By Uditha Devapriya –

Uditha Devapriya

It’s not wrong to concede that the US-led Western order is winning in Ukraine. It’s also not wrong to concede that Russia’s strategies lie beyond victory and defeat, and that it is overstretching and overextending the war and slowly raising the odds in its favour. This is not a classic military campaign in which one side triumphs over another: it is, as Dr Dayan Jayatilleka has accurately pointed out, a proxy war, between NATO and Russia, with Kiev as the proxy. The real question isn’t which side one takes, but why a side must be taken at all. Coming almost a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it thus makes sense to analyse what academics and writers are saying about the US’s place in that conflict.

Western commentators, by and large, advocate intervention. There are exceptions, like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. But they are exceptions. Most Western newspapers and journals, including the big ones like The Economist and Foreign Policy, not to mention The New York Times, continue to promote US intervention in Ukraine. Those who oppose this line do so for a variety of reasons. Some, like Mearsheimer, believe that its involvement in Ukraine has forced the US to lose its focus in Asia, where the more crucial strategic war with its “peer competitor”, China, is unfolding dramatically. Others, like Walt, contend that in continuing to intervene, the US is embarking on a futile crusader’s quest.

Walt’s argument is interesting, if provocative. He argues that the US has been unable to “act with restraint.” He posits four reasons for this. First, the US’s long tryst with liberalism, a creed that lays so much emphasis on “universal rights” that it provokes its most powerful purveyor on the world stage to preach to and convert other states to its doctrines. Second, its possession of “a remarkable amount of power”, which compels elites and presidents to act unilaterally instead of appeasing or compromising with a rival power. Third, the much criticised “military-industrial complex”, or the merger of the bureaucracy and the corporate sector, which has pushed the country to “maintain its outsized global role.” And fourth, the profusion of interest groups and lobbying firms, not to mention media organisations, which has swayed policymakers in the US to advocate intervention, even war.

It’s interesting to note that critics of intervention aren’t necessarily opposed to the values that US officials say they are promoting and defending in other countries. Walt, for instance, openly contends that “I like the United States’ liberal values as much as anyone.” Even John Mearsheimer’s criticism of the US losing its strategic focus in Asia, vis-à-vis China, reflects a fundamental belief in those values. As far as academic discussions in the US and the West over Ukraine are concerned, therefore, the main cleavages do not centre on the validity of US values, but rather for what purpose, or for what campaigns, they must be deployed. Both Walt and Mearsheimer argue that the US is wasting time in Europe against Russia: a country which, in their view, lacks the capabilities that China possesses.

On the other side of the debate are those who draw a fine line between US interventions of the past and its present activities in Ukraine. These advocates of intervention begin their arguments by noting that, yes, the US has blundered in the past, but that the situation in Ukraine is different. Whereas intervention in Latin America during the Cold War, and West Asia after it, ended up achieving nothing and fuelling resentment against the US, in Ukraine at present the issue is, as James Traub explains in Foreign Policy, about “an unprovoked war of territorial aggression.” In other words, unlike the interventions of the past – “in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq” – where the US waged wars “against distant threats”, the invasion of Ukraine has justified the use of immediate force: “sometimes,” Traub tells us, “you have no choice but to keep killing people until the other side stops.”

The arguments of the interventionists do not entirely lack substance. Nevertheless, at one level, they are rooted in rather questionable assumptions. The line Traub draws between the campaigns of the past and US involvement in Ukraine, for instance, does seem credible. Yet the arguments which follow this – that there are moral considerations in Ukraine, that securing Ukraine is in the US’s interests, and that the US’s power implicitly devolves on it a responsibility to “keep killing people until the other side stops” – are the same arguments made once upon a time in defence of interventions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and, during the Cold War, in Latin and Central America. More crucially, while the war in Ukraine may have different moral trappings, they are benefiting the same interests: as the US media itself has reported, the biggest beneficiaries of US intervention in Ukraine have been corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Kongsberg Defence.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, George Packer writes that the US’s foreign policy must continue to be shaped by its commitment to liberal values. He inserts an important caveat: liberalism, as it stands, contains some fundamental flaws, and the US, in its foreign policy, needs to take note of them. “This recognition of limits,” Packer contends, “would make a foreign policy founded on liberal values more persuasive abroad and more sustainable with the American electorate.” At the same time, the rise of leaders opposed to those values – Packer predictably mentions Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – makes it incumbent on the US to try and “bring the light of freedom to the world.”

The dichotomy Packer draws here is between darkness and light. In its almost Manichean overtones, it reinforces the same divisions invoked in defence of US interventions in the past: ironically, the same interventions advocates of intervention in Ukraine across the West highlight, and then contrast, against what the US is currently doing in Eastern Europe. Walt unpacks this line of reasoning succinctly: it is, he notes, a “well-worn line of argument”, one which has been deployed for far too long to acquire any novelty in the hands of academics, analysts, and commentators who promote US involvement in Ukraine on the grounds that Ukraine is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. “Insanity,” a famous witticism runs, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Walt invokes this in his essay: “it is so hard,” he concludes, “for the United States to stop doing stupid stuff.”

*Uditha Devapriya is a freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com. He is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think-tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk.