The Ukraine war has now lasted for over 500 days. The price has been immense: hundreds of thousands of both Ukrainians and Russians are believed to have perished in what could easily be described as Europe’s darkest hour in the post-1945 era. Ukraine has lost millions of its own citizens to exile, a demographic catastrophe from which the war-ravaged country is unlikely to ever recover. The nation, already the poorest in the continent before the war, has now sunk into an abyss of misery—appallingly, Ukraine’s per capita GDP is, according to IMF estimates, lower today than that of Namibia or Mongolia, and only slightly higher than Vietnam’s. Europe, meanwhile, faces economic doom: its industrial powerhouse, Germany, is sinking into recession, and high commodity prices are annihilating European industry.
The enormous sacrifices entailed by the war—record inflation, mass desindustrialisation and, now, recession—have been justified by politicians with the promise of Ukrainian triumph. This, however, has never been more than wishful thinking. The fiction of a successful Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ has now been indisputably refuted by reality. As Hungary’s ever-sensible Viktor Orbán has put it, Ukrainian victory is “impossible.” Russia has between five and seven times Ukraine’s population, vast war-making potential and an economy that has repeatedly proven itself invulnerable to Western economic pressure. Such advantages determine the impossibility of Ukrainian triumph, regardless of how gallant their resistance may have been.
Ukraine’s admission to NATO is not in Europe’s best interest
When wiser men come to write the history of these sorry days, they will shiver in disbelief at the way Western elites have managed the Ukrainian crisis. Trillions of dollars, either in direct aid or in related economic losses, have now been sacrificed in a war with no realistic hope of victory. Worse still, the West has gladly walked into an unsolvable strategic conundrum: Ukraine’s defeat by Moscow will be seen as a humiliation for Washington and Brussels, but the truth is that some of Kiev’s war goals, such as joining NATO, are themselves opposed to genuine Western interests.
Indeed, though Western governments made a point of refusing Russia’s request for assurances that Ukraine would not join NATO, what does remain in question is what exactly NATO itself would have to gain by counting Ukraine among its members. The North Atlantic Treaty is not a toy: the reason NATO is a respected military alliance is that an attack on a NATO member state is an attack on all. But can all NATO member states be expected to risk nuclear annihilation to defend Ukraine? U.S. President Joe Biden himself has repeatedly made clear that he would not risk a potentially calamitous, humanity-ending war over the distant, strategically meaningless Donbass. Considering that NATO effectively functions as an American security guarantee to the alliance’s additional members, that very fact appears to settle the issue. For Washington—or, indeed, almost any other Western capital—Ukraine is just not worth fighting for. For Moscow, as the current war makes clear, it is.
But let us imagine that, as its proponents claim, the extension of NATO’s Article V guarantees to Ukraine after the resolution of the current conflict—regardless of what such a ‘resolution’ could entail—would single-handedly prevent further episodes of Russian intervention in the country. In this scenario, Europe’s future would almost certainly be one of division, with its Western-leaning regions facing an estranged, besieged and hostile Russia. Such a Russia would likely be inward-looking, but militarised and inamicable. Not only would her vast economic potential be permanently closed to Western trade, contributing to European impoverishment, but it would also likely be used to fuel decades of Russian revanchism and anti-Western mischief.
China is this war’s only real winner
Russia and the West are fighting each other—and exhausting each other—in Ukraine’s vast steppe. As Europe enters a new economic recession and America empties her arsenals, however, one country has every reason to see the war as a godsend. That country is China. The European war has gifted Xi Jinping with enormous advantages. Just as China arms itself to the teeth, engaging in a massive naval buildup and openly threatening an invasion of Taiwan, Western leaders have deemed it sensible to deplete their weapon stocks in a conflict almost 8,000 kilometres away. Beijing made good use of this window of opportunity. The Russo-Western conflict has made Moscow a solid Chinese ally: the Manchurian border, long a concern for the Chinese, is now bustling with commerce. Beijing is now the beneficiary of the affordable Russian gas that once contributed to European prosperity, and one of its main strategic vulnerabilities, its reliance on the U.S.-controlled Pacific for the import of essential raw materials, has been largely resolved.
In Russia, China now has a reliable supplier of raw materials, a powerful military ally, a close diplomatic partner, and a source of crucial defense technologies. The two countries have been driven to work together at the UN Security Council and in courting developing nations away from the West: this has been recently made obvious in the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Despite the U.S.’s threats, a larger number of developing countries have been led to grow closer to the BRICS group, in response to the increasing weaponisation of the U.S. dollar, the economic decay of the Western world, and global animosity towards Washington’s heavy-handed diplomatic tactics. The simple truth is that, for many, if not most around the world, the Ukraine war is far more complex than suggested by the Western press. For the Global South, the war isn’t merely about a smaller country resisting the expansionist appetites of a larger neighbour; rather, it is also about the defense of Russia’s traditional sphere of interest in Ukraine, the narrow-sightedness of Western solipsism, and the U.S.’s attempts to defend its hegemonic position at the helm of the global order. One might agree or disagree with these views, but it would be foolish to deny how prevalent they are outside Europe and the United States.
This spreading of anti-Western feeling around the world is not only beneficial for the new Russo-Chinese consortium. It is actively stimulated by it. The West’s foolish policy of simultaneously confronting Moscow and Beijing, along with what many developing nations perceive as Western hubris, has led to a string of painful setbacks for American and European influence around the world. In the Middle East, Washington was stunned by the occurrence of a Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. In Africa, a string of Russian-inspired coups has utterly obliterated France’s once-mighty area of influence. And, of course, the West’s course vis-à-vis Russia has proved a major hassle for greater cooperation with India. This is patently not in the best interests of Europe or the United States.
The fact of the matter is that the West’s Ukraine policy is an immense failure. It has engulfed us in an unwinnable, unaffordable, and dangerous war of attrition. It has turned the developing world against us and accelerated the very trends of multipolarisation that Washington hoped to reverse. It has, by its failure to cause Russia any real economic hardship, utterly demolished the credibility of Western sanctions as an effective policy tool—in fact, bafflingly, the sanctions regime has actually helped Russia become the biggest European economy, according to the World Bank. Worse still: this policy has immersed Europe in a humanitarian and economic catastrophe that has now led to the death of hundreds of thousands, utterly destroyed Europe’s second largest country, weakened the West, and hastened China’s rise.
As U.S. Republican Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy has so eloquently put it, we need a change in direction. And we need it now.
The time for realism is here
Realism is often unlovable. It offers none of the exciting moral certainty of its competitors. For realists, international conflict is not best understood in terms of good and evil, but as the expression of otherwise unsolvable differences of inter-State interest. Washington is not the ‘Great Satan’ of anti-American propaganda; it is simply a hyperpower trying to preserve its privileged, hegemonic position in the global system. Much in the same way, Russia is no demon: Russian policy is better explained by the cold, unsentimental analysis of its interests than by childish portrayals of Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler.
The enormous humanitarian catastrophe still taking place in Ukraine will not end until Kiev and the West become realistic about their goals and abandon the notion of inflicting a military defeat on Russia. That will not happen. As General Mark Milley revealingly put it in November last year, “the probability of a Ukrainian military victory … happening anytime soon is not high.” On August 17th, the Washington Post starkly announced that U.S. intelligence believes Ukraine will fail in its counter-offensive. The longer the delusion of Ukrainian victory persists and the path of diplomacy is avoided, the harsher will the price of peace be for the Ukrainians. The mismatch in economic, industrial, and demographic resources between the two countries also determines that Ukraine is far worse placed to face a war of attrition than Russia. Yes, the continuation of the war has the potential to destabilise the larger country, as recently shown by Prigozhin’s abortive ‘March on Moscow’; however, Ukrainians are making proportionally much greater sacrifices than are the Russians. If anyone breaks, odds are the Ukrainians will be first.
Indeed, the longer the conflict lasts, the greater the likelihood of a complete, Afghan-style Ukrainian collapse. This is a scenario Western strategists would do well to begin considering, particularly given Ukraine’s traditionally fractious political life. Exhausted by years of overwhelming pressure in the economic, social, and military spheres, Ukraine could again sink into the kind of political chaos and infighting that has so often plagued the country. Should this happen, the West could one day wake up with an even worse situation than the one recently predicted by Professor John Mearsheimer: that, should the war continue, Russia will eventually annex half of Ukrainian territory and “transform the rest into a dysfunctional rump state.” In this scenario, some form of low intensity warfare would continue for years, and Russia’s relations with Europe would remain “terrible,” which would doubtless benefit China. Such outcomes are highly undesirable, and prudent leaders would do well to avoid them.
Giving peace a chance
It should be recognised that the Ukrainian state is no longer, as Viktor Orbán recently put it, a genuinely independent geopolitical actor. In May, Josep Borrell also said as much. Speaking in Florence, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs claimed that “if we do not support Ukraine, it will fall in a matter of days.” This reality should put an end to the delusion that the conflict in the East is primarily a ‘Russo-Ukrainian War.’ It isn’t, and this means that putting an end to the fighting doesn’t depend on Moscow and Kiev alone. There are two likely outcomes for this war: a Ukrainian collapse in the months or years ahead, or peace negotiations involving Russia and the Western powers. As Mr. Borrell told us in May, the West can force the second scenario at any moment. Or it can continue to needlessly prolong the fighting, altering the body count—but not the end result.
If diplomacy is the way forward, then what should the stance of Western capitals be in any upcoming peace conference? First and foremost, they should recognise that, while Russia’s invasion a year and a half ago was illegal, Moscow does have legitimate security interests in preventing Ukraine’s accession to NATO. As we have seen, Russian and Western interests in the matter are not truly in irrevocable opposition; instead, it would be dangerous, irresponsible, and useless for both sides if Ukraine were to join NATO. Secondly, they should accept that requests for a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine’s 1991 borders would be unconstructive, unrealistic, and unlikely to lead to a settlement. Five regions of Ukraine have now been officially, constitutionally integrated into Russia. The military reality is that Ukraine, though lavishly supported by the West, has proved itself unable to alter this state of affairs. These facts are understandably disappointing for Kiev and its backers, but there is no way around them.
Given that there are no political—or, as Kiev’s latest offensive has shown us, military—ways of evicting Russia from the regions it now controls, realism dictates that this must not become an excuse for a highly risky ‘forever war.’ Rather, the path forward is to accept the current line of contact as a de facto border between the two States. In this scenario, neither country would drop its respective territorial claims, but they would no longer be the object of armed conflict. Such a resolution is hardly impossible, as many nations live peacefully with each other despite competing views on what exactly is their legitimate territory. In the meantime, Ukraine would commit to staying out of NATO and, as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently suggested, remain a neutral buffer between Russia and the Alliance. In exchange, the country would receive security assurances from both Moscow and the West. Sanctions could then be reduced and, depending on a steady and genuine improvement in relations, entirely dropped. This itself is not a concession to Russia: it is, rather, a necessity for the West. A long-term ‘Iron Curtain’ would not only extend Europe’s impoverishment, it would also lead to Russia’s economic vassalisation by Beijing.
Such would be the essential contours of a sane, realistic Ukraine policy. They are not perfect; as always, politics is only the art of the possible. But what such a policy would do is to put an end to an inhumane war, save Ukrainian statehood, defend European peace and prosperity, and counteract the terrifying prospect of long-term Russo-Chinese consortium spreading throughout Eurasia. Sooner or later, such a policy will be followed, for it is inevitable. Why, then, should we postpone what cannot be avoided, and sacrifice by our inaction so many innocent lives? This is the question Western statesmen should be asking when they look at themselves in the mirror.
Conservative Realism Is the Way out of the Ukraine Quagmire
The Ukraine war has now lasted for over 500 days. The price has been immense: hundreds of thousands of both Ukrainians and Russians are believed to have perished in what could easily be described as Europe’s darkest hour in the post-1945 era. Ukraine has lost millions of its own citizens to exile, a demographic catastrophe from which the war-ravaged country is unlikely to ever recover. The nation, already the poorest in the continent before the war, has now sunk into an abyss of misery—appallingly, Ukraine’s per capita GDP is, according to IMF estimates, lower today than that of Namibia or Mongolia, and only slightly higher than Vietnam’s. Europe, meanwhile, faces economic doom: its industrial powerhouse, Germany, is sinking into recession, and high commodity prices are annihilating European industry.
The enormous sacrifices entailed by the war—record inflation, mass desindustrialisation and, now, recession—have been justified by politicians with the promise of Ukrainian triumph. This, however, has never been more than wishful thinking. The fiction of a successful Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ has now been indisputably refuted by reality. As Hungary’s ever-sensible Viktor Orbán has put it, Ukrainian victory is “impossible.” Russia has between five and seven times Ukraine’s population, vast war-making potential and an economy that has repeatedly proven itself invulnerable to Western economic pressure. Such advantages determine the impossibility of Ukrainian triumph, regardless of how gallant their resistance may have been.
Ukraine’s admission to NATO is not in Europe’s best interest
When wiser men come to write the history of these sorry days, they will shiver in disbelief at the way Western elites have managed the Ukrainian crisis. Trillions of dollars, either in direct aid or in related economic losses, have now been sacrificed in a war with no realistic hope of victory. Worse still, the West has gladly walked into an unsolvable strategic conundrum: Ukraine’s defeat by Moscow will be seen as a humiliation for Washington and Brussels, but the truth is that some of Kiev’s war goals, such as joining NATO, are themselves opposed to genuine Western interests.
Indeed, though Western governments made a point of refusing Russia’s request for assurances that Ukraine would not join NATO, what does remain in question is what exactly NATO itself would have to gain by counting Ukraine among its members. The North Atlantic Treaty is not a toy: the reason NATO is a respected military alliance is that an attack on a NATO member state is an attack on all. But can all NATO member states be expected to risk nuclear annihilation to defend Ukraine? U.S. President Joe Biden himself has repeatedly made clear that he would not risk a potentially calamitous, humanity-ending war over the distant, strategically meaningless Donbass. Considering that NATO effectively functions as an American security guarantee to the alliance’s additional members, that very fact appears to settle the issue. For Washington—or, indeed, almost any other Western capital—Ukraine is just not worth fighting for. For Moscow, as the current war makes clear, it is.
But let us imagine that, as its proponents claim, the extension of NATO’s Article V guarantees to Ukraine after the resolution of the current conflict—regardless of what such a ‘resolution’ could entail—would single-handedly prevent further episodes of Russian intervention in the country. In this scenario, Europe’s future would almost certainly be one of division, with its Western-leaning regions facing an estranged, besieged and hostile Russia. Such a Russia would likely be inward-looking, but militarised and inamicable. Not only would her vast economic potential be permanently closed to Western trade, contributing to European impoverishment, but it would also likely be used to fuel decades of Russian revanchism and anti-Western mischief.
China is this war’s only real winner
Russia and the West are fighting each other—and exhausting each other—in Ukraine’s vast steppe. As Europe enters a new economic recession and America empties her arsenals, however, one country has every reason to see the war as a godsend. That country is China. The European war has gifted Xi Jinping with enormous advantages. Just as China arms itself to the teeth, engaging in a massive naval buildup and openly threatening an invasion of Taiwan, Western leaders have deemed it sensible to deplete their weapon stocks in a conflict almost 8,000 kilometres away. Beijing made good use of this window of opportunity. The Russo-Western conflict has made Moscow a solid Chinese ally: the Manchurian border, long a concern for the Chinese, is now bustling with commerce. Beijing is now the beneficiary of the affordable Russian gas that once contributed to European prosperity, and one of its main strategic vulnerabilities, its reliance on the U.S.-controlled Pacific for the import of essential raw materials, has been largely resolved.
In Russia, China now has a reliable supplier of raw materials, a powerful military ally, a close diplomatic partner, and a source of crucial defense technologies. The two countries have been driven to work together at the UN Security Council and in courting developing nations away from the West: this has been recently made obvious in the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Despite the U.S.’s threats, a larger number of developing countries have been led to grow closer to the BRICS group, in response to the increasing weaponisation of the U.S. dollar, the economic decay of the Western world, and global animosity towards Washington’s heavy-handed diplomatic tactics. The simple truth is that, for many, if not most around the world, the Ukraine war is far more complex than suggested by the Western press. For the Global South, the war isn’t merely about a smaller country resisting the expansionist appetites of a larger neighbour; rather, it is also about the defense of Russia’s traditional sphere of interest in Ukraine, the narrow-sightedness of Western solipsism, and the U.S.’s attempts to defend its hegemonic position at the helm of the global order. One might agree or disagree with these views, but it would be foolish to deny how prevalent they are outside Europe and the United States.
This spreading of anti-Western feeling around the world is not only beneficial for the new Russo-Chinese consortium. It is actively stimulated by it. The West’s foolish policy of simultaneously confronting Moscow and Beijing, along with what many developing nations perceive as Western hubris, has led to a string of painful setbacks for American and European influence around the world. In the Middle East, Washington was stunned by the occurrence of a Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. In Africa, a string of Russian-inspired coups has utterly obliterated France’s once-mighty area of influence. And, of course, the West’s course vis-à-vis Russia has proved a major hassle for greater cooperation with India. This is patently not in the best interests of Europe or the United States.
The fact of the matter is that the West’s Ukraine policy is an immense failure. It has engulfed us in an unwinnable, unaffordable, and dangerous war of attrition. It has turned the developing world against us and accelerated the very trends of multipolarisation that Washington hoped to reverse. It has, by its failure to cause Russia any real economic hardship, utterly demolished the credibility of Western sanctions as an effective policy tool—in fact, bafflingly, the sanctions regime has actually helped Russia become the biggest European economy, according to the World Bank. Worse still: this policy has immersed Europe in a humanitarian and economic catastrophe that has now led to the death of hundreds of thousands, utterly destroyed Europe’s second largest country, weakened the West, and hastened China’s rise.
As U.S. Republican Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy has so eloquently put it, we need a change in direction. And we need it now.
The time for realism is here
Realism is often unlovable. It offers none of the exciting moral certainty of its competitors. For realists, international conflict is not best understood in terms of good and evil, but as the expression of otherwise unsolvable differences of inter-State interest. Washington is not the ‘Great Satan’ of anti-American propaganda; it is simply a hyperpower trying to preserve its privileged, hegemonic position in the global system. Much in the same way, Russia is no demon: Russian policy is better explained by the cold, unsentimental analysis of its interests than by childish portrayals of Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler.
The enormous humanitarian catastrophe still taking place in Ukraine will not end until Kiev and the West become realistic about their goals and abandon the notion of inflicting a military defeat on Russia. That will not happen. As General Mark Milley revealingly put it in November last year, “the probability of a Ukrainian military victory … happening anytime soon is not high.” On August 17th, the Washington Post starkly announced that U.S. intelligence believes Ukraine will fail in its counter-offensive. The longer the delusion of Ukrainian victory persists and the path of diplomacy is avoided, the harsher will the price of peace be for the Ukrainians. The mismatch in economic, industrial, and demographic resources between the two countries also determines that Ukraine is far worse placed to face a war of attrition than Russia. Yes, the continuation of the war has the potential to destabilise the larger country, as recently shown by Prigozhin’s abortive ‘March on Moscow’; however, Ukrainians are making proportionally much greater sacrifices than are the Russians. If anyone breaks, odds are the Ukrainians will be first.
Indeed, the longer the conflict lasts, the greater the likelihood of a complete, Afghan-style Ukrainian collapse. This is a scenario Western strategists would do well to begin considering, particularly given Ukraine’s traditionally fractious political life. Exhausted by years of overwhelming pressure in the economic, social, and military spheres, Ukraine could again sink into the kind of political chaos and infighting that has so often plagued the country. Should this happen, the West could one day wake up with an even worse situation than the one recently predicted by Professor John Mearsheimer: that, should the war continue, Russia will eventually annex half of Ukrainian territory and “transform the rest into a dysfunctional rump state.” In this scenario, some form of low intensity warfare would continue for years, and Russia’s relations with Europe would remain “terrible,” which would doubtless benefit China. Such outcomes are highly undesirable, and prudent leaders would do well to avoid them.
Giving peace a chance
It should be recognised that the Ukrainian state is no longer, as Viktor Orbán recently put it, a genuinely independent geopolitical actor. In May, Josep Borrell also said as much. Speaking in Florence, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs claimed that “if we do not support Ukraine, it will fall in a matter of days.” This reality should put an end to the delusion that the conflict in the East is primarily a ‘Russo-Ukrainian War.’ It isn’t, and this means that putting an end to the fighting doesn’t depend on Moscow and Kiev alone. There are two likely outcomes for this war: a Ukrainian collapse in the months or years ahead, or peace negotiations involving Russia and the Western powers. As Mr. Borrell told us in May, the West can force the second scenario at any moment. Or it can continue to needlessly prolong the fighting, altering the body count—but not the end result.
If diplomacy is the way forward, then what should the stance of Western capitals be in any upcoming peace conference? First and foremost, they should recognise that, while Russia’s invasion a year and a half ago was illegal, Moscow does have legitimate security interests in preventing Ukraine’s accession to NATO. As we have seen, Russian and Western interests in the matter are not truly in irrevocable opposition; instead, it would be dangerous, irresponsible, and useless for both sides if Ukraine were to join NATO. Secondly, they should accept that requests for a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine’s 1991 borders would be unconstructive, unrealistic, and unlikely to lead to a settlement. Five regions of Ukraine have now been officially, constitutionally integrated into Russia. The military reality is that Ukraine, though lavishly supported by the West, has proved itself unable to alter this state of affairs. These facts are understandably disappointing for Kiev and its backers, but there is no way around them.
Given that there are no political—or, as Kiev’s latest offensive has shown us, military—ways of evicting Russia from the regions it now controls, realism dictates that this must not become an excuse for a highly risky ‘forever war.’ Rather, the path forward is to accept the current line of contact as a de facto border between the two States. In this scenario, neither country would drop its respective territorial claims, but they would no longer be the object of armed conflict. Such a resolution is hardly impossible, as many nations live peacefully with each other despite competing views on what exactly is their legitimate territory. In the meantime, Ukraine would commit to staying out of NATO and, as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently suggested, remain a neutral buffer between Russia and the Alliance. In exchange, the country would receive security assurances from both Moscow and the West. Sanctions could then be reduced and, depending on a steady and genuine improvement in relations, entirely dropped. This itself is not a concession to Russia: it is, rather, a necessity for the West. A long-term ‘Iron Curtain’ would not only extend Europe’s impoverishment, it would also lead to Russia’s economic vassalisation by Beijing.
Such would be the essential contours of a sane, realistic Ukraine policy. They are not perfect; as always, politics is only the art of the possible. But what such a policy would do is to put an end to an inhumane war, save Ukrainian statehood, defend European peace and prosperity, and counteract the terrifying prospect of long-term Russo-Chinese consortium spreading throughout Eurasia. Sooner or later, such a policy will be followed, for it is inevitable. Why, then, should we postpone what cannot be avoided, and sacrifice by our inaction so many innocent lives? This is the question Western statesmen should be asking when they look at themselves in the mirror.
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