The Ukraine Policy Dilemma

A couple of recent articles at Real Clear Politics display the muddle of conventional thinking about Ukraine. In Compact, which describes itself as "an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good", with Ivy Leaguers on its masthead, we find Reality Is Winning the Ukraine Narrative War:

While the Russian and Ukrainian militaries have been clashing violently on the bloody battlefields of Eastern Europe, a parallel war has long been underway in the media sphere, where armies of information warriors have battled to shape the ways Western publics think about the conflict.

The dominant army in this information war has comprised most Western governments and leading media organs, abetted by a formidable array of public relations firms working in partnership with the Ukrainian government. It has insisted that the Ukraine war is best understood as a modern-day variation of Nazi Germany’s World War II aggression, with Putin reprising the Hitlerian role of revanchist dictator seeking to grab land and dominate Europe. Unless he is stopped through resolute military force, they argue, his armies will move from Ukraine to the Baltic states, Poland, and beyond.

Arrayed against this army has been a loose band of realist experts and anti-establishment skeptics who contend that the war’s origins more closely resemble those of World War I. To varying degrees, they acknowledge that Russia’s paternalistic attitudes towards Ukraine have played a significant role in Moscow’s motivations, but they argue that the invasion is fundamentally the product of what international relations theorists call a “security dilemma.” Steps by NATO to bolster the security of its members and aspirants were perceived as threatening by Moscow. Aggressive efforts by Russia to block these moves threatened the West, producing a spiral of action and reaction that continued to escalate absent diplomatic efforts to arrest it.

This is something of a straw man good guy-bad guy narrative, whereby anti-establishment skeptics battle the evil establishment. The problem is that right now, the establishment -- for instance Foreign Affairs -- seems to be on the side of the skeptics, at least as far as NATO is concerned:

At last week’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels, newly minted U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the position of the U.S. government was that Ukraine will not join NATO. Although greeted with horror by some in Washington and in European capitals, Hegseth’s remarks were in fact more a public statement of reality than a genuine change in policy. This position had been telegraphed throughout the Trump campaign and transition, and even the Biden administration had been skeptical of Ukrainian membership any time soon. The risks of admitting Ukraine to the alliance—reflected in widespread opposition to it in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere—have long made this reality perfectly clear to all.

. . . With the Trump administration insisting that no U.S. troops be sent to Ukraine, the conversation in European capitals is increasingly focused on whether and how European states can provide “security guarantees” through their own deployments.

Yet there are reasons to doubt whether a European guarantee to provide troops is feasible, especially without substantial U.S. involvement.

. . . Kyiv itself has long been insistent that the only way to resolve this concern is to provide Ukraine with NATO membership as part of an eventual peace deal. This is ideal from Kyiv’s point of view because it offloads the problem of preventing a future war to the United States. It would also be beneficial for European states—“cost effective,” as one EU leader recently put it—as it would rely less on spending, arms, or military deployments and more on the paper guarantee provided by NATO’s Article 5.

But NATO membership for Ukraine remains unlikely in the long term and implausible in the short term.

The piece, after surmising that a peacekeeping force would require from 50,000 to 200,000 troops, which the US refuses to provide and Europe is unable to, concludes that Ukraine should guarantee its own security. But isn't this the unworkable situation we have now? Well, we'll just strengthen and rebuild Ukraine's military!

A rebuilt and adequately supplied Ukrainian military would be a formidable deterrent to Moscow, and Western support will be critical to this military rebuilding. Rather than paper promises of NATO membership—or insufficient European troop deployments—what Ukraine needs is Western partners to provide arms and funding in the case of a future war, much as these states have done for the last three years. This could even be framed as a kind of security guarantee, in that it provides training and arms to Ukraine in peacetime and aid in a future war.

But how does this differ from current policy? The piece says flat out, the US and Europe will fund a new Ukraine military "much as these states have done for the last three years". I assume that now would involve magicallly cutting out the corruption that by Zelensky's own account siphoned off 50% of that aid. Curious about what sort of mind would devise such an imaginative solution, I discovered the author, Emma Ashford,

is a Senior Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center. She works on a variety of issues related to the future of U.S foreign policy, international security, and the politics of global energy markets.

. . . Prior to joining the Stimson Center, Ashford was a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which focused on challenging the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy. She was also a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, where she worked on a variety of issues including the US-Saudi relationship, sanctions policy, and US policy towards Russia, and US foreign policy and grand strategy more broadly.

How on earth does this "challenge" the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy if it envisions keeping Ukraine out of NATO -- the policy of the US at least since Dubya -- and sending hundreds of billions down a continuing black hole of military aid? I think Sundance at Conservative Treehousehas a better grasp of the situation:

Elements outside our central government, likely CIA clandestine operators in coordination with GCHQ in U.K, are the leading operators on what they frame as Ukraine military operations.

. . . Sooner or later, something is bound to happen, because the desperation to retain control amid those within the IC consortium is palpable and visible. They fear President Trump and President Putin forming a geopolitical alliance and they are reacting out of fear for diminished influence.

This presents a problem for our nation. The background here is very concerning. This is why I said, “at a certain moment, likely as a part of a media question, someone is going to ask President Trump why a certain action was taken by his administration in the Ukraine conflict. President Trump will respond by saying, “we didn’t do that.” The puzzled media will repeat the question. President Trump will again say, no one in my administration did that. . . And suddenly, things will reveal.”

Biden was never in control of the Ukraine operation. This is something that started within the U.S. State Department (CIA division) long before Biden was installed. President Trump is now having to deal with a geopolitical consequence that comes from this collaborative IC operation that is obviously no longer exclusive to the USA. Other intelligence agencies are now too far enmeshed to safely retreat.

It makes sense for President Trump to start this conversation by pointing out the Zelenskyy factor within it. It was a logical prediction to look at the scope of the problem and see Zelenskyy as the Gordion knot that needs to be cut.

Trump's currentely expressed view, which I think is the only genuinely realistic one, is that Ukraine has no credible path forward:

“I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

“So, I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you,” Trump added. “He makes it very hard to make deals.”

Trump suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine. He claimed Putin did not necessarily have to negotiate a ceasefire, because if he wanted, he’d get “the whole country.”

It looks like Trump's next steps are clear:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has few — if any — advocates in President Trump’s inner circle as the pair’s souring relationship threatens to tank Kyiv’s standing in peace talks with Russia.

. . . While the deterioration between Washington and Kyiv appears sudden, one source familiar with White House discussions told The Post Thursday: “It’s nothing new to me.

. . . The “real question is, has anyone told [Trump] they really, really like him?” the source said of the Ukrainian president.

A second source close to Trump concurred with the assessment and suggested that “the best case for [Zelensky] and the world is that he leaves to France immediately.”

I suspect this will happen soon. The alternative to the feckless dither we see on various sides of the argument is to recognize that the Ukraine war is the creation of unelected intelligence and quasi-diplomatic entities that invented the idea of a reified "Ukraine" that could defend itself without exorbitantly expensive aid that the West is no longer in a position to supply, especially when it was always assumed that the US would provide the great bulk of it.

But what about the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, or the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which fund people like Emma Ashford and are part of the machinery that brought us the Ukraine war in the first place? Aren't they actually also part of Musk's grift machine?