon Ukraine, we’re done and the war ends fast. So does our endless funding of it. Ditching the UKRs also eliminates the risk of us going to war with Russia, at least in the short-term. Of course, the first disadvantage is that Putin wins. Aggression prevails, and Ukraine is enslaved. That’s bad.
But what’s worse is that capitulation announces that America is done as the world’s preeminent power. That’s a big deal. I’m as Jacksonian as the next guy, but guys like Vivek, who is too young to remember America before it was the sole superpower, do not recognize the costs that come with giving up the title. The rest of the world will look at us pumping up Ukraine and then turning tail and running because it got hard. Call it “Kabul 2: Bail on the Borscht.” This practically ensures that every enemy of America around the world is going to see us as feckless, which would be accurate. There is a price to abandoning Ukraine, like it or not. You pretty much guarantee another thug takes a swing at us. That means dead soldiers or maybe dead civilians. The world is a cellblock and you’re either a shot-caller or a punk.
Course of Action Three is to force a negotiation to resolve the dispute, since neither belligerent seems willing to compromise. The advantage is, at least to us, that it gets this war over with. It is certainly not in our interest to have this war dragging on and on. It is probably the second cheapest of the courses of action, and also avoids sucking our troops into a dumb new war. The big disadvantage is that Putin is going to end up being rewarded, to a limited extent, for his aggression. You’re not going to talk him into just leaving Ukraine, especially the ethnically Russian-dominated areas in the east and the strategically vital Crimea.
Putting that aside, to get them to settle we’re going to have to force the Ukrainians to give in, at least to some extent. Ukrainians, who I trained in Ukraine while I was in the Army, are not a giving-in kind of people. They are tough and stubborn. There is no guarantee we can just tell them to swallow a peace that removes a big piece of their country and gives it to Vlad. We might be in the position of telling Zelenskyy, “Hey, if you want to keep fighting, that’s fine, but we’re not giving you any more bullets.” That’s a bad look after our politicians have made this guy out to be a cross between Winston Churchill, Joan of Arc, and Bono.
The Fourth and final course of action is the least advantageous to us, and, therefore, naturally, the one our politicians have embraced so far – the meat grinder option. This is the course of action where we give the Ukrainians just enough ammunition and training to keep the killing going on indefinitely. The advantage is that Putin‘s not going to obtain all his objectives, at least not yet. But the real advantage is for the politicians, who get to put off the tough decision about a course of action that might actually end this catastrophe by simply passing the butchers bill to the young Ukrainians and Russians who die while we dither. Our politicians and celebrities fly into Kyiv and pose for photos, pretending to be doing something when they are really just refusing to do anything at all.
It is not clear how long this course of action is sustainable either. The Ukrainians are running out of Ukrainians. We are running out of ammunition. Politically, our citizens are on the verge of running out of patience. The American people see the disasters in our own cities and states and on our borders and it’s not clear how long they’re going to be willing to keep pumping dollars into the Crimean Cuisinart. At best, this stalemate devolves into the kind of static, cold war situation we’ve seen for the last 70 years on the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel. That’s not much of a best case. The worst case is the Russians build up their strength then crush the Ukrainians before we can spin up from giving the Ukrainians just enough to stay in the fight to giving them the massive aid they would need to beat off a gigantic offensive. This is a treading water strategy, and you can only tread for so long before you get exhausted and drown.
So Republicans, you’ve got to choose a course of action. Pick one. They’re all terrible. No one is seriously talking about Course of Action One, and the pols who seem to be trying to sound like they are, such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, seem to really be all in on Course of Action Four, which is not surprising because it is the worst possible option. Vivek is all in on the pull-out option – of course, he is probably too young to understand why you don’t just walk away. Ron DeSantis, who has been to war, knows better than to listen to the Humongous. It seems like he would prefer some sort of settlement, but he would also like to dump a lot more of the effort on the Europeans, which is fine with me. They have been parasites for eight decades and it’s about time they pick up their own check. Trump seems to be pushing a negotiated settlement, backed up by the threat of us backing off, though he’s not really explicit about it.
None of them are, and who can blame them? All of them got this giant steaming Scat Francisco sidewalk sausage of a foreign policy nightmare dumped in their path and none of them wants to wreck their Guccis by stepping in it. But leadership is about choices, and they’ve got to choose. It’s just that all their choices are terrible.
Thank you, Joe Biden.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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