A Policy of Consequences

Tanner Greer has an op-ed in the New York Times, urging us to consider the consequences of our policy with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rather than focusing solely on the righteousness of the Ukrainians’ cause. The observant might recognize Tanner as “T. Greer”, the blogger at The Scholar’s Stage. The Scholar’s Stage is one of my favorite blogs and I have added it to my blogroll.

Here’s a snippet from the post at The Scholar’s Stage on the op-ed:

I have an op-ed out in the New York Times today arguing that we must intentionally ground our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in careful, cost-benefit calculation instead of emotional reaction or moral fervor. The piece is given the unfortunate title “Ukraine’s Cause is Righteous. That Shouldn’t Shape Policy.” My argument is not that the rightness of the Ukrainian cause does not matter, but that in moments of crisis it is easy to do things that feel right even if they do not help us achieve the right outcomes. The righteous demand to do the right thing—now!—unnaturally speeds the tempo of decision making and warps the policy review process. The end result are statesmen rushing into policies whose consequences they have not fully gamed out.

These points are not new to you all: I made them all at greater length in an essay published on this website two weeks ago. Like that essay, today’s New York Times piece hearkens back to the poor policy planning process that preceded the invasion of Iraq. This comparison is not playing well on Twitter. This is partially because the idea that Iraq was a problem of moral imperatives gone wrong is not intuitive to folks who have not studied the origins of that war in close detail (e.g. see here, here, and here), and there was no space to provide those details in the column. But a lot of what is riling people up is the implicit moral comparison they think is being made between the neocons of Bush ’43 and Western leaders today. But that is not my argument! The comparison is necessary not because an invasion and a stand against invasion are moral equivalents, but because in both situations we find American statesmen working outside of the normal policy process in the immediate aftermath of an emotionally charged attack on innocent people.

That dovetails nicely with James Joyner’s assessment of the situation at OTB:

The obvious settlement is one in which Ukraine concedes Crimea, which is already a fait accompli, as well as Eastern Ukraine to Russia along with a pledge to never join NATO. That would be a bitter pill, indeed, for Zelensky. But he’s more-or-less made the NATO pledge already and Crimea was gone years ago.

Would President Biden and other Western leaders go along with this? I’m not so sure. While far short of his original war aims, it would be a clear victory for Putin and a massive reward for his atrocities.

Then again, the West has very little skin in this game. We’re supplying massive amounts of weapons to help the Ukrainians fight on. But will that be enough to achieve a total victory? If not, how many Ukrainians do we want to die by prolonging this fight for months, or even years?

Which leaves me where I’ve been for weeks: I simply don’t know the answer to these questions.

I’ll make the remarks here I was tempted to make there. Discounting the risk of escalation to increasing direct participation by NATO which every wargame has found leads to a nuclear exchange, I think there’s a substantial risk that the U. S. and our NATO allies will be reluctant to accept a resolution of the war that the Ukrainians themselves are willing to accept. I suspect that James’s scenario described above fits that. What would the Ukrainians get from it? An end to the shelling of Ukrainian cities, the shelling and bombing of Ukrainian cities not intensifying, and a small amount of sovereignty since the present Ukrainian government would remain in place. It would save Ukrainian lives.

I recognize that’s not a moral solution. Will it encourage Putin to engage in similar actions in the Baltic or elsewhere? I honestly don’t know but I doubt it given the Russian experience in Ukraine.

Whether we would accept that is a question of priorities.

Such a suggestion will no doubt be condemned as immoral, appeasement, crypto-Russian, etc. Again, it’s a question of priorities. I still don’t believe that Putin is Hitler (or crazy), that Russia is Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or that Ukraine is Poland in 1939.