https://www.frontpagemag.com/ukraine-only-bad-and-worse-choices/
The war in Ukraine has seemingly devolved into a vicious stalemate. Ukrainian counter-attacks have pushed Russia back, but a definitive ejection of Russia from all its territorial gains at this point doesn’t seem likely. Commentary has settled on two choices for resolving the crisis: a diplomatic resolution that requires Ukraine to sacrifice territory; or a larger Ukrainian offensive to push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders, supported by more aid and materiel from NATO countries, which in practice really means the U.S. Each choice is fraught with difficulty and danger.
This predicament of only bad and worse choices is one endemic to foreign policy, as military violence always exacts the price of “exorbitant risk,” as Henry Kissinger put it, of unforeseen and costly consequences. In the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, that risk includes the possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons, and triggering a wider nuclear engagement that could escalate into an apocalypse.
On the other hand, allowing Russia to keep territories acquired by force creates the moral hazard of endangering global supplies of energy, and encouraging Russia and other aggressive irredentist and revanchist powers like China and Iran to make the same wager that the West does not have morale or even resources to punish their aggression.
The difficult solution for avoiding such dilemmas is to anticipate and forcefully deter an enemy’s ambitions, and all the means he has for realizing them, before they become kinetic. Yet the West for a century has done a poor job at such long-range planning and instituting preemptive policies. Too often we have been like Demosthenes’ Athenians in the early 4th century B.C., who failed to preempt King Phillip II of Macedon’s advance against the southern Greek politically free city-states. Demosthenes chastised the Athenians, saying they “carry on the war with Phillip, exactly as a barbarian boxes . . . when struck, [he] always clutches the place; hit him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary.”
