Why did the US reject military intervention in Ukraine when news broke in December that Russia had moved its army to the border with Ukraine? Why did it publicly say so? And why, six weeks into the carnage and taking technocratic fustiness to extremes, does Washington share intelligence but not “data that would enable ‘real-time targeting’” of Russian forces?
There already is a rousing debate about what motivated Russia’s invasion, but the reflexive exclusion of Western force to prevent it appears to be accepted uncritically. If Ukraine’s well-being and avoidance of sanctions-related economic harm to the West were priorities, surely the prevention of bombs would have been better than having to clean up after them.
Bluff-calling has gone missing from the West’s playbook in the traditional wrangling among world powers. Wars cost lives, money, and influence. If advantage is to be had without resorting to force, it requires a combination of secrecy about intentions and capabilities, as well as misdirection and disinformation. The aim is influence the other guy’s risk calculation.
To do this, great powers expend enormous resources to ferret out the other side’s deliberately indecipherable intentions, to understand, or at least guess, what its leaders are thinking. To prevail requires a willingness to play poker, which is what the West—Washington, in particular—chose not to do on Ukraine.
Already by November 2021, the steady build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine’s border, which had been in progress since early in the year, triggered concerns among NATO leaders. In early December, President Biden promised “‘the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives’ to deter” a Russian invasion.
What Washington did not do was keep Moscow guessing about US intentions beyond sanctions. As early as December 8, the US president rejected the use of US troops to defend Ukraine. “That is not on the table.” By removing the only deterrent against invasion—Russia sees sanctions as endurable—he green-lighted it for Putin.
Knowing what it already knew in December, what if the West had acted preemptively? Drop two airborne divisions into Kyiv, set up an airbase in Lviv, create a no-fly zone, and have the Sixth Fleet head for Odesa, all before Russia had a chance to cross the border? Or if Biden had privately communicated those intentions to Putin to confirm US seriousness about support for Ukraine’s sovereignty?
Whether this would have succeeded in deterring the invasion is unknowable. But given Putin’s concern in early February about possibly having to take on NATO, a confrontation with equal-capability American rather than overmatched Ukrainian forces likely would have caused him to reevaluate the risk, which would have been considerable.
Washington chose not to call his bluff, even after he’d warned off anyone “tempted to meddle” with a response that “will … lead you to consequences you have never encountered in your history,” which observers took as a threat to go nuclear. Did the US really assume that Putin was prepared to accept the risk of Russia’s evaporation by crossing the nuclear threshold?
Russia’s nuclear force doctrine says that it will resort to first-use only if the existence of the Russian state itself is threatened. This policy is not new. Why, then, did the West not see Putin’s threat of consequences “never encountered” as the bluff that it was? US military action limited to Ukraine would not have threatened the existence of the Russian state.
The US refusal to engage in high-stakes poker, including the repeated, pre-invasion public rejections of using US forces to counter Russian ones, surrendered all initiative to Russia. Even if it has failed in its initial military objectives, Russia knows it can continue to lay waste to Ukraine unmolested by the only thing that matters: superior force.
There are two plausible counter-arguments: First, preemptive military action by the West would have needed Ukraine’s consent. It’s questionable if President Zelensky would have given it. In late January, he even criticized the West for “causing panic in the financial sector, damaging the ‘purse’ of Ukrainians, and depleting Ukraine’s gold reserves and currency”.
Second, if one assumes that it’s a messianic (vs. real national security) motive that compelled Putin to right a wrong and reabsorb Ukraine, along with a servile Belarus, into Russia, Putin just might see failure in Ukraine as an existential risk to Russia and opt for nuclear war with the US. In that case, though, who would be left to write his glorious role in the restoration of imperial Russia?
Guessing what risks the other guy is prepared to assume is as much art as science. World affairs run on guesses, educated ones, maybe, but guesses nonetheless. Putin naturally would have seen a preemptive move by the US as an outrageous provocation. But, more likely than not, he would have kept his army had home rather than have it mauled in Ukraine.
The West’s response to the invasion has been credible and substantive. But its refusal to play poker with Putin before the invasion was a missed opportunity to expose the hollowness of his enterprise. It had the unfortunate effect of assuring him that nothing would stand in the way of his raining death on a people he claims are Russian kin.
