We want Ukraine to win. But at what cost?

With the prospect of spending nearly $50 billion on this war in FY22, and in all likelihood spending far more than that on Ukraine in 2023, US taxpayers – the folks who really do pay for it – are probably going to start asking: “Is that the only cost? What do we get out of all this?”

Most of the world does not like Vladimir Putin or his regime. But countries don’t need to be liked; as Charles De Gaulle noted, countries don’t have friends, only interests.

President Zelenskyy is charismatic and has done a superb job of getting Europe, the US, and many other countries behind Ukraine. But we should understand that Zelenskyy’s concerns are centered on Ukraine. President Zelenskyy is not concerned with US policy goals except in as much as they benefit Ukraine. And that’s precisely as it should be. If he were willing to sacrifice some of Ukraine’s goals to suit the United States he would no longer be the leader of whom Ukrainians are so proud.

And the same needs to be said of the US leadership.

There has a been talk lately about the Russia – Ukraine war actually being a proxy war in which the US is manipulating Ukraine for its own purposes. The argument is that the US has taken Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to destroy Russia as a great power. Some even go so far as to suggest that the US has been machining this situation since 2013, manipulating Ukraine into a scenario in which Russia would attack Ukraine so we could bleed Russia out and destroy it. Note that if that second part were true, then the DOD would hardly have expected Russia to seize Kiev in only a few days.

But it’s possible that there are folks in the West Wing of the White House, in the State Department, and in DOD, who’ve come to see in this war the opportunity to break Putin’s regime and break Russia and reset the international balance of power with Russia no longer a major power. And doing it by using Ukraine to do the heavy lifting, Ukraine as our proxy. If so, this is a dangerous and ill-formed idea.

It’s dangerous for a host of reasons: the first and most obvious is that Russia has 4,800 nuclear weapons. It’s surprising at how blithely some analysts are willing to ignore that fact, forcefully asserting that Russia will not use these nuclear weapons.

The second reason is just a bit more complex but may be more dangerous than anything other than an unlimited nuclear exchange: the unintended consequences, 2nd and 3rd order effects, of disrupting international food shipments and all the other related issues, disruptions in everything from cooking oils to fertilizers to micro-chip production. The potential 2nd and 3rd order effects are tremendous: global scale food, health and nutritional impacts, the possibility of food riots in various countries, and the political instability that would surely follow.

A third issue is the shift in power that might, depending on the circumstances, actually leave China benefitting substantially in relative balance of power.

Fourth is the notion that Ukrainians, who are doing the fighting and killing and dying, are going to fight and die for something other than Ukraine, for people other than Ukrainians.

We might ask: Aren’t we willing to fight and die for Ukraine? After all, they’re fighting for their freedom. But so are the Rohingya. And the Tigrayans. Where does this end?

To restate the obvious: Ukraine is not part of NATO. Nor is Ukraine an ally of the US. True, the US did agree, under the framework of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty. So did Russia and England. Then, when we should have done something – when Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, we chose to do nothing.

That is horribly confusing, isn’t it? So where are we today?

Perhaps the US is coldly practicing realpolitik and will support Ukraine as long as events support clear, well defined US national interests, US interests that include ending this war quickly so as to preclude all the dire 2nd and 3rd order effects of this war.

Or, perhaps some denizens of Inside the Beltway war games, loosely reasoning that “proxy Ukraine” sounds good, have found a war they think they can wage from afar.

But, having spent $50 billion on Ukraine in FY22, is there any likelihood that the US will cooly and rationally evaluate our presence in Ukraine any time in the next several years? Or is it more likely that we will press on, for any number of years, jumping from one goal to the next, even if the 2nd and 3rd order effects tip the world into crisis after crisis, perhaps even into a greater war?

Ukraine will fight for Ukrainian interests – as they should, not US interests. As long as those interests are aligned, great. But when – and it is when, not if, those interests start to diverge, what is our plan? Can anyone in the White House or the Pentagon clearly define US interests so that they could identify when our interests are no longer being served by the course of the war?

We can, and should, want Ukraine to win this war. But first, last and always, US actions must serve US interests first
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