A new American strategy for Ukraine

When he gives his crucial speech on Ukraine in coming days, President Biden needs to provide a different framing.

Helping Ukraine is still the right thing to do. But helping Ukraine “as long as it takes,” as Biden and his team are prone to say, is fundamentally unsatisfying — not only to MAGA Republicans, but increasingly to most Republicans and even to many non-Republicans, who wonder how long the United States should support an open-ended and currently stalemated war effort.

To be clear: I agree with Biden that we must help Ukraine remain sovereign, independent and well-defended. It would be a moral calamity to abandon Ukraine in a war that is totally Russia’s responsibility. It would ignore America’s obligations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which we promised to help ensure its future security as a way of persuading Ukraine to give up the nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. Worst of all, it would constitute a huge strategic risk, since a Putin who was victorious in Ukraine could then become a serious threat to NATO countries like Latvia and Estonia — risking direct conflict with the U.S.

But expressing an open-ended commitment without conditions or time horizons only makes obvious sense for existential wars of national survival. Otherwise, any strategist must periodically review the costs and benefits of various possible policies before simply continuing with the current approach. As a political practicality, Americans expect as much.

Biden should announce that we will sustain and even increase support for Ukraine through 2024 and into 2025. But he should also acknowledge that, at that point, a newly elected president — himself or Donald Trump or someone else — would naturally be expected to conduct a fresh strategic review of the conflict (which is quite likely to be ongoing at that point, alas), taking into account all relevant factors in proposing any future course of action.

It is too soon to do that, however. For now, we should continue with the current strategy — and even intensify it. Biden should explain one by one the reasons for this approach:

1. In history, major wars often only reach their key turning points two to four years into the effort. The Ukraine war has not yet reached two years of duration. For example, in America’s major wars, the average turning point (for those wars we won) was usually after around 25 to 30 months. Ukraine’s own history, notably in the world wars, is not dissimilar.
2. Absorbing and learning to operate modern military equipment is a multi-year process. The average member of the American military serves about five to six years, and many of our troops serve 10 to 20 years or more, during which time they build up more and more expertise. Most U.S. military units train up to full combat readiness over cycles lasting one to two years. Ukraine has had Western tanks for only a few months and does not yet have any western aircraft. Most of its troops have had only modest training. The Ukrainian military needs all of 2024 to have a reasonable chance at carrying out effective combined-arms warfare (though they have been rather impressive to date in much of what they have already done).
3. American politics currently give Putin hope, and that is counterproductive. It is important that the prospect of a Trump victory in 13 months, or assertive action by Republicans in Congress before that, not encourage Putin to keep fighting in the hope that the White House will deliver him the victory that his own army cannot. Even if Trump would likely take a more minimalist approach to the Ukraine war than Biden, his new strategy would only emerge after he assembled a national security team that then developed the plan. In particular, the Trump team would presumably want to examine options for helping Ukraine keep its currently-held territory, and of course its sovereignty, even if the U.S. stopped providing Ukraine with offensive capabilities to attempt to retake occupied land.

As retired Gen. David Petraeus and strategist Fred Kagan have argued, there are reasons to hope that the current Ukrainian offensive, which is gaining at most hundreds of meters a day in territory, could produce results much faster in the months to come. Even incremental progress at some point adds up; forward Ukrainian fighting positions will then be able to range Russian supply lines that extend from Ukraine’s east over to Crimea. Also, while there is little immediate prospect of Russian lines breaking, it is not clear that Russia has adequate strategic reserves to plug any gaps that do develop in coming months. The current stalemate may break someday — just as the stalemate on the western front in World War I that prevailed from 1915-1917 finally broke in 1918.

Ukraine deserves a serious chance to retake its occupied territory and liberate its own peoples who live in those parts of the country before we give up on that possibility. My own instinct is that Ukraine’s prospects of achieving all these goals even by 2025 are no better than 50-50. But it is too soon to draw that conclusion — and it is certainly too soon to impose it on Ukraine’s government.

If, in 2025, battlefield conditions and other factors make it wiser to adopt a fallback strategy, that may be an adequate approach to defend America’s core interests. Such a strategy might be one in which we help Ukraine hold the territory it then controls, maintain a sovereign and safe government, strengthen its own defenses to deter or stop any future Russian offensive, and anchor Ukraine to the West with some kind of security arrangement, whether through NATO or otherwise. But that would be an approach that gave Putin some of what he had wanted all along and, in that sense, would risk being seen as rewarding cross-border aggression. It is not a decision we should ever reach lightly, and it would be badly premature to reach it now.

Yes, the Ukraine war is expensive for us. But Europeans are contributing every bit as much as Americans when financial aid and refugee resettlement costs are considered, and the burden on us amounts to just over 5 percent of the total U.S. defense budget and about 0.2 percent of GDP. Given the stakes at hand, it is affordable and sustainable — as, by the way, is a new strategy for securing the border and attacking the fentanyl problem more assertively, which Republicans are right to identify as an additional top national security priority.

Biden can and should say as much in his speech, as well. But his top goal is to explain why the Ukraine war effort must in fact be intensified now — even if it should not be viewed as a forever war.

Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, and author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”