Why America Changed Its War Aims in Ukraine By Charles Lipson –
Slowly, slowly, the United States has expanded its war aims in Ukraine and significantly altered its pipeline of military supplies. Those two changes are mutually reinforcing. The U.S. is finally sending Ukraine the heavy weapons it needs because the Biden administration has finally decided it actually wants Ukraine to win and the Russian army to suffer losses so drastic it will not threaten other Western countries.
Highlighting these changes is not meant to downplay the support America has already given Ukraine. Biden’s team has done a lot. Not nearly as much as Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted, but a lot. Biden and his administration forged a coalition of NATO partners, provided Ukraine real-time intelligence about Russian forces, and shipped huge quantities of light weapons and ammunition. Those supplies were critical in protecting Kyiv.
Still, the U.S. and its NATO partners could have done much more. They did too little to deter an invasion when they could have prepared for it by training and equipping Ukrainian forces on NATO-standard equipment. As the invasion loomed, they delayed sending military equipment because the CIA predicted that Russia would win quickly and capture those supplies. After Ukraine fended off the Russian attack on Kyiv, the U.S. rejected Zelenskyy’s urgent requests for heavy weapons, including artillery, long-range drones, cruise missiles, planes, and anti-aircraft batteries. (It is still wisely refusing to insert Western troops and airpower into combat, fearing that could provoke a wider conflict with Russia.) Nor had the U.S. endorsed Ukraine’s principal war aim: to defeat Russia and recover as much territory as possible. All that changed over the past week. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin went even further. In a dramatic announcement, he said the U.S. wanted to weaken Russia.
Biden was reluctant to embrace these larger aims for two sound reasons: prudence and coalition-building. The prudential calculation is that Russia wields nuclear weapons and, unlike NATO, has a combat doctrine that includes their battlefield use. Second, Biden wanted to confront Russia with a united front of NATO partners, far different from George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Forging that coalition was difficult because many of these partners rely on Russian energy, conduct a lot of bilateral commerce, and, until March, pursued conciliatory foreign policies.
Overcoming these obstacles is what makes Biden’s multilateral success so noteworthy. That success has three consequences. It will increase Ukraine’s military sources, deny Putin his aim of fracturing NATO, and allow Biden to differentiate his alliance policies from the unilateralism of Donald Trump and George W. Bush.
Why this change in U.S. policy? Why this new commitment to Ukrainian victory? The primary drivers are the following:
- The likelihood that the battle for eastern Ukraine will be decisive and will require heavy weapons.
- Fear that a victorious Russia would not stop at Ukraine’s borders.
- Horror at Russia’s deliberate murder of vast numbers of Ukrainian civilians.
For two months now, Russia’s wanton killing and destruction has been captured by cell phones, cameras, drones, and satellites and then broadcast to Western audiences. The reaction can be summed up in a single word: revulsion. The scale and visibility of these attacks have made it far easier to form an anti-Russian coalition and to send Ukraine the heavy weapons it needs. Those weapons are late in coming, but they are finally arriving.
America’s slow recognition of a major security threat is hardly unique to the Biden administration. It is a recurrent pattern in U.S. foreign policy. For all the criticism of America’s “preemptive” wars or imperial overreach in places like Vietnam, the U.S. also has an opposing tradition of reticence, withdrawal, and isolation. That is how America reacted – or, rather, failed to react – to Europe’s rampant fascism in the late 1930s. The U.S. did nothing as the Nazis seized territory and then launched full-scale war, first against Poland and then against France, Britain, and Russia. Nor did America seriously challenge Imperial Japan in the 1930s as its war machine gobbled up territory on the Asian mainland. The vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean would keep us safe, or so we thought.
Even after Pearl Harbor, there was little American appetite for entering the European theater of the war, a reluctance made moot when Hitler declared war on the United States. By then, the war in Europe had been killing millions and destroying countries for over two years, the Soviet Army was locked in a life-and-death battle with the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, and Japan had already occupied Korea, Manchuria, and the Chinese coast.
After the war, the U.S. was slow to recognize the Soviet threat. Our erstwhile ally had, unexpectedly, become our greatest enemy. America’s response was tardy for several reasons: geographic distance, misplaced hopes for cooperation, and domestic pressures to “return home” and demobilize. The U.S. sent almost all its soldiers and sailors home within 18 months, ended its wartime intelligence service, and waited two years before announcing the Marshall Plan to deal with Western Europe’s dire poverty and growing communist parties. It didn’t form NATO until 1949, well after the Soviet Union had solidified its control of Eastern Europe. It built so few armaments in those years that it fought the Korean War (1950-53) with leftover equipment from WWII.
This slow reaction to emerging threats is grounded in America’s sense that it is basically safe, that the world is seldom very threatening, at least to America, and that most conflicts are far distant from our shores and our concerns. This deep-seated, romantic, and optimistic view is not an excuse for serious policy mistakes, but it does help us understand them.
Those mistakes have piled up in recent years. They include the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan; President Trump’s inward-looking nationalism and scorn for alliances; Barack Obama’s decision to gut the defense budget, his failure to enforce his own “red line” in Syria, and his mocking the very idea, expressed by challenger Mitt Romney, that Russia posed any real threat; George W. Bush’s misplaced confidence that Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators and that they wanted a democracy like ours; and Bill Clinton’s now-dashed hope that expanding NATO membership wouldn’t challenge Russia, and that welcoming China into the World Trade Organization would lead the communist regime to liberalize its governance and perhaps democratize as the country grew wealthier.
Why recall those mistakes? To learn from them. The war in Ukraine should teach us the hard lesson that Putin’s Russia will use military force and economic coercion to overturn the post-Soviet order in Europe. Likewise, China is determined to reorder Asia’s security at its neighbors’ expense and play by its own rules in the world economy. Iran has exploited America’s exhaustion and Saudi Arabia’s weakness to extend its regional domination and pursue nuclear weapons.
America needs to confront these threats for its own security, without overreaching or making unsustainable commitments. That means increasing our defense budget and backing allies in Eastern Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East. It means confronting our comfortable assumption that, as Americans, we are immune from foreign threats because they are so distant, and we are so big, rich, and powerful. The world’s most malevolent actors are determined to show us just how wrong that assumption is.
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