Ukraine - Waiting on Trump
The Liberal Order Plays Poker With A Weak Hand
The two month delay before the newly elected President Trump can take executive office from the evidently rapidly declining (in mental terms) President Biden is proving fraught to say the least. Although the President continues to ‘take decisions’, we can reasonably surmise that these decisions are vectored through a Cabinet that is attempting both to set the conditions for his successor and to secure a collective legacy, using every tool in their tool box and leaving the consequences to the future. Trump, probably wisely, is allowing them to continue to dig themselves deeper into a hole of their own making. He is remaining relatively silent but the risk of military escalation going beyond the line tolerable to Moscow is creating something close to terror in those who actually understand what is at stake here and is beginning to destabilise domestic politics in some European capitals.
The ‘reasoning’ behind escalation is simple – if Trump-led peace talks are inevitable (which is likely), the West has only two months to improve the Ukrainian negotiating position to the point where Russia has something material to fear from what is left behind by Biden and his allies. Trump may not have a problem with this strategy since it improves his ability to step in and get a win for peace. However, although huge sums of money and an escalation of weaponry during this period becomes necessary despite the clear signal sent by the American electorate, it also means increasingly unpopular Western governments are being forced to make their own dramatic commitments (including threats of deploying their troops on Ukrainian soil) which must extend well beyond January 2025 if there is no peace. That is a lot of strategic and economic drain on economies that are experiencing low growth, deindustrialisation or the threat of stagflation. We may see the new US Administration leaving Europeans to fight a draining war for which, in many cases, they do not have the internal political capital.
The Russian response is intelligent. Western hawks might want to trigger a ‘Pearl Harbour’ moment that enables political elites to force their populations into line behind a conventional war even if that threatens to trigger the US nuclear guarantee or ‘nuclearise’ Ukraine itself but, for all his threats, Putin (or Xi or the Iranians for that matter) does not seem inclined to help them out. This notional ‘axis of resistance’ to Western hegemony (or paladins of multipolarity if you prefer) can maintain wars or threats that are localised and which do not trigger Article V formally or the US commitment to defend Israel or the weaker one to defend Taiwan until the West is perhaps too exhausted and divided to respond decisively.
The first use by the Russians of an intermediate ballistic hypersonic on Kiev without significant warheads was clever. It educated millions that immolation with multiple nuclear warheads, whatever happened to Russia, was less than twenty minutes away and was effectively unstoppable. The West’s ‘rational’ response could thus only be a pre-emptive strike that would be politically impossible without several more stages of escalation and far more popular support for Western political elites than currently exists. Only Trump (after January 20th) has the political authority to press a red button and he is clearly disinclined to do so. If Biden tried to do this, I doubt if the American military would follow him without a provocation that Putin has no intention of providing.
Where we are now is that the actual risk of a nuclear exchange is still low but it is not negligible. The Russians continue to advance, regardless of Ukrainian missile strikes deeper into Russian territory. They appear happy to treat Kursk as a cauldron in which the Ukrainians lose men and assets. Kursk is also a sitting excuse not to engage in talks while Ukrainians sit on Russian territory and lob missiles at Russia. Meanwhile, the UK is depleting its own Storm Shadow supplies in order to give Ukraine some edge. There does seem to be something of a bounce-back in Ukrainian morale but the fundamentals have not changed. Russia may see more losses than otherwise as a result of Western decisions but the new weaponry only has a limited reach. The Russians are still winning in terms of their initial war aims. They simply have to hold on for two months and negotiate well with a newly sympathetic US. No wonder European centrists and some neo-nationalists, who have built their careers in part on the Russian bogeyman, are nervous.
Europeans are divided but the fragmentation is both horizontal (between elites) and vertical (between elites and peoples). In general European political elites (with important exceptions that slow down unified decision-making) remain pro-Ukrainian but a division is beginning to emerge between those happy to support Kiev with weapons and funds only (such as Italy and Germany) and those, nuclear powers most notably, who are talking (though possibly only for effect) more aggressively about not only permitting their weaponry to strike Russian territory but sending soldiers on to Ukrainian soil (UK and France). The rhetoric is even moving towards tactical nuclear deployment. This, of course, is madness but these are mad times. The relationship between political elites and populations is what matters in the long run because (as noted above) the elites need a dog (a ‘just cause’ such as a Pearl Harbour event) to get the sheep out of the paddock and into the abattoir. At the moment, the sheep are quite happy to munch on the lush grass and ignore the distant barking of poodles. Russia seems to be skilled at frightening many ordinary Westerners whilst not provoking them into complicity with their own doom.
The problem is that three major European countries (Germany, France and the UK) have inherently unstable political situations for reasons only very indirectly connected to the war. Sending troops and then seeing body bags come home can either be seen as cause for revenge and popular mobilisation or as cause for resentment and protest. We could have a ‘by jingo’ moment supporting those plucky Ukrainians or, more likely unless Russia does something very silly, a Vietnam moment. Germany is neutered for the moment by the fact of an election on February 23rd where two populist parties are actively opposed to war and to its costs and consequences. The German Defence Minister clowns about with militarist tropes in a desperate attempt to appropriate right wing mentalities for his collapsing party. The situation is not helped by very public preparations for war in a country more vulnerable to conventional conflict and tactical nuclear exchange than the US, UK and France (although not, of course, to strategic nuclear exchange). No election can be fully predicted but the probability is of a conservative (CDU) administration trying to hold on to a pro-Ukraine Europeanist position that evades actual war or which is forced into neutrality by the necessity of working with the AfD.
The Macron and Starmer regimes in France and the UK are, meanwhile, drawing closer together on a more aggressive pro-Ukraine platform. Neither will have much of a voice in Washington by the end of January. Both are deeply troubled politically because, although constitutionally secure, neither is entirely democratically secure. Both are facing serious economic difficulties that might eventually lead either to increased public order issues or (in France) an opportunity for populism under Le Pen to seize executive control of a major nuclear power. The sight of Starmer and Macron posturing on military vehicles together is looked on with disdain or indifference by populations more concerned with impending austerity and economic crisis. A remarkable right-led public petition in the UK demanding a new General Election (which will stand on the record until May) garnered well over 2.7m signatures in less than a week and is still growing. Although this has nothing to do with foreign policy and will not be acted upon, it represents a widespread sense of discontent with a Government that is seen in multiple and often competing negative lights. This is rapidly turning into a much more general discontent with how the country is governed regardless of Party. Something similar is happening in many other European countries.
In other words, because of the lack of public interest in pursuing war for an abstract ideal (the liberal international order) and the inherent hypocrisies emerging within the liberal centrist political community (as in the confused responses to the ICC condemnation of Netanyahu), much of the ‘escalation’ on both sides is performative rather than material but with the very real risk that someone somewhere will make a misjudgement and let all hell loose. There is no way that the Russians will give way on their fundamental vision of national security (which is far less abstract than the vision of the West). The country is huge and strategies of population defence and resistance well honed. On the other hand, despite claims to the contrary, Russian war aims are limited, not imperialist: it is probable that Trump understands this and can accommodate them. They are, in fact, not unreasonable in the light of history - and if we remove abstract liberal ideals from the equation. European centrists have invested heavily in the absurd paranoia of Russian ambitions to re-conquer Europe. A limited sensible peace settlement under US patronage terrifies them. It pulls the rug out from a significant part of their ideological self image.
The problem for European political elites is that there is more at stake than the fate of Ukraine (which would survive as a major nation after a settlement even if largely ‘owned’ by the major investment funds and local associates whose support would be required for reconstruction). The ‘abstract ideals’ are (as with the Democrats in the US) what holds their coalitional parties together. The discrediting of those ideals, whether because of defeat in the field (following failures in Afghanistan and the Middle East, let alone Georgia) or because of economic failure that becomes linked to the promotion of those ideals, shifts the terms of political trade towards charismatic alternative leaderships and to national populist solutions which are either more war-like than they are (as in the Baltics, the Nordics, Poland and the Netherlands) or far less federalist and militarist than they have become (as possibly in the US, Germany, Romania, the Balkans, Hungary , Austria, Slovenia and Slovakia). Ukraine is relevant less in itself (for European elites) than as a prism through which the pure light of Europeanism fragments into a rainbow of alternative and competing visions of future European security and order.
The best situation for European elites may, in fact, be to allow Europe to appear to go to the brink of war over the next two months to ensure the best possible negotiating stance for Kiev as Trump opens up talks and then for peace to arrive on terms that look like a draw rather than a victory for Moscow. The self-evident problem is that brinks of war are not easy to control or manage and almost any probable solution is going to be hard to sell as a Russian loss or Western victory. Crossing a red line under certain conditions may leave an under-resourced Europe with discontented populations stuck in a Vietnam-like ‘body bags’ crisis and with the US reluctant to do anything further to support it unless Russia crosses a NATO boundary (which it will not despite huge provocation). In short, the ‘West’ is playing with fire (quite literally) in the belief that it can control the situation much as the Austro-Hungarian Empire thought it could in 1914. The intellectual capacity of Western leaderships becomes a material fact in the survival of the West. This in itself is a reason for some gloom, looking at them clinically and collectively.