Ross Douthat gets into the scenario act in his most recent New York Times column. The three he foresees are:
- Regime change in Moscow
- A brutal Russian victory and grinding occupation
- A swift cease-fire followed by peace on not-entirely-ideal terms
closing with words of support for the Biden Administration:
So far the Biden administration has met the test of this war’s outbreak quite impressively, both in rallying support for Ukraine and in letting events unfold to our benefit organically without taking outsize risks. But those benefits are provisional, contingent on how the war ends and what kind of peace follows — and those tests are yet to come.
I think that something between the second and third are the most likely with ongoing resistance from Ukrainians while a notional cease-fire is in place arriving at “not-entirely-ideal terms”.
In a round table at the New York Times Messrs. Douthat and Friedman are joined by Yara Bayoumy and moderated by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Ms. Bayoumy’s primary contribution is:
It has been obviously interesting to see this information war play out, whether it was seeing how a lot of Ukrainians have really taken to social media, young Ukrainians, as well saying how they are all — will do anything to defend their country.
And that I think has struck a nerve in a way and has appealed to a lot of Western audiences watching that I’m not sure we’ve really seen before. That is very powerful. But I also worry about a couple of scenarios related to that, which is seeing this encouragement, including by President Zelensky himself, of having foreigners come in to fight for the defense of Ukraine.
And what also worries me the most as well is that we get to a situation where the U.S. and the West has committed, as we’ve seen right now, very strongly towards the defense of Ukraine. But it ends up being — again, because of the unequal firepower between and capabilities between both the Ukrainian Army and the Russian Army — it just becomes this protracted siege like guerrilla warfare conflict.
I think there’s a lot of concerns and worries now about what a prolonged sort of insurgency warfare would look like. And that to me really is a nightmare scenario.
As I have intimated in the past I think that “information war” presents a major risk. Messrs. Douthat and Friedman add little to the two columns I’ve already cited.
My skepticism on #2 is whether that is sustainable long term without destabilizing much of Eastern Europe (including NATO members).
For example, if the model is an Afghan insurgency (funding and arming militants); from experience it left Pakistan full of militants which it couldn’t control and led to 9/11, Afghan war, ISIS, etc.
There is another alternative. Putin follows the Sino-Vietnamese war model; destroy the mass of the Ukrainian military (equipment, soldiers), much of its industrial capacity that would be used to arm a military, then withdraw to pre-war borders.
At that point Ukraine would take a generation to rebuild a modern military. And would a destroyed Ukraine needing hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild be a viable candidate for EU or NATO membership?
I think that’s pretty likely.