In my youth in Minnesota, I was a fan of the local National Hockey League team at the time, the North Stars, and they had a sportscaster, Al Shaver, who gave me my first lesson in military policy and strategy. He ended his programs with this farewell: “When you lose, talk little. When you win, talk less. Good night and good sport.”
Joe Biden and his team would do well to take Shaver’s advice.
Last week, in Poland, near the Ukrainian border, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin caught my attention – and certainly Vladimir Putin’s – by declaring that the US war objective in Ukraine is no longer just to help Ukraine to restore its sovereignty, but also produce a “weakened” Russia.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do the kind of thing it did in invading Ukraine,” he said. “So she’s already lost a lot of military capability — and a lot of her troops, actually. And we want them not to have the ability to reproduce that capability too quickly.”
Please tell me that this statement was the result of a National Security Council meeting led by the president. And that they’ve decided, after carefully weighing the second- and third-order consequences, that it’s in our interest and in our power to degrade Russia’s Armed Forces so much that it won’t be able to project power again — soon? Forever? It is unclear – and that we can do this without risking a nuclear response from a humiliated Putin.
Make no mistake: I hope this war ends with Russia’s armed forces heavily degraded and Putin out of power. It’s just that I would never say that publicly if I was in the lead, because it doesn’t buy anything and it can cost a lot.
Loose tongues sink ships – and they also lay the groundwork for war hype, mission slowness, the disconnect between ends and means, and massive unintended consequences.
There’s been an excess of this on Biden’s team, and the mess has required a lot of cleanup. For example, shortly after Austin’s statement, a National Security Council spokesperson said, according to CNN, that the secretary’s comments reflected US objectives, namely, “to make this invasion a strategic failure for Russia.” “.
Good try. But it was an attempt at artificial cleaning. Forcing Russia to withdraw from Ukraine is not the same thing as declaring that we want to see it so weakened that it can never do that anywhere again – that is an ill-defined war objective. How do you know when this is achieved? And is it an ongoing process? Will we continue to degrade Russia?
In March, in a speech in Poland, Biden said that Putin, “a dictator, bent on rebuilding an empire, will never erase a people’s love for freedom,” and then the president added: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.
After that statement, the White House claimed that Biden “was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia or regime change” but was asserting that Putin “cannot be allowed to wield power over his neighbors or the region.” Another cleaning speech that just convinces me that the National Security Council didn’t have a meeting to define where US involvement in helping Ukraine begins and ends. Instead, people are acting on their own. This is not good.
Our objective started simple and must remain simple: to help the Ukrainians fight as long as they feel like it, and to help them negotiate when they think the time is right – so they can restore their sovereignty and reaffirm the principle that no country can simply devour the your neighbor. To say more than that is an invitation to trouble.
Like this? For starters, I don’t want the US to be responsible for what happens in Russia if Putin is overthrown. Because one of these three things is likely to work:
1) Putin is replaced by someone worse;
2) Chaos erupts in Russia, a country with around 6,000 nuclear warheads. As we saw in the Arab Spring, the opposite of autocracy is not always democracy – it is often disorder;
3) Putin is replaced by someone better. A better leader in Russia would make the whole world better. I pray for it. But for that person to have legitimacy in a post-Putin Russia it is vital that it doesn’t look like we installed it. It has to be a Russian process.
If we get option 1 or 2, you wouldn’t want the Russian population or the world to blame the US for triggering prolonged instability in Russia. Remember our fear of “runaway nukes” in Russia after the fall of communism in the 1990s?
We also don’t want Putin to alienate us from our allies — not all of them would approve of a war aimed not only at liberating Ukraine but also expelling Putin. Without naming names, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently complained that some NATO allies really “want the war to continue. They want Russia to weaken.”
Remember: many countries in the world are neutral in this war because, as much as they sympathize with the Ukrainians, they really don’t like to see the US or NATO acting like a bully – even towards Putin. If this is going to be a long war, and Ukraine manages to regain all or most of its territory, it is vital that this is perceived as Putin against the world, not Putin against the US.
And let’s be careful not to raise Ukrainian expectations too much. Small countries that suddenly receive support from big powers can become intoxicated. Many things have changed in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, except for one: its geography.
It is still, and always will be, a relatively small nation on the Russian border. You’ll have to make some tough compromises before this conflict ends. Let’s not make this even more difficult by adopting unrealistic goals.
Biden’s team has done so well so far with their limited goals. It must stay there.
“The war in Ukraine has given the government the opportunity to demonstrate the unique capabilities of the US in the world today: its ability to forge and maintain a global alliance of countries to face an act of authoritarian aggression; and second, the ability to respond with an economic super weapon that only the dollar’s dominance in the global economy makes possible,” said Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and CEO of geostrategic consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners.
If the US can continue to effectively mobilize these two assets, he added, “it will greatly improve our long-term power and position in the world, and send a very powerful deterrent message to Russia and China.”
In foreign affairs, success breeds authority and credibility, and credibility and authority breed more success. Just restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty and thwarting Putin’s military there would be a major achievement with lasting dividends. Al Shaver knew what he was talking about: when you lose, talk little. When you win, talk less. Everyone can see the score.
