President
Biden began his State of the Union speech with
an impassioned warning that
failing to pass his $61 billion dollar weapons
package for Ukraine “will put Ukraine at risk,
Europe at risk, the free world at risk.” But
even if the president’s request were suddenly
passed, it would only prolong, and dangerously
escalate, the brutal war that is destroying
Ukraine.
The
assumption of the U.S. political elite that
Biden had a viable plan to defeat Russia and
restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders has proven
to be one more triumphalist American dream
that has turned into a nightmare. Ukraine has
joined North Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Yemen,
and now Gaza, as another shattered monument to
America’s
military
madness.
This
could have been one of the shortest wars in
history, if President Biden had just supported
a peace and neutrality agreement negotiated in
Turkey in March and April 2022 that already
had champagne
corks popping
in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian negotiator
Oleksiy Arestovych. Instead, the U.S. and NATO
chose to prolong and escalate the war as a
means to try to defeat and weaken Russia.
Two
days before Biden’s State of the Union speech,
Secretary of State Blinken announced the early
retirement of Acting Deputy Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland, one of the officials most
responsible for a decade of disastrous U.S.
policy toward Ukraine.
Two
weeks before the announcement of Nuland’s
retirement at the age of 62, she acknowledged
in a talk at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) that the war in
Ukraine had degenerated into a war of
attrition that she compared to the First World
War, and she admitted that
the Biden administration had no Plan B for
Ukraine if Congress doesn’t cough up $61
billion for more weapons.
We
don’t know whether Nuland was forced out, or
perhaps quit in protest over a policy that she
fought for and lost. Either way, her ride into
the sunset opens the door for others to
fashion a badly needed Plan B for Ukraine.
The
imperative must be to chart a path back from
this hopeless but ever-escalating war of
attrition to the negotiating table that the
U.S. and Britain upended in April 2022 - or at
least to new negotiations on the basis that
President Zelenskyy defined on
March 27, 2022, when he told his people, “Our
goal is obvious: peace and the restoration of
normal life in our native state as soon as
possible.”
Instead,
on February 26, in a very worrying sign of
where NATO’s current policy is leading, French
President Emmanuel Macron revealed that
European leaders meeting in Paris discussed
sending larger numbers of Western ground
troops to Ukraine.
Macron
pointed out that NATO members have steadily
increased their support to levels unthinkable
when the war began. He highlighted the example
of Germany, which offered Ukraine only helmets
and sleeping bags at the outset of the
conflict and is now saying Ukraine needs more
missiles and tanks. “The people that said
“never ever” today were the same ones who said
never ever planes, never ever long-range
missiles, never ever trucks. They said all
that two years ago,” Macron recalled.
“We have to be humble and realize that we
(have) always been six to eight months late.”
Macron
implied that, as the war escalates, NATO
countries may eventually have to deploy their
own forces to Ukraine, and he argued that they
should do so sooner rather than later if they
want to recover the initiative in the
war.
The
mere suggestion of Western troops fighting in
Ukraine elicited an outcry both within
France–from extreme right National Rally to
leftist La France Insoumise–and from other
NATO countries. German Chancellor Olaf
Scholz insisted that
participants in the meeting were “unanimous”
in their opposition to deploying troops.
Russian officials warned that
such a step would mean war between Russia and
NATO.
But
as Poland’s president and prime minister
headed to Washington for a White House meeting
on February 12, Polish Foreign Minister Radek
Sikorski told
the Polish parliament that sending NATO troops
into Ukraine “is not unthinkable.”
Macron’s
intention may have been precisely to bring
this debate out into the open and put an end
to the secrecy surrounding the undeclared
policy of gradual escalation toward full-scale
war with Russia that the West has pursued for
two years.
Macron
failed to mention publicly that, under current
policy, NATO forces are already deeply
involved in the war. In
his State of the Union speech, Biden insisted
that “there are no American soldiers at war in
Ukraine.”
However,
the trove of Pentagon documents leaked
in March 2023 included an assessment that
there were already at least 97 NATO special
forces troops operating in Ukraine, including
50 British, 14 Americans and 15 French.
Admiral John Kirby, the National Security
Council spokesman, has also acknowledged a
“small U.S. military presence” based in the
U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to try to keep track of
thousands of tons of U.S. weapons as they
arrive in Ukraine.
But
many more U.S. forces, whether inside or
outside Ukraine, are involved in planning
Ukrainian military operations;
providing satellite intelligence; and play essential roles
in the targeting of U.S. weapons. A Ukrainian
official told the Washington
Post that Ukrainian forces hardly ever
fire HIMARS rockets without precise targeting
data provided by U.S. forces in Europe.
All
these U.S. and NATO forces are most definitely
“at war in Ukraine.” To be at war in a country
with only small numbers of “boots on the
ground” has been a hallmark of 21st Century
U.S. war-making, as any Navy pilot on an
aircraft-carrier or drone operator in Nevada
can attest. It is precisely this doctrine of
“limited” and proxy war that is at risk of
spinning out of control in Ukraine, unleashing
the World War III that President Biden has vowed
to avoid.
The
United States and NATO have tried to keep the
escalation of the war under control by
deliberate, incremental escalation of the
types of weapons they provide and cautious,
covert expansion of their own involvement.
This has been compared to “boiling
a frog,”
turning up the heat gradually to avoid any
sudden move that might cross a Russian “red
line” and trigger a full-scale
war between
NATO and Russia. But as NATO Secretary General
Jens Stoltenberg warned in December 2022, “If
things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.”
We
have long been puzzled by these glaring
contradictions at the heart of U.S. and NATO
policy. On one hand, we believe President
Biden when he says he does not want to
start World
War III.
On the other hand, that is what his policy of
incremental escalation is inexorably leading
towards.
U.S.
preparations for war with Russia are already
at odds with the existential imperative of
containing the conflict. In November 2022, the
Reed-Inhofe Amendment to the FY2023 National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) invoked wartime
emergency powers to authorize an extraordinary
shopping-list of weapons like the ones sent to
Ukraine, and approved billion-dollar,
multi-year no-bid contracts with weapons
manufacturers to buy 10 to 20 times the
quantities of weapons that the United States
had actually shipped to Ukraine.
Retired
Marine Colonel
Mark Cancian,
the former chief of the Force Structure and
Investment Division in the Office of
Management and Budget, explained, “This isn’t
replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s
building stockpiles for a major ground war
[with Russia] in the future.”
So
the United States is preparing to fight a
major ground war with Russia, but the weapons
to fight that war will take years to produce,
and, with or without them, that could quickly
escalate into a nuclear
war.
Nuland’s early retirement could be the result
of Biden and his foreign policy team finally
starting to come to grips with the existential
dangers of the aggressive policies she
championed.
Meanwhile,
Russia’s escalation from its original limited
“Special Military Operation” to its current commitment of
7% of its GDP to the war and weapons
production has outpaced the West’s
escalations, not just in weapons production
but in manpower and actual military
capability.
One
could say that Russia is winning the war, but
that depends what its real war goals are.
There is a yawning gulf between the rhetoric
from Biden and other Western leaders about
Russian ambitions to invade other countries in
Europe and what Russia was ready to settle for
at the talks in Turkey in 2022, when it agreed
to withdraw to its pre-war positions in return
for a simple commitment to Ukrainian
neutrality.
Despite
Ukraine’s extremely weak position after its
failed 2023 offensive and its costly defense
and loss of Avdiivka, Russian forces are not
racing toward Kyiv, or even Kharkiv, Odesa or
the natural boundary of the Dnipro
River.
Reuters
Moscow Bureau reported that
Russia spent months trying to open new
negotiations with the United States in late
2023, but that, in January 2024, National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slammed that
door shut with a flat refusal to negotiate
over Ukraine.
The
only way to find out what Russia really wants,
or what it will settle for, is to return to
the negotiating table. All sides have
demonized each other and staked out maximalist
positions, but that is what nations at war do
in order to justify the sacrifices they demand
of their people and their rejection of
diplomatic alternatives.
Serious
diplomatic negotiations are now
essential
to get down to the nitty-gritty
of
what it will take to bring peace to
Ukraine.
We are sure there are wiser
heads
within the U.S., French and other
NATO
governments who are saying this
too,
behind closed doors, and that may
be
precisely why Nuland is out and why
Macron
is talking so openly about where
the
current policy is heading. We
fervently
hope that is the case, and that
Biden’s
Plan B will lead back to the
negotiating
table, and then forward to
peace
in Ukraine.
