The Return of the Scenarios

And none of the ones that are even remotely likely are particularly appealing. In a piece at The National Interest after giving a realist observation about war:

War is not like a Hollywood movie where the good guy always wins in the end. Civilization is coeval with conflict, not its Manichean opposite.

Serbian scholor Damjan Krnjević MiÅ¡ković outlines several possible scenarios for the outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine. After noting the dichotomy between a Kissingerian view of the war with that of the Biden Administration:

This is evidently not the way the Biden administration and others in the West understand geopolitics, and it is certainly not the way they view the conflict with Russia over Ukraine. For them and their fellow travelers, the war is a black-and-white manifestation of a global struggle between the partisans of democracy and autocracy. This is, of course, an understandable emotional response, but it is hardly the prism through which American, and by extension, Western decisionmaking should be understood. In no way ought geopolitics be conflated with eschatology: championing supremacy in the name of exceptionalism in an era of unipolarity was hubristic enough; trying to impose a “rules-based international liberal order” in conditions of increasingly acrimonious multipolarity is even more so.

he makes this observation:

But the truth is—however uncomfortable it may be to accept—that Ukraine was and remains an object of great power relations and not a subject of international order. Indeed, it would be hard to argue persuasively that a country that depends almost entirely on the free guns, ammo, and reconnaissance supplied by foreign powers is either fully sovereign or fully independent, regardless of its regime type.

The scenarios are:

1. Total victory for Ukraine, including the return of all Ukrainian lands by Russia, potentially including Crimea. This is the scenario being held out by Western (and Baltic) leaders.
2. More or less permanent warfare which he refers to as “frozen conflict”—something like Syria.
3. Edward Luttwak’s three point plan.

but what he sees as the most likely scenario is what he describes in his conclusion:

Thanks to the West’s munificence, Ukraine has been able to demonstrate that it can resist (but not overcome) aggression; now the West must be clear that its priority is coming to terms on some sort of settlement. This will almost certainly require Kyiv to accept a compromise—an unpalatable word to the Ukraine-must-win-at-all-costs faction. This should not be interpreted as necessarily requiring Ukraine to formally sign a legal document that cedes a portion of its lands in perpetuity: we know from the conflict over Karabakh in the South Caucasus that a heroic reversal is possible, and we can point to the unresolved Kosovo case as evidently remaining a point of contention between those who champion territorial integrity as a cornerstone principle of international law and those who continue to pressure Serbia, a UN member state, into “accepting the reality on the ground.” The point is that the onset of such European conflicts and their subsequent trajectories had less to do with respecting the basic tenets of the UN Charter than geopolitical ebb and flow coupled with shifts in the balance of power.

Perhaps this maximalist faction would have more luck in convincing its recalcitrant Western allies, not to mention the rest of the world, of the sincerity of its intentions were it not for the fact that Ukraine is hardly a democracy in the usual Western understanding of the term: Freedom House calls it a “partly free” and “transitional or hybrid regime” while Transparency International ranks it as the most corrupt country in Europe.

Democracy or not, if this conflict goes on much longer, Ukraine runs the imminent risk of becoming irredeemably dysfunctional once it comes to an end—say, the Bosnia of Eastern Europe—and Russia could end up as China’s Belarus or what the Warsaw Pact states were to the Soviet Union. How could either of these scenarios, to say nothing of both, possibly be in the interest of the West?

or, said another way, not all territorial integrities are created equal. BTW, Mr. Luttwak sees Germany as the primary impediment to what he characterizes as a “solidly satisfactory outcome”:

Unlike the victory lobby, I see the makings of a solidly satisfactory outcome in the present situation, so long as enough aid reaches Ukraine to keep up its strength — and that means reading the riot act to double-dealing Chancellor Olaf Scholz — while vigorously proposing a peace plan. After all, the two sides have already reached agreement on the broadest issues: Zelenskyy has already stated that Ukraine will not join Nato and the Russian side has already accepted Ukraine’s entry into the European Union.

which I think is certainly correct as far as it goes. I’m not sure that’s a likely let alone inevitable outcome. At this point it appears to me that the most likely outcome is “wrecking Ukraine” which perhaps not coincidentally is what John Mearsheimer predicted 15 years ago.