We have previously reported on Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans. Mr Kristol and the other neocons, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, all love wars and want the United States to participate in them. Today’s left have managed to become so seduced by President Biden’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia than even the very much not-a-neocon Amanda Marcotte was supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit for different reasons.
I’ll admit the shameful truth: I follow Mr Kristol in Twitter, not because I like or even respect his views, but because he does clue me into some of his silliness. I’m not a subscriber to The Atlantic, and wouldn’t have seen this article, had Mr Kristol not retweeted Adrienne LaFrance’s promotion of it.
The Case for the Total Liberation of Ukraine
Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea.
By Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg | Monday, May 1, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
In March 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist.
Oh, I’m pretty sure that Vladimir Vladimirovich believes that Ukraine exists now, and that he’s not particularly happy about it.
There follows several paragraphs — the magazine is given to longer articles — on the history of Prince Potemkin and the fight over Kherson, before we get to the meat of the authors’ advocacy.
When we visited again a few weeks ago, the lights were on, the restaurants were open, and the trains ran on predictable schedules. A coffee shop in the station was serving oat-milk lattes. Bucha is a construction site, with a brand-new hardware store for anyone repairing war damage themselves. A conversation with Zelensky is now a more formal affair, with simultaneous translation, a videographer, and an array of English-speaking aides in attendance. Zelensky himself spoke English much of the time—he has had, he said, a lot more practice. But behind the more polished presentation, the tension and uncertainty persist, fueled by the sense that we are once again at a turning point, once again at a moment when key decisions will be made, in Kyiv, of course, but especially in Washington.
“Especially in Washington.” Not in Warsaw, or Berlin, not in nations much closer to Ukraine, but across all of Europe and the broad Atlantic Ocean.
For although the war is not lost, it is also not won. Kherson is free, but it is under constant attack. Kyiv’s restaurants are open, but refugees have not yet returned home. Russia’s winter offensive has petered out, but as of this writing, in mid-April, it is unclear when Ukraine’s summer offensive will begin. Until it begins, or rather, until it ends, negotiations—about the future of Ukraine and its borders, Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and to Europe, the final status of the Crimean Peninsula—cannot begin either. Right now Putin still seems to believe that a long, drawn-out war of attrition will eventually bring him back his empire: Ukraine’s feckless Western allies will grow tired and give up; maybe Donald Trump will win reelection and align with the Kremlin; Ukraine will retreat; Ukrainians will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Russian soldiers, however poorly armed and trained they may be.
Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. The Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, spoke with us about the “Ramstein Club,” named after the American air base in Germany where the group, which consists of the defense officials of 54 countries, first convened. Still, his most important relationship is with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (“we communicate very, very often”), and everyone knows that this club is organized by Americans, led by Americans, galvanized by Americans. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that Ukrainians now feel they are “strategic partners and friends” with America, something that might not have felt so true a few years ago, when Donald Trump was impeached on charges of seeking to extort Zelensky.
That’s two slams against former President Trump in two paragraphs; no wonder Mr Kristol liked the article. Unmentioned is the fact that Russia invaded and annexed part of Ukraine while Barack Hussein Obama was President, made no moves against Ukraine while Mr Trump was in office, and invaded the rest of that nation once Joe Biden was in the White House.
In our interview with Zelensky, which we conducted with the chair of The Atlantic’s board of directors, Laurene Powell Jobs, we asked him how he would justify this unusual relationship to a skeptical American: Why should Americans donate weapons to a distant war? He was clear in stating that the outcome of the war will determine the future of Europe. “If we will not have enough weapons,” he said, “that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus, and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.” The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.
And now we get to it: the old “domino theory.” But it ignores Russia’s experience in Ukraine, an experience that tells Russia that, even if it wins, conquers, and annexes all of Ukraine, that their army has to be rebuilt, their industries have to modernize, and their resources have to be better channeled. Even if Russia wins, the nation will not be in any shape to invade another of its neighbors for a long time. And President Putin is 70½ years old.
There follows many paragraphs about the necessity for a Ukrainian victory to validate freedom and democracy, to show that such can prevail against an authoritarian nation bent on conquest. That’s all very nice, but at some point it has to be asked: how can Ukraine win? President Zelensky keeps asking for more and more weapons, telling its allies that if we can just give them enough weapons, they can defeat a nation with thrice its manpower, in a war that is being fought not in Russia, but in Ukraine, a country in which its infrastructure is being slowly demolished. As we have previously noted, some have said that the only way Ukraine could win, in the way that President Zelensky and the authors of the Atlantic article want, “Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea,” necessarily involves more than just NATO shipping weapons to Ukraine, but “direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time.”
Really? Our “full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops” involved 697,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. That would require calling up thousands and thousands of reservists, and we need to remember: it took the elder President Bush six months of diplomacy and work after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to assemble and put in place the forces which drove Iraq out of Kuwait. We used staging areas Iraq could not touch to assemble the forces required, but staging areas which Russia could attack.
There is, of course, the small matter of engaging in a direct war with a nation which has a strategic nuclear arsenal, something just blithely waved aside as a serious consideration by the neoconservatives and warmongers. Yes, it would be absolutely great if Vladimir Putin was deposed and Russian forces driven completely out of Ukraine, but I have to ask: how many American cities are we willing to see burned in nuclear fire to see that accomplished? If the answer is greater than zero, I’d like to know what number Mr Kristol believes would be acceptable.
Because that is the risk here, and no one should doubt it. There are all sorts of rational reasons why Russia should not resort to nuclear weapons, even the ‘smallest’ ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons it has, to stave off defeat, but if defeat becomes eminent, who can promise that President Putin or Russian military commanders would base their actions solely on those rational reasons?
The number of American cities I’d be willing to see burned in nuclear fire to save Ukraine? Zero!