The debate over U.S. policy toward Ukraine is menaced by a “war or ignore” binary. Unless corrected, it risks not only hampering the West’s response to Russian aggression but also hardening into an inward-looking, disengaged posture in future crises.
The increasingly common opinion holds that any hostility toward Vladimir Putin is a warlike action, and that any preparation for conflict chooses guns over butter, that is, comes at the cost of the needs of everyday Americans. At the center of these concerns is the idea that U.S. interests are in conflict with the interests of our allies.
That is a mistake.
In the first half of the 20th century, the United States came to Europe’s rescue twice. It was not out of lofty, altruistic internationalism or commitment to liberal values. Rather, it was out of recognition that having a single, hostile power dominate the Eurasian landmass ran against America’s national interest.
After the wars, the U.S. helped rebuild Europe and set up the “rules-based order” under which the continent would thrive. Thanks to that order, Europe’s democracies are more affluent. A responsible U.S. administration should actively encourage them to step up and shoulder more of the burden of maintaining that system. But retrenchment, much less a retrenchment undertaken in a moment of crisis and amid strategic and economic competition from China, is emphatically not the answer. If anything, the entire point of stronger European defense capabilities and of American investment in the Indo-Pacific is to make the West and America collectively stronger and more influential.
No conflict exists between the material prosperity of working classes at home and an outward-looking and active foreign policy. The opposite is true: American companies and their workers need an open and predictable global trade and investment environment. At a time of heightened concerns over Chinese trade practices and intellectual theft, the existence of large and prosperous marketplaces in like-minded places (think the European Union’s single market) makes it only easier to “allyshore” vulnerable production chains and to give businesses opportunities to grow, even as they seek to become less dependent on China.
Moreover, the entire point of American-led alliances and tripwires is not to expose our nation to needless conflicts in faraway lands. It is to prevent such conflicts from emerging in the first place, thus saving trouble later. From South Korea and Japan to the “new” members of NATO, that policy has been, on balance, extraordinarily successful.
Which brings us to Ukraine. While NATO’s deterrence in Poland and the Baltic states remains strong, the main reason for the current Russian revanchism against Ukraine is precisely the absence of an effective tripwire. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan only reinforced the Kremlin’s view of the West as unsteady and weak.
Vladimir Putin’s goals, meanwhile, have been consistent and crystal clear: to seize any opportunity to reverse some of the basic norms that have been successfully upheld in Europe in recent decades. Most important among those is the principle that national borders cannot be redrawn by force, as well as the idea of self-determination of sovereign nations, without their stronger neighbors holding a veto power over, say, their foreign policy decisions.
Forcing Ukraine into compliance with the Minsk agreements by federalizing its east while the government in Kyiv has no control over its territory would give Moscow decisive influence over the country’s politics, turning it into a Russian dependency.
No one, not even the Ukrainian leadership, is arguing that NATO troops should be defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity against a possible Russian invasion. The prospect of Ukraine’s NATO membership, too, is a distant one, for understandable reasons. But that does not mean that Americans should be indifferent to the country’s fate or that the administration ought to acquiesce to even an inch of Putin’s demands. A destabilized Ukraine, subject to constant subversion by Moscow, spells trouble for its immediate neighbors — our allies. An explicit “no” to possible NATO enlargement in the east would give Moscow an unprecedented degree of power over the alliance itself. External, unfriendly powers don’t get to decide who joins an alliance set up as a bulwark of defense against those powers. It would make a mockery of American credibility around the world.
To its credit, the Biden administration now appears to understand the gravity of the Ukraine crisis. Yet, more needs to be done to raise the cost of an incursion, large or small, to the Kremlin. While the Ukrainian military is in a much better state than in 2014, it would surely benefit from more lethal aid and U.S.- and Western-led training (some of which is already taking place).
Simultaneously, the West must commit to crippling economic sanctions in the case of further Russian escalation, even if those are going to have adverse consequences for European economies. Again, the Biden administration has made meaningful strides, but it must be more consistent — especially regarding the possibility of cutting Russia off from SWIFT, the global bank settlement system, as well as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
That is not saber-rattling. That is the leadership role the United States has traditionally played and that many Europeans, particularly in the east and the north, sincerely desire the United States to continue to play. Of course, Germany is the weakest link in these deliberations. Due to the consensual nature of the country’s political system and the new coalition government, getting Berlin on board is a slow and oftentimes frustrating process. But as the 2014 EU sanctions against Russia show, once consensus is reached in German politics, it tends to be durable.
Make no mistake, there is no silent American majority that wants the United States to just pull the rug from under Europeans’ feet in the middle of a crisis. As my colleague Marc Thiessen notes, common-sense policies to support Ukraine and deter Putin easily command the support of most Americans — 63%, for example, support crippling sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.
None of that detracts from the need for Europeans to do more, including to play a more visible role within NATO to help Ukraine succeed with its domestic reforms. Yet, there are more and less intelligent ways to incentivize them to do so. To undercut Ukraine and our European allies at a critical moment, as many self-styled “realists” and proponents of retrenchment appear eager to do, is the worst of them all.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.
