By Ross Douthat
The first year of the war in Ukraine seemed to vindicate Russia hawks. The belief that Vladimir Putin was a careful chess player whose ambitions could be constrained through negotiation, the belief that Ukraine couldn’t plausibly defend itself against Moscow and therefore didn’t merit support from an already overstretched America — these ideas seemed to dissolve in the first months of war, with Putin gambling and rambling while Ukrainian arms threw his forces back.
The second year of war has been kinder to realists and doves. Russia, as in many wars before, seems stronger in a grinding conflict than it did in the initial thrusts. Putin’s regime proved resilient against the West’s economic weapons, and against internal opposition as well; the death in prison of Russia’s leading dissident, Alexei Navalny, looks like the latest example of the dictator’s ruthless settling of accounts. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian counteroffensive of spring and summer failed: A year ago there was still hope that a Russian retreat would turn into a rout, but since then stalemate has ruled the front.
The changed situation has created a division in the hawkish argument, visible as the U.S. Congress wrangles over further aid to Ukraine. On the one hand you still have rhetoric that seems to belong more to the first year of war, claiming that Putin is clearly losing the war (“This guy is on life support,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told his colleagues in the Senate debate), and that aid to Ukraine is a cheap, effective way to degrade and defeat an American rival without fighting the Russians ourselves.
On the other you have arguments that suggest that the tide is turning against Ukraine, that Putin is getting ever stronger (“Russia’s capacity to produce military equipment has increased tremendously,” Denmark’s defense minister warned recently), and that he’ll be ready to attack the Baltics or some other NATO country soon. The strange events this past week on Capitol Hill, in which Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, a Ukraine hawk, teased secret intelligence about Russian superweapons in space, felt like an attempt to boost this narrative — emphasizing Russia’s increasing strength as the reason to keep on sending money and weapons to Ukraine.
The problem with the first argument is that it doesn’t match the changing situation on the ground. The problem with the second argument is that it raises a big strategic question: If Russia has gotten only stronger since we started funding the Ukrainian war effort, doesn’t that suggest that we’ve ended up overstretched after all, just as critics warned?
I think there is a good case for continued aid to Ukraine that doesn’t rely on either exaggerating Ukrainian successes or hyping Russia’s military-industrial complex. But it’s a case that’s hard to make under the sweeping terms that have framed our support for Ukraine to date.
The legislation that passed the Senate includes, ostensibly as a concession to skeptics, a provision requiring the Biden administration to submit to Congress a detailed strategic plan explaining how the aid will “hasten Ukrainian victory.” But as Keith Gessen of The New Yorker puts it, mildly, at this point most military observers are “a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine.” It’s more likely that there simply is no plausible path to a full Ukrainian triumph — or at least not one that’s compatible with defending the United States’ other interests around the world.
We are not giving Ukraine money, in other words, because we see a likely future in which Russia can be pushed back to the prewar lines of control. Instead, the best reason to continue sending aid is to make it easier to negotiate an armistice on terms favorable to Ukraine’s survival and resilience — since any such terms will become less and less favorable if we’re seen as abandoning the Ukrainians in advance.
I hope and believe that this is what the White House, beneath its wartime rhetoric, is currently seeking: not outright victory but the best possible deal to end the war. And certainly there are reasons, if that’s your goal, that you wouldn’t want to say so openly; you’d want to present yourself as planning for victory even if you’re actually ready to negotiate.
But the Biden administration has a domestic audience as well as an international one, and it might be easier to convince domestic doubters — wavering House Republicans, especially — if the current aid package weren’t being presented as the clincher for a Russian defeat that isn’t actually in evidence, or the key to the sweeping victory that our prior investments have conspicuously failed to bring about.
These days that kind of promise — Triumph just around the corner! Victory waiting just beyond the next offensive! — evokes memories of Afghanistan and Vietnam, rather than confidence in U.S. strategic prowess. What’s needed instead is something much subtler: a public argument that doesn’t concede too much to Russian aggression, but concedes enough to military reality to convince Americans that they’re making an investment that will actually help bring the conflict to an end.