What Are We Fighting For In Ukraine?

Thinking about the escalation ladder, and what might induce us to climb down

19th century Indian game of snakes and ladders

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In my last post about the situation in Ukraine, I talked about Russian nuclear threats, attempting to assess both how serious they are and what we should do about them. My conclusion was that nuclear weapons wouldn’t actually help Russia win the war in the tactical sense, and were therefore being brandished as a form of nuclear terrorism, aimed at delivering a diplomatic victory when military efforts had failed. Precisely because that’s what they are, we couldn’t give in to them without reaping the whirlwind. Moreover, since actually using nuclear weapons might be even more regime-threatening to the Kremlin than suing for peace, we should treat the threats as a desperate bluff and remain calm rather than responding with escalatory threats of our own.

But they might not be a bluff. A recent War on the Rocks piece did an excellent job laying out the reason to worry that we might be heading incrementally toward nuclear catastrophe through reciprocal escalation. Here’s the key paragraph about Russia’s recent nuclear threats:

The problem that the Russians have had in their signaling is that their decision to escalate likely revolves around the progress that the Ukrainians make on the ground, not on any discrete action (such as the provision of new weapons systems) that the West might take. The likelihood of escalation, in other words, has stemmed from developments on the battlefield, not from the crossing of some arbitrary red line. Experts on the Russian military have long suspected that Russian nuclear signaling is an elaborate bluff meant to instill fear and caution in a weak-willed Western enemy. But events in Ukraine and the possibility of a catastrophic military loss may have changed that calculation. Nobody really knows. It is likely that the Russians don’t know either.

We can’t let nuclear threats be an all-purpose trump card. But they’re not nugatory either. If we’re actually on that escalatory ladder, then it behooves us to know where and how we would be willing to climb down. And we can’t do that without knowing what we’re fighting for—hence the title of this post.

So what are we fighting for?

I want to be clear about one thing up front: my question is about why we are engaged and what we aim to achieve, not why Ukraine is engaged or what they are fighting to achieve. Ukraine is fighting for their country, their formal and practical independence, their territorial integrity, their national honor, their freedom. They’re out to repel an invader who has dismembered the country, brutalized the population it conquered, and aims not only to reduce them to vassal status but to obliterate their national identity. Ukraine’s determination to fight rather than submit is unquestionably inspiring—but it’s their determination, not ours, based on their ideals, ambitions and interests, not ours. What are we fighting for?

This question turns out to be harder to answer than I generally like. Or, rather, it’s easy to answer too narrowly or too expansively. Narrowly, we’re engaged in this proxy war to back up our prior decisions to engage; we can’t back down without looking feckless and weak. That’s too narrow because it doesn’t identify any goals we might have that diverge from Ukraine’s goals, any situation where we might say “we’ve achieved what we set out to do and can now shift our stance.”

Expansively, we’re fighting for democracy against tyranny, and for a rules-based international order against an aggressor state. Those are real ideals that we genuinely believe, but they are too broad for multiple reasons. For one, we aren’t capable of repelling aggression everywhere on earth, nor for supporting democracy everywhere, so it doesn’t explain why Ukraine is special. For another, it arrogates to ourselves a responsibility that from the perspective of the rules-based order itself belongs elsewhere—specifically to the U.N. Security Council, which is responsible for identifying and responding to illegal aggression. Obviously the Council isn’t going to respond to Russian aggression because Russia has a permanent veto on the council, but that’s kind of my point: this war is proof that the rules-based order, such as it was, is no longer operative. Most importantly, it’s too broad because it implies an open-ended rather than a contingent commitment to Ukraine. If we’re fighting to secure their democracy and their territorial integrity, and we have an absolute commitment to these things, then how are they different from an Article V signatory?

The right answer to “why are we in Ukraine” should be “to achieve x” where “x” is a defined set of objectives that we believe are achievable by means we are prepared to deploy. Those objectives might well be different from Ukraine’s objectives—indeed, it would be weird if they weren’t. Yet the more I thought about it, the more concerned I became at my inability to identify clearly what those achievable objectives are.

Right now, these questions are somewhat academic, because while Ukraine continues to make progress, Russia has shown no interest in negotiating a peace of any kind. But we have to hope that will change. If the tide of battle continues as it has, Russia’s situation is going to keep getting worse in dramatic ways. They risk long-term economic degradation, a collapse of their influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia and long-term dependence on China at a minimum. In addition, a victorious Ukraine will be battle-hardened and nationally unified against Russia—something much worse, from Russia’s perspective, than they could have imagined before 2014. Maximally, Russia risks outright state collapse and a series of civil wars within the Russian Federation. If they cannot magically prevent all that by lobbing nuclear weapons into the Black Sea or at Kyiv—and they can’t—then if they can’t turn the tide of battle they must, at some point sue for peace. Ukraine’s demands, at that point, will naturally be maximal—they’ll have won the war, after all. But what terms would we accept? We can’t know the answer to that unless we know what we’re fighting for. Indeed, short of anything like a suit for peace, we need to know what we’re fighting for to know how to respond to any Russian overtures—which, to be clear, have not been forthcoming—to deescalate, whether it’s a change in their declared red-lines or a proposal for a cease-fire or what-have-you.

Escalation and deescalation are, after all, on the same ladder, and complement each other. In 1973, when Israel was attacked by surprised by Egyptian and Syrian armies, the United States hurried to resupply the Jewish State, and threatened to get involved directly if the country were at serious risk of being totally overrun (in part because, had we not, we risked Israel itself going nuclear in a last-ditch effort at self-defense). But later in the war, when Israeli General Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal and trapped Egypt’s Third Army, the Soviet Union threatened to get directly involved if Israel did not let the Egyptians escape destruction—and the United States pressured Israel to do precisely that. Neither superpower had escalatory dominance, and both sides made escalatory threats at different points in the conflict. But the red lines of the United States and the Soviet Union were positioned such that both could be satisfied, and therefore the war didn’t escalate to a superpower confrontation. What’s the analogy in Ukraine? Russia has, dangerously, failed to communicate red lines that could possibly be respected. We shouldn’t make the same mistake. But without knowing what our own red lines are, how can we avoid doing so?

Here’s another way of putting the question that is perhaps more pointed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took a lot of people by surprise—including most of Europe. That will have long-term consequences regardless of what Russia does now. Finland and Sweden have joined NATO, Europe is turning decisively away from dependence on Russian gas, support for Ukraine is massively popular among both Democratic and Republican leaders as well as both parties’ rank-and-file, and Ukraine’s own people are overwhelmingly anti-Russian. None of that is going to change if Russia changes course. But what Russia does now should still matter. The hostile yet cautious and incremental Russia that seized Crimea and was fighting a low-intensity war in the Donbas was a problem for America, but not a catastrophe. The Russia that has been revealed by the war in Ukraine is more like a catastrophe. So what we’re fighting for, ultimately, is a change in Russia. But is it a change in regime? If so, then Vladimir Putin’s most paranoid rantings have a kernel of truth to them, and we should worry more seriously than we are about where that escalatory ladder ends. Or is it a change in policy? If so, then what sort of change are we looking for, how would Russia communicate such a change, and what are we prepared to offer to solidify it?

If we care to limit the risk of uncontrolled escalation while continuing to support Ukraine, we ought to tell them. And to do that, we have to know, ourselves, what it is we’re fighting for.