Counting the costs of losing Ukraine
The Washington Post
January 31, 2025
Ukrainian soldiers participate in military exercises in the country's Chernihiv region on Friday, January 31, 2025. (Maksym Kishka/Reuters)
Yes, by all means, Secretary of State Marco Rubio should be “realistic” about Ukraine. Let’s win.
In the aftermath of costly U.S. frustrations in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, advocating foreign policy “realism” is often shorthand for modest assessments of what U.S. power can accomplish in a world less malleable than many policymakers once thought. Those three interventions involved attempts to cause democratic institutions to take root in inhospitable social soil.
The U.S. intervention in Ukraine — the proxy war with Russia is a war — is different. And the cost of losing even, perhaps especially, a proxy war can be steep.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio says we should be “realistic” regarding Ukraine, he is not, one hopes, worrying about U.S. prestige. The bigger danger is excessive pessimism about what can be achieved, and a too-sanguine calculation of a low cost of choosing defeat.
Before he became vice president, JD Vance said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.”
Richard Moore, head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, says the cost of not supporting Ukraine “would be infinitely higher” than the cost of supporting it.
Ukrainian troops short of ammunition in September 2024 …credit The Washington Post
Elaine McCusker, Frederick W. Kagan and Richard Sims, in their American Enterprise Institute report “Dollars and Sense: America’s Interest in a Ukrainian Victory,” explain why.
They estimate that a five-year $808 billion increase in defense spending would be necessary if Vladimir Putin prevails and menaces Eastern and Central Europe. That is seven times more than the cost they estimate of preventing a 2026 collapse of Ukraine’s military — a cost consisting mostly of money spent in the United States on weapons production.
The AEI report projects the budgetary consequences of Ukraine’s defeat: more than 900,000 Russian troops along a new 2,600-mile front between NATO and Russia. This would require the counter-positioning of U.S. and other NATO forces. Russia could conscript battle-tested Ukrainians into its military.
For decades, NATO has not configured forces to fight a conventional war in Europe. To the cost of quickly ramping up the surge capacity of the U.S. defense industrial base, add the cost of 266,000 more military personnel.
The report does not estimate the costs of the refugee and humanitarian crisis that would be caused by what Russia has shown is in store for occupied Ukraine: murder, pillage, mass rape, barbaric torture, the kidnapping of children. (See the Yale School of Public Health’s report on Russia’s “deportation, re-education, and coerced adoption and fostering of children from Ukraine,” as after Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea.)
Putin’s Russia is hardly an irresistible force. Andrei Kolesnikov of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, writing in Foreign Affairs, notes that to control inflation — now more than 9 percent and rising — Russia’s central bank has a benchmark interest rate of 21 percent. The quick collapse of the Russia-friendly Assad regime in Syria, and the hostility of the Erdogan regime in Turkey (it has called for the return of Crimea to Ukraine), underscores Putin’s futilities after a quarter-century in power.
Up to 1 million Russians, many young and talented, have left Putin’s country. It has suffered 700,000 dead and wounded since Feb. 24, 2022, all for its current occupation of about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory.
As The Post has reported, Putin’s redlines “are constantly being crossed”: His warnings against giving Ukraine modern fighter jets, main battle tanks and long-range missiles delayed, but did not prevent, their deliveries.
Losing a war in which the dying is done by proxies would tell Putin that the West’s pain threshold is contemptibly low. His dangerous disdain is already evident as he wages barely covert warfare across Europe: assassinations, arson, likely attacks on undersea cables and other sabotage.
All wars end. This one will, either with negotiations or with a Ukrainian collapse presaging another war. Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia (2012-2014), now at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, correctly says (in Foreign Affairs) that Putin will negotiate seriously only when his forces no longer have the capacity to seize more territory.
McFaul thinks that for the negotiations to achieve more than an interval between Putin aggressions, Ukraine needs “the credible deterrence that only NATO can offer.”
NATO membership might be currently unattainable. More military muscle for Ukraine is not. Aid sufficient to produce a durable stalemate, and unendurable costs for Putin’s regime, is the way for the United States and its NATO allies to avoid being penny wise and pound foolish.
Success, such as it might be in Ukraine, will be unsatisfying but much less costly than failure to achieve it. And defeat in Ukraine is a choice.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, "American Happiness and Discontents," was released in September 2021.follow on X@georgewill
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