Hawks Set Ukraine Up to Fail

Robert Kagan asks what he must think is a very clever question:

Today, it is the Ukrainians who are being urged to abandon the romantic path of hopeless resistance and pursue the heroic path of realism. But if they do, what is to stop Russia from taking the rest of Ukraine whenever it is ready?

Kagan’s comparison with Czechoslovakia and Munich is misleading and worthless as it always is. If an analyst falls back on a Munich comparison when talking about a contemporary issue, it is a safe bet that he has little of value to add to the debate. It is even more likely that he has an ideological hostility to negotiating with adversaries. Invoking Munich is typically a way of trying to divert the audience’s attention away from the weakness of the hawkish argument. Kagan’s advice on diplomacy is almost always the same: he is against it and doesn’t think it is worth doing. He is wrong about this, just as he has been about practically every important foreign policy question of the last twenty-five years.

Supporters of a diplomatic settlement are not calling for Ukraine to give up on resistance, but to acknowledge that they aren’t going to retake all the territories that they have lost. Russia is also not going to be able to achieve its maximalist goals, and it will have to settle for far less. A negotiated agreement between Ukraine and Russia is the best available way to end the war, but it will be impossible to know what kind of compromise the two governments are willing to reach if there is no attempt made to negotiate.

What is to stop Russia from taking the rest of Ukraine later? Well, the Ukrainians might have a few things to say about that, and they have managed to keep most of their country in their own hands despite significant Russian advantages. Russia has struggled mightily to take less than a third of the country, so why would anyone believe that it is going to become some unstoppable juggernaut later on? An armistice would also buy Ukraine time and space to begin to recover.

Russian forces have taken heavy casualties over the last two and a half years. Estimates vary, but the losses are in the hundreds of thousands. All that Russia has to show for this extraordinary butcher’s bill are some limited territorial gains of little value. The Russian leadership might very well decide that the cost of the war has been high enough that reaching a negotiated settlement is the better alternative.

The delusional hawks that used to talk about the “inevitability” of Ukrainian victory would have Ukraine keep fighting indefinitely when they are struggling to hold what they still have. Ukraine is being slowly ground down in a war of attrition that it cannot afford to fight. Russian forces have been steadily gaining ground in the east, and they have begun to retake territory that Ukraine had seized during the Kursk operation.

When Ukrainian forces were advancing, hawks dismissed diplomacy as premature. Then when the war settled into a stalemate, they insisted that Ukraine couldn’t talk yet because they needed to negotiate from a position of strength. Now that Ukrainian forces are slowly being forced back, they say that negotiations are nothing more than appeasement. Somehow it is never the right time to negotiate. That has meant that Ukraine forfeited its earlier, stronger position in the mistaken belief that its position would only get stronger over time. Failing to pursue a negotiated settlement will be ruinous for Ukraine as its position continues to weaken.

Kagan ends with this passive-aggressive line: “Americans need to decide soon whether they are prepared to let Ukraine lose.” If Ukraine is able to reach the end of this war with the vast majority of its territory under its own control and a durable armistice, that won’t be a loss. Refusing to negotiate on the long-shot chance that the Russian military “breaks” first is a good way to ensure that Ukraine winds up with a much worse settlement that leaves a lot more of its territory under Russian control.

Daniel Larison is a Ph.D. in History from The University of Chicago Contributor, Responsible Statecraft