“Will Russia invade Ukraine?” has become the biggest guessing game in Washington.
Most U.S. officials apparently think the answer is “yes” – and soon, as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan warned on Friday. Russia continues to deny any intention to invade. Yet if Russian President Vladimir Putin does make his move, that wouldn’t be the end of the crisis – with Russia simply cementing its gains and the world moving on, as happened with Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014.
It would be the start of a sharper, more protracted U.S.-Russia confrontation, one that could escalate dangerously and pose grave complications for America’s global strategy.
Moscow has given itself the ability to throw perhaps 100,000 troops forward on multiple fronts, in an effort to wreck Ukraine’s military and industrial infrastructure, coerce its leaders and perhaps precipitate the fall of its government. Whether or not Putin wants a prolonged occupation of Ukrainian territory, he could end up with one if initial blows fail to make Kyiv give in to Russian demands.
In turn, we could see a high-intensity, extremely bloody war of the sort most Europeans thought had been consigned to a distant past. It could cause massive refugee flows and spiking military tensions that would further destabilize the continent.
This is why President Joe Biden’s administration has been desperately trying to keep war from happening. Biden’s two-pronged strategy has reportedly involved offers to negotiate on issues of plausible Russian concern, such as the stationing of ground-launched missile systems in Ukraine or Eastern Europe. This sort of diplomatic engagement is necessary to hold nervous North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in line and deprive Putin of reasonable excuses for intervention.
Yet the administration has also refused to negotiate away Ukraine’s right to choose its own geopolitical alignments; it has rejected Russia’s demands that NATO effectively abandon Eastern Europe. Biden’s team has also leaked intelligence on Russian machinations, to deprive Moscow of ambiguity and surprise. And it has telegraphed the penalties it could impose following a Russian invasion – an expanded U.S. and NATO military presence in Eastern Europe, harsh economic and technological sanctions, additional arms deliveries to Ukraine, and perhaps even moves toward NATO membership for Finland and Sweden.
The goal has been to offer Putin a path out of the crisis, while promising him more of what he hates – NATO forces near his borders, strategic pressure exerted by Russia’s enemies – if he declines to take it.
Unfortunately, reasonable strategies don’t always succeed. Putin may calculate that the costs he would pay for an invasion are less than the costs of Ukraine creeping closer to the West. He may fear that backing down now, in response to the West’s deterrent threats, would reek of weakness at home and abroad. (It is presumably not lost on Putin that one of his Soviet predecessors, Nikita Khrushchev, was toppled after his geopolitical bluffs in Cuba and Berlin went awry.) Or Putin may simply think that the West would prove more forthcoming if he occupied half of Ukraine.
If Russia does use force, the U.S. will be ready for the immediate aftermath: Washington has been working, in close if imperfect coordination with allies, on the sanctions and other measures it would roll out in the weeks following an attack. There will be no slow, gradual ramp-up of penalties, one White House official has promised: “We’ll start at the top of the escalation ladder and stay there.”
Putin wouldn’t just sit there while America tried to choke out his economy, bleed his forces in Ukraine, and worsen his strategic predicament. When Washington and its allies sanctioned Russia after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, he responded (in part) by meddling in America’s presidential elections. Today, Putin has plenty of options for inflicting reciprocal pain, such as cyberattacks against private-sector targets or poorly guarded critical infrastructure, menacing military exercises along NATO’s Eastern flank, or flurries of sabotage and subversion in Europe.
The U.S. and Russia would then find themselves in a longer, more intense confrontation, with both sides aggressively probing each other for weakness. The goal of U.S. policy might shift from finding what Biden calls a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia to sapping Moscow’s strength through a concerted campaign of geopolitical attrition.
But this raises a second question about what might happen next, involving America’s larger global posture. Biden’s foreign policy and defense strategy have, so far, aimed to achieve quiet on non-Asian fronts so that Washington can focus on China. That approach wouldn’t survive a major land war in Europe.
A drastic deterioration of security in Eastern Europe would demand greater American attention and resources, even if the NATO allies upped their game. A US defense budget that was already strained by investments necessary to prepare for potential conflict with China would look even less adequate. Russia and China could move closer into alignment, posing still-greater challenges for Washington. An administration that has rejected the idea that it faces even one “cold war” might find itself waging two – necessary struggles, perhaps, but ones that would tax the U.S. far more than most Americans currently imagine.
(Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Most recently, he is the author of “The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today”).
