To Be or Not to Be

Ukraine and the Biden Legacy

“To be or not to be.”  President Zelens’kyi of Ukraine once told me that “everything is in Shakespeare.”  Early in the war he quoted that famous line from Hamlet to the British parliament.  It is certainly a propos right now. It applies, in different ways, to his administration and to that of Joe Biden.  Will Ukraine win and survive?  And will the Biden team assist and be remembered?

Ukrainians and Americans both want peace.  Indeed, no one can possibly want peace more than the Ukrainians.  For the past two weeks, Ukrainian leaders have tried to persuade American journalists and the Biden administration of how this can come about, tried to convey a simple strategic truth: Russia will make peace only when Putin believes that Russia is losing.  They are now presenting what they call a victory plan to try to get into that position.

This is realism.  Using the word “negotiations” in any other sense is misleading, since the Russians themselves have made clear, over and over, that their goal is the humiliation and the destruction of Ukraine as a first step towards a world order in which such actions are normal.  There is a thought which one hears outside of Ukraine to the effect that one can simply choose negotiations at any point without appropriately altering the power position.  This is not realism.  It is wishful thinking.

One cannot simply choose to negotiate with a power that openly seeks to bring about the end of your nation and state.  First you have to show that the attempt to destroy you will end in failure.  With some more help from the American side (reinforcing all of the very important prior help, also that from other allies), supplementing prior aid and of course support from European and other allies, Ukraine would have a good chance of doing this.

The question right now is whether that help will be forthcoming.  President Zelens’kyi is in the United States to make his case.  The Biden administration has a chance to use its last few months in power to take decisive action to bring an end to this war. 

This is its opportunity for a historical legacy in foreign policy.  Biden and his team will of course be remembered well by allies for their diplomacy and competence and in general for restoring a sense of normality and reliability.  This is no small thing.  Indeed, it is a tremendous achievement.  But Ukraine is the challenge that history offered.  It has not yet been met.

This has been a war of two timescales and two realities.  It is laudable and impressive that President Biden visited Kyiv in wartime, and senior American officials visit regularly.  Yet this war has been different than wars of the past in that far too few personal relationships have been developed.  There are too few Americans with meaningful experience in Ukraine during this war.  While the Ukrainians have fought the largest land war in Europe since 1945, holding back a Russian army believed in Washington in 2022 to be unstoppable, too few Americans have been physically present to observe how this was done (and to learn).  Whereas Ukrainians have been bombed, tortured, and executed in horrifying numbers by Russians, the American conversation is too often about professional reputations and hurt feelings inside the DC Beltway.

Although we have been on the right side of this war, we began from the wrong premise, and that had everything to do with the consensus errors.  The Biden administration was absolutely right to believe and share its own intelligence about Russia’s plan to invade Ukraine.  That courageous innovation helped to restore American credibility and created the basis for a coalition to help Ukraine when the invasion came.  That specific prediction, based upon concrete data, was however wedded to a general conviction, based on Russia expert consensus and implicit (and incorrect) assumptions about Russian power and Ukrainian weakness, that when Russia did invade it would defeat Ukraine in three days.

When the United States armed Ukraine then, it was for the partisan resistance that was supposed to follow the rapid Russian victory and the collapse of the Ukrainian state.  But Ukraine did of course resist as a state and as a society, and to great effect, giving Americans the chance that we have still, deep into the third year of the war, not quite taken.

When the Ukrainians used those weapons (and their own) to halt the initial Russian invasion in February and March 2022, we had an analytical problem that we have still not yet really solved.  Since our unquestioned assumption was that Ukraine would lose, we had trouble, and still do have trouble, thinking that Ukraine could win.  And until we get to that thought, we cannot get to peace.

Ukraine did have a plan to resist a Russian invasion, and applied it in February and March 2022.  That plan generally worked.  Ukrainians won the battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv, forcing the Russians to concentrate on the southeast.  In September 2022, Ukraine mounted a surprise counteroffensive, and took back much of Kharkiv region.  Later that year it took back meaningful territory in the south, including Kherson city.  That was the point when Ukraine had the best chance of winning the war.  Had the United States by then delivered weapons that it would later accede to deliver, Ukraine might well have won.

Elon Musk also took a hand in slowing the Ukrainian advance that autumn, choosing because of personal anxiety to cut Ukrainian units off from Starlink.  He was afraid that Ukrainian attacks on the Russian fleet in the Black Sea would end the world or something of the sort.  Ukraine did eventually carry out those naval attacks, and drove most of the Russian fleet from the Black Sea.  This had only good strategic consequences, and has allowed Ukrainian farmers to resume feeding hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia.  That Ukrainian naval victory has received far too little attention in the United States, for what I suspect are bad reasons.  It was not expected by most of our experts, and was achieved by Ukrainians using their own systems.

To be sure, the land war has been horribly costly.  Neither side has been able to make important gains since the end of 2022, despite one Ukrainian counter-offensive in summer 2023 and several Russian ones.  At the moment the Russians are progressing slowly, and at huge cost, in the Donbas region, whereas the Ukrainians have made a surprise breakthrough into Russian territory in the Kursk region.

Putin can, at least for a while yet, send his people to die with impunity (although as more and more urban men have to fight the clock begins to tick).  Russia has a large weapons industry that can copy Ukrainian innovations and then produce at scale (although sanctions work and can be tightened and enforced).  Russia holds territory in Ukraine that has now been throughly mined and fortified.  Ukraine cannot win simply by facing up to Russia in the trenches and taking punishment day after day in its cities.  It has to fight intelligently, as it has shown it can do, and receive the right kind of help from its friends, which is the open question right now.  And it has to be able to hit the Russian airfields and other sites from which the daily strikes on its own territory come.

Americans are hindered, in their evaluation of this war, by their own initial underestimation of Ukraine — since we thought it must immediately lose at the beginning, we still have trouble switching to the idea that it can and must win.  For a while, we seem to have the idea that the larger power or the imperial power or the nuclear power always wins wars: in fact, the historical record shows that they very often lose.  Russia (in various state formations) lost the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, its part of the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War, and the First Chechen War.

In what they are calling their victory plan, the Ukrainians are today making a very specific case, based upon the correct reading of the politics of war generally and of the Putin regime specifically: peace is possible when one political system or the other bends, and so those who want peace will have to choose a side and help with the bending.

Trump, for his part, understands this.  He has made clear that his side is Russia, and if elected he will use American power to exert pressure on Kyiv rather than Moscow, forcing a Ukrainian surrender.

Aside and apart from the vast suffering inside Ukraine that will follow, this would be a blow to world order and to American safety and prosperity from which we will not soon recover.  It would demonstrate that fighting for democracy is pointless, since no one will help you.  It will show that the international legal order means nothing, since violating borders, taking territory, and destroying states is permitted by the United States.  It will encourage Chinese aggression in the Pacific, which thus far Ukraine has been deterring by demonstrating that offensive operations bring costs.  It will make nuclear war more likely, because the lessons of Ukraine’s destruction will be that only nuclear weapons will deter a nuclear power like Russia, and so lead to nuclear proliferation.

It is worth remembering that the United States pressured Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons in 1994 — along with its long-range missiles.  Ukraine gave its missiles then to Russia, which was considered a safe partner.  Now Russia fires missiles of those types — quite likely some of those very missiles — at Ukraine.  Ukrainians understandably believe that this action on their part generated a moral obligation on the part of the United States to help during this war, not least since that is what the Budapest Memoranda of the time actually said.  The deeper issue, though, was nuclear proliferation.  At the time it was reasonable to believe that the United States was acting to slow it.  That has turned out to be a mistake.  That very same interest in slowing nuclear proliferation now militates for giving Ukraine the weapons it needs to defeat the nuclear bully that Russia has become.

Admitting mistakes is not exactly an American strong suit; nor is listening to others in times of stress.  The Russians understand our weaknesses perhaps better than we do ourselves, and their successes in this war are almost entirely a result of their successive victories in psychological warfare (again, something Americans will find hard to contemplate, let alone admit).  For Russians, national and individual psychology is an attack surface.  One American vulnerability is the need to be the center of attention at all times.  And so on every occasion Ukraine asks for something from the United States, as for example right now in the victory plan, Putin changes the subject to vague threats that might concern us, so that we can experience personal anxiety.  We then perform Hamlet in the bad sense, turning an urgent strategic moment into a soliloquy.

Where American leaders believe that they are managing escalation, Russians know that they are managing (our) anxiety.  This is what they do, and they do it well. They do it with fervent determination, because they believe in it, and they know that it is their one chance to win.

Americans also do many things well, and American material help has been indispensable, as Ukrainians acknowledge at every step.  The last incremental package of support for Ukraine was passed by Congress after some very impressive political work by the White House.  The National Security Council has done incredible yeoman’s labor in coordinating deliveries of weapons, without much recognition of the complexity of this task.  American weapons tend to work better than expected in the battlefield.

But Russia has succeeded in making decision about these weapons deliveries come far more slowly than they should have.  Operational speed cannot make up for strategic slowness.  With Ukraine’s victory plan, right now, we will either see this pattern once again — Ukrainian request, Russian threat, American delay — or we will break the cycle and change the war, giving the Ukrainians a chance.   Autumn 2024 is the Biden administration’s last chance to attain strategic pace.

In this war, Putin has not only managed our anxiety, he has created entirely new rules of war that too many of us now take for granted — even though they have no precedent and are absurd.  It somehow seems like the correct journalistic practice to refer to Ukrainian weapons as NATO or American weapons, even though when weapons of American or European origin are used by other countries we do not apply that term.  Nor do we refer to weapons used by Russia but built in North Korea and Iran as North Korean and Iranian weapons.  It somehow seems normal that the war should be fought only on Ukrainian territory (doesn’t it?), even though this contravenes all strategic logic, any basic sense of justice, and the international law of war concerning self-defense.

Once Russia succeeds in transforming these odd precepts into normal American rhetorical and mental habits, Americans become defensive about them, even though they were generated from outside, designed to hurt us, and make no sense.  When we use them in speech and writing, we slow ourselves down.

It is not of course the case that Russian war magic works completely.  The nuclear blackmail works on fewer and fewer people.  With time, Russia slowly does lose its reputation, at least among those who know history or are paying attention, as an unstoppable military force.  In the end, we have almost always given the Ukrainians what they wanted, but after the delays that have kept Russia in the war.

There is no time left, at least for this administration. The Russian goal is to make the Biden team move slowly so that Russia can keep fighting until Trump arrives to save them.  The next few months will reveal whether that plan has worked.

“To be or not to be.”  For the Biden administration, this is about legacy, about being remembered as having changed the world for the better.  For Ukraine, this is literal, about survival, about being in the world.