Over the course of the nearly three years since Russian invaded Ukraine, foreign policy experts in both Europe and the United States seem to have become increasingly detached from reality. Many seem to have abandoned their role as analysts and instead become cheerleaders. Instead of realistically assessing the situation in Ukraine and asking difficult questions about Western strategy, they have simply kept demanding that we send Ukraine more and more advanced weapons in order to defeat Putin. Even now, with Donald Trump re-elected as US president, most continue to ignore reality.
Throughout the last year, the military situation has worsened for Ukraine as Russia has been gradually but inexorably gaining ground. In August, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Russian territory near Kursk. But this has not stopped Russian forces advancing in the Donbas. During the last month or so, their advance seems to have accelerated and there are now even fears that Ukrainian forces may completely collapse. Ukrainian soldiers are now deserting in large numbers – and, although the experts focus on weapons systems, what Ukraine has always really been short of is men.
This reality on the battlefield – together with the political realities in Europe and the US – meant that it would have made sense to begin negotiating with Russia sooner rather than later. However bad the deal Ukraine might be able to get, it was likely to be better than what it would get if it waited and lost even more territory. Some of the more sensible voices in Washington did try to start discussions about what a possible peace deal might look like. But most foreign policy experts dismissed them as naive or worse, and sought to shut down debate about a peace deal. They insisted that Ukraine must first push Russia back so it could negotiate from a stronger position.
During the last year, it also became increasingly likely that Trump would win the US presidential election. This meant on top of the already deteriorating situation on the battlefield, there was now also the danger that as president, Trump might suddenly withdraw US support for Ukraine and negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin which experts themselves said would be disastrous from a Ukrainian perspective. Given this danger, they should have thought creatively about how Joe Biden might bring the war to an end before Trump returned to the White House. But most again refused to accept the new reality.
Even now that Trump has been re-elected, the experts seem to be in denial. In particular, they seem to be hoping that what Trump wants from Europeans is simply that they take on more of the burden of supporting Ukraine. According to this logic, if they now increase their economic and military support, they might keep him happy. Some even seem to imagine that Trump might actually increase, rather than decrease, US support for Ukraine – after all, it was his first administration that began supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine in the form of Javelin anti-tank missiles in 2018.
It is of course true that Trump is unpredictable – and although the people he has nominated for senior positions are loyal to him, they include neocons like Marco Rubio, his nominee for Secretary of State. But in an interview on 8 December, Trump seemed to confirm that he sees the war in Ukraine as pointless and wants to bring it to an end quickly. It is clear that he also wants Europeans to pay more for their own security – in the interview he again threatened to take the US out of Nato if Europeans do not “pay their bills”. But that is a separate question about the commitment of the United States to defend Nato countries, not Ukraine.
This creates a dilemma for Europeans, including the UK. If they try to continue to help Ukraine to keep fighting even as Trump seeks to bring the war to an end, they will be thwarting his agenda and are likely to have a problem with him. Are they really willing to jeopardise Nato and the US security guarantee to Europe – in other words, to undermine their own security – in order to continue to support Ukraine? This would not just be futile – if Ukraine was unable to defeat Russia with US support, how is it going to do so without US support? – but irresponsible.
This illustrates perhaps the biggest failure of the foreign policy establishment that Barack Obama’s adviser Ben Rhodes called “the Blob”, which is that it has failed to differentiate clearly enough between the security of Nato countries and EU member states on the one hand and the defence of Ukraine on the other. Since the war began, foreign policy experts have consistently tried to conflate the two by insisting that it was clear that, if Putin were to prevail in Ukraine, he would attack the Baltic states or Poland next. In making this assumption, they reject the idea that there might be trade-offs between the security of Nato countries and the defence of Ukraine.
As a result of this refusal to differentiate between Nato and Ukraine, these foreign policy experts have failed to think clearly and realistically about priorities. They have kept insisting on maximalist war aims in Ukraine – that is, a complete defeat of Russia – that may never have been realistic but were clearly becoming less and less so as Russia advanced and a second Trump administration loomed. Instead of thinking in a clear-headed way about what might happen, the Blob dug in and kept on saying what they thought should happen, that is, Ukraine must win and Russia must be defeated. The strategists have completely failed to think strategically.
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