Realism and restraint produce better foreign policy
It’s time to rethink U.S. support for Ukraine and demand Europe shoulder its own security burden.
By Jimmie T. Smith, Coalitions Director at Concerned Veterans for America
Since the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the United States has remained heavily involved on the periphery, providing funds, humanitarian aid, weapons, and rhetorical support for the cause of Ukrainian sovereignty. Three years, 35 billion dollars, and over a million casualties later, it is time to rethink America’s role in the Ukrainian cause.
The U.S.’ role in Ukraine goes deeper than the peripheral, as reported in a recent New York Times story. A misguided and reckless foreign policy has allowed U.S. leadership under the Biden administration to inch us closer and closer to war with a nuclear adversary.
“America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) …A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”
That excerpt alone should give you pause. Not only has the U.S. taken the public role of supplying Ukraine with weapons and financial aid, but it’s also taken the secret role of contributing to specific military operations against Russia, including those that have targeted senior Russian military officials.
In doing so, U.S. leaders, and the foreign policy elites advising them, have put us dangerously close to retaliatory Russian aggression.
As much as we may wish for a Ukrainian victory over our geopolitical rivals (I’m a Cold War-era veteran, I get it), the world will rarely be exactly as we wish it. Operating as if we can shape the world in our image, bankrolling European security all the while, is foolish and dangerous. And notably, it rarely works.
The U.S. has carried Europe’s security bag long enough
Russia’s war in Ukraine has dragged on for more than three years now. While it’s heartening that negotiations to end the bloody conflict are finally underway, peace and stability seem a long way off.
One of the sticking points to these negotiations is possible Western security guarantees for Ukraine and what role the U.S. and NATO will have in the region’s future.
Naturally, Ukraine wants security guarantees as part of any negotiated settlement. Many European leaders feel the same way. That is hardly surprising, as most of Europe has allowed the U.S. to carry the bag for European security for decades – a continuation of the post-WW2 European security arrangement whereby the United States was the only nation equipped to secure the continent as it barreled into the Cold War.
At the end of the Cold War, European nations were cumulatively fielding dozens of divisions, numbering millions of troops, with America as the ultimate guarantor of European security. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, any pretense of security parity was abandoned – and the United States simply accepted it as part of a broader consensus that this was simply the cost of being the world’s only superpower.
Though NATO countries are inching toward meeting defense spending commitments and providing for their own security, Europe has developed a codependent relationship with the U.S. which assumes that Europe (and NATO) will always be America’s top priority. Only a substantial change in U.S. foreign policy will cause the Europeans to wake up and start treating their own security with at least the level of seriousness that the United States has for the past 80 years.
That policy change should come in the form of embracing realism and restraint.
The “pivot” that can’t take place
New U.S. leaders are well-positioned to now make decisions informed by how the world actually is rather than how we wish it could be. They must use America’s defense dollars and military might as the last resort within a spectrum of American foreign policy options, not a first step. Neglecting our non-military tools of national power causes us to overextend our resources, while strategic priorities go unaddressed.
For over a decade, policymakers have been talking about a “Pacific Pivot,” focusing U.S. strategic resources on countering China. Yet, for all that realignment, we continue to pour resources into the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The 2022 National Security Strategy declared that “(t)here is nothing beyond our capacity.” Respectfully, I disagree.
No nation, no matter how prosperous, no matter how rich in resources, can operate in multiple regions without a loss of effectiveness. Nor should it. Our simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were recent warnings about the danger of mission creep and confused goals as military leaders tried to prioritize too many things without a direct link to U.S. national interests.
The same is true today. Open-ended military aid to Ukraine has drastically reduced U.S. stockpiles of vital munitions. The limits of our inventories became clear after the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel, which led to the U.S. rerouting artillery shells from Ukraine to Israel. Similar tradeoffs have become painfully apparent between our efforts to supply Ukraine and Taiwan.
Our potential adversaries are acutely aware that America is stretched dangerously thin, and they do all they can to exacerbate that situation by exploiting America’s foreign policy impulses. China can buy Iranian oil to indirectly support the Houthi rebels in Yemen that target U.S. ships. That means less American ships supporting Pacific operations.
But it’s not too late to stop taking the bait and correct our course.
Time to reprioritize
The Trump administration’s commitment to end the war in Ukraine is a good start, but it’s just that – a start. America must take a step back from overextending American lives and treasure in defense of other nation’s causes so that we can prioritize our own.
We must seek a swift end to the war in Ukraine that excludes any security guarantees from NATO or the United States. We must realign the security burden within NATO and refuse to continue funding the European security grift with American taxpayer dollars. And we must devote our resources to only the most strategic causes to be ready for the problems of tomorrow.
Jimmie T. Smith is coalitions director for Concerned Veterans for America and a veteran of the United States Army.