The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Future of European Security - Dr. Mackubin Owens

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Dr. Mackubin Owens, MINDSETTER™

 

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The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Future of European Security - Dr. Mackubin Owens

It has now been two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Once dominating foreign policy news, the conflict has slipped off the front page as other crises—especially the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the Southern US border emergency—have led the news in recent months. The Russo-Ukrainian war has been the graveyard of predictions since the beginning. The experts first assured us that the Russians would achieve a quick victory by seizing Kyiv. They were wrong. They next predicted Russian success in the south and east, but again Ukraine defied expectations with a lightning campaign that pushed Russian forces out of Kharkiv Province in early September 2022.

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But a Ukrainian counteroffensive this past spring and summer fell short of its objectives and the war has deteriorated into a war of attrition, reminiscent of the Western Front in 1917 and 1918.  The Russians, who failed to achieve offensive breakthroughs due to shortcomings at the operational level of war, have proven themselves adept at defense. A war of attrition is a contest of wills, heavily dependent on materiel factors. Ukraine has received massive materiel support from the United States and NATO, but that support is wavering in both the United States and our European allies. That is not a good thing.

Supporters of Ukraine in both the United States and Europe have expressed concerns about the possible return to the White House by Donald Trump in 2025. His recent comment that he would “encourage” the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to allies who don’t pay enough for their defense has certainly caused consternation among supporters of Ukraine but it has also revived the claim that Trumps wants to abandon NATO. But as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated in an interview with CNN on 31 January, Trump’s stance toward NATO had actually strengthened the alliance by getting it to increase defense spending.

On the one hand, Trump’s attitude towards allies has been troubling because of its non-strategic and transactional nature. On the other hand, it is an understandable reaction of those who believe that too many US national security experts have made a fetish out of allies, treating them as ends in themselves. But allies are means, not ends. Their purpose is to strengthen one’s own security status.  An alliance that does not serve the interests of the United States is of little value.

The fact is that thanks to the United States, our European allies have enjoyed a decades-long holiday from the primary responsibility of any state: its security. They have benefitted from the benign international conditions of the 1990s and early 2000s, which the United States helped to create, believing them to be a prelude to a peaceful global community.

I have called this period the “age of strategic happy talk.” It went by other names: “the unipolar moment” and the “end of history.” It represented the confluence of two related events: geopolitically, the victory of the West in the Cold War; and militarily, the rapid US victory in the First Gulf War. But as Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian “philosopher of war” observed, “in war, the outcome is never final.” Those “victories” proved to be fleeting and with them, the idea that they would somehow presage the emergence of a universal peace. Now it’s clear that progress toward global harmony isn’t happening, and nourishing such illusions is dangerous.

It is dangerous and short-sighted to entertain the opposite extreme and abandon not only Ukraine but also NATO and other alliances.  But Europeans need to face two harsh international realities:  that Russian aggression is a threat to wider Europe; and that the resources and patience of United States are finite.

As my friend and colleague, Jakub Grygiel, argued recently in the Wall Street Journal, Europe has a major stake in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War, because an aggressive Russia is likely to outlast Putin.  And weak, non-strategic US leadership has not helped Europe. As Grygiel observes, “President Joe Biden has 11 months left in his administration. If we take the past three years as an indication of what he may do, Europe faces serious risks. So far the Biden administration has abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, has willfully dragged out the war in Ukraine by spoon-feeding Kyiv with enough arms not to be overwhelmed by Russia but not enough to defeat it, and has entered into a war with Iran and its proxies without a clear vision of victory.”

While commentators are quick to condemn Trump for what they think he might do vis a vis Ukraine and NATO in a second term, the non-strategic approach of the Biden administration should be condemned for what it has already done to Europe. Grygiel contends that Biden wants to avoid a presidential election in the shadow of a war, and accordingly has a strong interest in striking a deal with Russia, regardless of what this may mean for Ukraine. “The inability of Congress to agree to fund the next batch of weapons for Ukraine—caused in part by the Democrats’ insistence on ignoring the crises on the U.S. southern border—is helpful for Mr. Biden as it reduces American exposure to the war and prepares the conditions for freezing the conflict. Ukraine—and, with it, European security—is at risk of being sacrificed well before Inauguration Day 2025.”

Europeans should be afraid, but the object of their fear should not be Trump’s rhetoric. The reality is that Europeans must take the necessary steps to ensure their own security no matter what a presidential candidate says. 

Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. 

He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.

Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”

Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.

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