What to think about Ukraine, pt 2

The good, bad, and ugly of Biden's Ukraine policies.

Continuing from part I, with a few sentences borrowed from a post in January because I’m too lazy to rewrite them…

4. After the invasion began, President Biden got Ukraine right — at first.

When Russia began its full-scale invasion in February of 2022, most informed observers expected Ukraine to fall quickly.¹ President Zelensky was considered tremendously brave for remaining in Kyiv because many believed that Russia would be able to reach him and kill him in a matter of days. Russia had a military, economy, and population several times larger than Ukraine’s, and that military was considered a “near-peer” of the U.S. military. On paper, Russia should have won decisively.

But Ukraine held on, likely in large part due to the extensive aid, weapons, and intelligence the United States provided and organized. President Biden publicized intelligence revealing Putin’s plans to invade several days before Ukraine or others believed it would, allowing crucial time to prepare for the initial attempt to seize Kyiv. When the fighting began, Biden rallied allies to Ukraine’s support, imposed tough sanctions on Russia, and leveraged U.S. resources to fund, inform, and organize an effective defense. Using surplus supplies the United States did not immediately need, he sent Ukraine air defense systems, drones, rocket launchers, radars, tanks, and anti-armor weapons. One Ukrainian official warned that without U.S. help, Ukraine would have run out of vital artillery shells by May or June of 2022.

In the following months and years, Biden deftly used salami tactics to increase the extent and sophistication of U.S. support while mitigating the risk of escalation. Contrary to criticism that he was too cautious, there is no reason to believe that any of the weapons initially withheld from Ukraine would have changed the war’s outcome had they only been provided earlier (Ukraine’s main bottleneck was rather a lack of manpower). The risk of nuclear escalation was real, and far outweighed any other U.S. interests in the country.

As a partial result of Biden’s response, the ultimate outcome in Ukraine is likely to be much better than most people expected when the war began—all without a single U.S. troop involved in the fighting. Biden deserves credit for avoiding the worst outcomes without selling Ukraine down the river.

5. By 2023, however, Biden failed to adapt his strategy to battlefield realities, allowing idealism to worsen the outcome.

Biden’s successful strategy in the first year of the war failed to update with new information. By late 2023, it had hardened into a stubborn, ideologically blinkered non-strategy, to Ukraine and America’s detriment.

Ukraine’s initial success (and especially the euphoria of the Kharkiv counteroffensive in September of 2022) misled many of its sympathizers into wishful thinking that Ukraine could retake all of its occupied territory. Some even envisioned retaking Crimea (first seized by Russia in 2014), then pushing all the way to Moscow and forcing Putin’s surrender and Russian reparations. The Wagner Group rebellion in June of 2023 added a brief splash of real-world excitement to the dream of a Russian collapse and decisive loss.

Unfortunately, these fantasies were always rooted more in moral yearnings than they were in battlefield power. Some in the military community were brave enough to say so. Late in 2022, General Milley went public with his opinion that the war was unwinnable by military means. In Milley’s view, Ukraine should try to leverage its recent successes to cement its gains at the bargaining table from a position of strength.

With frank discussion about Americans’ unwillingness to fund this war forever, Biden might have pushed Ukraine to the negotiating table, preserved its democracy and 80% of its territory against all odds, and secured the peace for long enough to rebalance responsibility for European security, on terms at least as good as what Ukraine will get now. But this would have required concessions: at minimum, conceding that Russia would gain some territory from its war of aggression; that Ukraine would not join NATO; and that power gets a vote despite our noble principles.²

President Biden and the national security establishment he embodied would have none of it. State Secretary Blinken, Ukrainian President Zelensky, and a vocal chorus of liberal internationalists dismissed Milley’s expertise as defeatism, insisting on maximalist aims of total Ukrainian victory.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that Milley was right. But in fairness, hindsight is 20/20. By late 2022, it was not yet obvious that Ukraine was unable to win decisively. Ukraine had momentum, resources to push on, and an eager will to fight on. I could understand Biden and Zelensky’s unwillingness to negotiate that winter.

A year later, though, that optimism had become blindness: an irresponsible refusal to confront reality and its implications.

The much-hyped 2023 Ukrainian offensive resulted in abject failure, such that Russia gained more territory than it lost by year’s end. By late 2023, the U.S. aid money had run out, and Republican skepticism of sending more had hardened into full-blown opposition. Russia was slowly gaining ground. We had no plausible theory for how this trend would change. And yet President Biden, and most Democrats, remained in denial.³

Part of the problem was that by this point, Biden had so dramatized the stakes of the conflict that he’d lose face to settle for a compromise outcome. He’d gone around the world pretending that the war in Ukraine was really a war for the future of democracy; that if Putin was allowed to gain anything at all, whatever the cost, the entire “rules-based order” would collapse; that he’d be certain to attack other countries next, and it was only a matter of time before America would be drawn into an even costlier war against a NATO ally.

So instead of following General Milley’s advice a year too late, Biden tripled down on indefinite maximalism. He gave a national address that absurdly linked the case for sending $60 billion more to Ukraine to a wildly different conflict in Israel and Gaza, without any acknowledged need to shift the war’s strategy or reduce its ambitions. The same classic blind spots of U.S. foreign policy elites that

Glenn

meticulously cataloged in January— miscasting pragmatic rivals as insatiable expansionists, overweighting the importance of symbolism and credibility, denying limits to U.S. power or any need to weigh tradeoffs, and confusing moral conviction for strategic clarity—reared their ugly heads again.

So instead, tens of thousands more people have needlessly died, while tens of billions more dollars were sunk into prolonging Ukraine’s agony. Democrats made ugly legislative concessions at home in exchange for more aid, and that aid failed to improve the situation. Russia gained almost 10 times as much ground in 2024 as in 2023, in exactly the sort of unwinnable, attritive trench warfare that General Milley predicted. As our leverage evaporated, Biden had no plausible plan for victory, and yet no willingness to admit there would probably be a negotiated settlement at roughly the current battle lines. To top it all off, Biden lost the election, dealing global democracy and his rules-based order a greater blow than Russia ever could.

6. Even after Biden started to get Ukraine wrong, aid to Ukraine was still worth sending.

After all of the above, this take may surprise you—it’s where I differ from many conservatives in the restraint community. Even after the 2023 offensive failed, I thought it was good to keep funding Ukraine’s defense.

To be clear, that funding should have come with more strings attached. It should have been accompanied by candid conversations about America’s political constraints and limited interests, and pressure to negotiate or risk fighting alone. But even without those things, ensuring Ukraine’s continued ability to at least hold the line was better than pulling the plug on funding cold turkey. Biden was right to request more funding, and Republicans were wrong to oppose and delay it.

Total U.S. spending on Ukraine came out to about $180 billion over three years, including all military equipment and economic aid combined. That’s about $60 billion per year, which is less than 1% of FY24’s $6.8 trillion federal budget. It’s about 7% as large as the official U.S. defense budget, most of which is spent on less important things. Much of this Ukraine spending passed through U.S. arms manufacturers anyway, creating spillover economic benefits at home.

This manageable investment bought something morally and strategically important—something which was in real jeopardy without the aid, and which unconditional aid at least bought time to secure through future negotiations. Specificlaly, it bought a continued standstill at the front lines, which meant freedom from tyranny for tens of millions of Ukrainians.

Unlike the advanced weaponry Ukraine so covets, simple artillery shells and funding were essential for defensive purposes. Withholding them for months, while Republicans held up Biden’s aid package, led to battlefield losses for Ukraine. Preventing further losses was not nothing!

Even if you don’t care about Ukrainian freedom, preserving the status quo achieved real strategic benefits for the U.S. For $60 billion a year and zero troops on the ground, the United States stiff-armed and exhausted the entire Russian military. We kept a chief rival politically and economically isolated, brain-drained, conscripting its men, and pouring 6% of its meager, stagnating GDP into a futile boondoggle of a war—all while American life went on utterly unaffected.

Was this really so bad for U.S. security interests? Was it really less effective than most things the defense budget buys? For which side of the war was it less sustainable?

All debates over whether some federal spending is “worth it” depend on the measure of comparison. Are you comparing it to the best possible alternative thing the government could (but wouldn’t) buy with that money? To tax cuts the government could (but wouldn’t) offer instead? To the median dollar our government spends? To the marginal program actually cut in the next round of budget negotiations? The worthiness changes depending on what you pick.

My measure is this: I think U.S. aid to Ukraine bought something more important than most things the government spends money on, and probably also more important than what the private sector would do with an extra $180 billion returned to taxpayers.⁴ I have a very long list of wasteful or awful things that I want my government to stop paying for, but defending 40 million innocent people from brutal invading armies isn’t one of them. To me, that’s 0.8% of my tax dollars well spent.

So I was annoyed that so many in the restraint community allowed their valid critiques of Biden’s approach to broaden into opposition to supporting Ukraine at all.⁵ Mere funding to a just cause with strategic benefits should not have gotten us as animated as we get about our military fighting directly.

Think of it this way. If China invades Taiwan, and the only thing the U.S. does in response is send Taiwan money, weapons, and intelligence—without directly involving U.S. troops at all—that would be a tremendous victory for the restraint community! Even more so if those deliveries actually succeed at defending most of the island, rallying a regional coalition to contain China, and reducing China’s power and global appeal three years later. We should keep Ukraine in the same perspective.

Part III will stop relitigating the past and focus on what to do now.

1. This is part of why I supported a NATO moratorium in the months leading up to it: I worried that the alternative was Ukraine getting completely conquered and subjugated. I fully admit that I underestimated Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

2. We can’t know exactly what it would have taken, because we never tried. I’m not saying Putin would definitely have been willing to reach a ceasefire deal acceptable to Ukraine or the U.S., as both sides’ publicly stated demands were incompatible. But frankly, Putin’s terms on the largest sticking points—NATO and control of the occupied territories—were more in line with political and military reality than Ukraine’s. Both sides demanded territory that Russia controlled, and that Ukraine had no way to retake. Ukraine could only demand as much as it did on the assumption that we’d be willing to write them a blank check indefinitely. With a candid threat to pull that funding, they’d have had to either settle for less or risk fighting alone. Once that ultimatum was made clear to Ukraine behind closed doors, we’d have had more leverage to secure a better deal from Russia then than we do now with Trump in charge. More on that to follow in part III.

3. As late as August of that year, I distinctly remember being called a Russian propagandist by college-educated people for gently pointing out that the offensive was failing and the war was in a stalemate.

4. For another comparison: look how many trillions of dollars people are proposing we spend to prepare to fight a hypothetical, less winnable, and more dangerous war in Taiwan, to defend the democracy of half as many people.

5. Some restrainers made bad analogies to Afghanistan, where we sent hundreds of thousands of our own troops to fight a futile war of choice that killed 71,000 civilians. Yes, Biden lacked a strategy for ending the Ukraine war, or a willingness to acknowledge the need for concessions; and yes, that technically made it a “forever war,” since there was no conceivable pathway to what he called victory. I share the frustration with bleeding resources indefinitely in pursuit of unachievable objectives. But as forever wars go, $6 trillion over 20 years is a lot different than $180 billion over three. Especially since for most of those three, it was not clearly a frozen conflict, and it was still plausible that Ukraine could gain more ground or increase its negotiating leverage.