The Media Squabble

There’s quite a bit of disagreement in the media about the NATO summit and it doesn’t all fall within party lines. The editors of the Wall Street Journal are optimistic:

The first task in Vilnius is to sustain support for Ukraine through a difficult counteroffensive and whatever comes next. Western leaders still seem reluctant to say they want Ukraine to win outright, which is a mistake because it sends the Kremlin mixed signals about Western resolve. But barring a decisive victory, the allies have a stake in helping Ukraine negotiate a peace from a position of strength. That will mean more advanced arms shipments.

NATO also needs to finish the expansion it started in the wake of the Ukraine invasion when Sweden and Finland announced their intention to join. Finland is now a member but Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is blocking Sweden’s bid for no good (or even obvious) reason. This week’s summit will be a chance for other leaders to remind Mr. Erdogan that Turkey benefits from belonging to the bloc, which comes with a commitment to be a team player.

A bigger question concerns Ukraine after the war. A debate is underway over whether Ukraine should benefit from a formal Western security guarantee, or perhaps join NATO. President Biden is cautious about membership, but the West has already decided that defending Ukraine from Russia is in its interest—hence the weapons supplies.

Ukraine at the end of the war will have one of the strongest militaries in Europe, with modern weapons and inter-operability with NATO. The prospect of joining NATO would help Volodymyr Zelensky sell a negotiated peace to Ukrainians, while enhancing deterrence against Mr. Putin and Russia’s next Putin.

and they support President Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine:

Ukraine isn’t seeking to use these bombs against civilians. It wants them because they are running out of other munitions and figures they can compensate for some of the advantage Russia still holds. The greater risk to Ukrainian civilians is from Russia’s invading army and indiscriminate weapons targeting.

If you can’t see a moral distinction between Russia’s aggression and Ukraine’s use of cluster bombs for defense, then you have the blurred vision. Those best suited to make the tradeoff between risks are the Ukrainians whose lives are on the line every day.

The New York Times disagrees:

With Ukraine using up ordinary artillery shells at a huge rate (the United States alone has sent more than two million rounds to Ukraine), the cluster munitions, of which the United States has a bountiful supply, could give Ukrainian forces an advantage in prying the Russians from their trenches and fortifications along the 620-mile-long front. Besides, Russia has been using its own cluster munitions, as has Ukraine, from the outset of the war, and Ukraine’s leaders have been urgently asking for more.

This is a flawed and troubling logic. In the face of the widespread global condemnation of cluster munitions and the danger they pose to civilians long after the fighting is over, this is not a weapon that a nation with the power and influence of the United States should be spreading.

However compelling it may be to use any available weapon to protect one’s homeland, nations in the rules-based international order have increasingly sought to draw a red line against use of weapons of mass destruction or weapons that pose a severe and lingering risk to noncombatants. Cluster munitions clearly fall into the second category.

and

While it is Ukraine’s decision to choose what weapons it uses in its defense, it is for America to decide which weapons to supply. At the outset of the conflict, the United States resisted sending advanced weapons for fear of encouraging a wider war and Russian retaliation. But as the fighting dragged on and Ukraine proved increasingly capable of standing up to Russia, line after line has been crossed, with Washington and its allies agreeing to provide sophisticated weapons like the Patriot air-defense system, the HIMARS long-range rocket launcher, the Abrams tank and soon the F-16 jet fighter.

There is a legitimate debate about whether this amounts to the sort of mission creep that marked conflicts in Vietnam or Afghanistan. Sending cluster munitions to Ukraine amounts to a clear escalation of a conflict that has already become far too brutal and destructive. But the greater issue here is sharing a weapon that has been condemned by a majority of the world’s nations, including most of America’s close allies, as morally repugnant for the indiscriminate carnage it can cause long after the combatants have gone.

The WaPo hasn’t weighed in on either subject but its columnists are all over the map.