Branko Marcetic asks a very relevant question about whether the Biden Administration may be trapped by its own rhetoric on Ukraine
Moralistic rhetoric in foreign policy often has a downside
“Fear over loss of prestige and credibility was one of the factors that kept U.S. involvement in Vietnam going and going, as it did for Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars.”1
That’s a reminder from Branko Marcetic in making an important point about the Democracies-vs.-Autocracies rhetoric that has characterized Our Side (NATO) in the Russia-Ukraine War.
If the Biden Administration decides for whatever combination of reasons that it needs to push for a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement or ceasefire in the last part of this year or early next year, it will have to make a fairly quick reversal of its main narrative about the stakes in the war.
The problem is that if Democracy in the entire world depends on Ukraine pushing Russia out of all the Ukrainian territories Russia currently occupies - it will be working against the master narrative the Administration has gotten even the left-center government of German to adopt.
[S]uch maximalist talk is now conventional thinking in the U.S. political landscape. Republican presidential contender Chris Christie recently met with strong agreement from the liberal hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe when he charged that, should the United States “cut and run” from Ukraine, it would trigger a Chinese invasion of Taiwan (which, he argued, would inevitably necessitate sending “American men and women” to fight Chinese troops) and lead currently friendly governments in the Middle East to abandon the United States for China.
That the outcome in Ukraine will decide whether or not China invades Taiwan has been similarly advanced by U.S. commentators, strategists, members of Congress, and even by the administration itself.
It’s not a leap to hear in these words — and those of NATO officials — the echoes of the Cold War-era “domino theory,” the discredited doctrine that led the United States to get pulled into the disastrous Vietnam war. [my emphasis]
The Munich Analogy begat the Domino Theory which begat the Rules-Based-International Order which begat The Future of Freedom In The Entire World Depends On Completely Crushing Russia In Ukraine.
This is what is known as “threat inflation.” It’s a chronic problem for US foreign policy. (Though not for arms manufacturers.) And has been for decades. US policy throughout the Cold War continually struggled with this tendency to think in good-vs.-evil terms. As the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger put it in 1986:
During the 1960s, the simplifications of the early Cold War appeared to be yielding to more complex conceptions; melodrama to tragedy. "No government or social system is so evil," President Kennedy had said at American University in 1963, "that its people must be condemned as lacking in virtue," and he called on Americans as well as Russians to reexamine attitudes toward the Cold War "for our attitude is as essential as theirs." Who would have supposed that exactly twenty years later another American President would brand the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world" and call on Americans to "oppose it with all our might"? In the age of Ronald Reagan, the official American version of the Cold War regressed, past Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and detente, past Kennedy and the "world of diversity," back to the holy war of John Foster Dulles.2 [my emphasis]
Jeffrey Record lists some cases where overconfidence and misunderstanding the opponent’s motives led so some really bad results:
War is the province of miscalculation. History is littered with wars arising from misperceived enemy intentions, capabilities, or both, and this reality seems endemic in the practice of statecraft. Just as Chamberlain misread Hitler's intentions in 1938, Hitler misread British intentions in 1939. In Korea in 1950, the Soviets misread the intentions of the Americans, who in turn misread the intentions (and capabilities) of the Chinese. In Vietnam, the United States overestimated its own capabilities and underestimated those of the Communists. And Saddam Hussein misread George H. W. Bush's intentions in the Persian Gulf in 1990-91, while the George W. Bush administration misread Saddam Hussein's capabilities as it approached America's second war against Iraq in 2003. Saddam certainly wanted deliverable weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but wanting is not the same thing as having.3 [my emphasis]
Record argues for a real effort by policymakers to be as realistic as possible in evaluating potential opponents. In the Chamberlain-Hitler case he cites, the British leader underestimated Hitler’s intentions. But as he describes in that book, there was a problem with a mismatch between their military defensive strategy against Germany and the kind of broader containment of Germany they were trying to achieve diplomatically. Their estimations of Soviet intentions and capabilities also came into play, because acting militarily to prevent Hitler from annexing the Czechoslovakian areas he was targeting would have meant entering into a active military cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Arrogance and stereotypical thinking can easily lead to threat inflation - which can be every bit as dangerous as underestimating threats. The habit of labeling current enemies as “Hitler” is one of which Record is particularly critical. And, as he and others have observed, the “unipolar moment” of US dominance post-1989 encouraged reckless calculations:
America’s conventional military primacy is becoming its own worst enemy. The fact and nature of that primacy have hustled enemies into irregular warfare and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, encouraged unnecessary use of force and bolstered the unfortunate American tendency to separate war and politics. The present [2005] US predicament in Iraq is rooted in these unintended consequences of primacy.4
Paul D’Anieri stresses a point about post-1989 Europe that is also important to the Democracies vs. Autocracies framework. Which is that the expansion of NATO and the EU were both associated with the spread of Western-style liberal democracy. Both organizations have democratic requirements for joining, although they are both less strenuous about democratic backsliding (e.g., Turkey, Hungary, Poland). D’Anieri points out that after the “color” revolutions in Georgia (Rose Revolution 2003), Ukraine (Orange Revolution 2004), and Serbia (Bulldozer Revolution 2000):
[D]emocracy promotion in general and democratic revolution in particular were so intertwined with geopolitical competition that they could not be separated. For the West, democracy promotion became not just the pursuit of an ideal, but a powerful weapon in the contest for influence in an increasingly chaotic world. For Russia, democracy promotion appeared to be a new form of warfare, capturing territory by replacing its leaders via protests, rather than by invading with armies. Moreover, it was a weapon that increasingly appeared [to Russian leaders] to be aimed at the Putin regime in Russia.5 [my emphasis]
But he cautions that even a drastic democratization in Russia can’t be automatically expected to diffuse tensions between Russia and NATO over Ukraine. Because long before 2014, the idea of Ukrainian independence was unpopular in Russia.
And D’Anieri observes, “It is notable that one of the leading analysts of the colored revolutions, Michael McFaul, was named US Ambassador to Russia in 2011, much to the annoyance of the Putin government.” McFaul has been an unrelenting anti-Russia hawk since the 2022 invasion.
Backing away from the maximalist rhetoric that the West has been indulging since February 2022 over Ukraine and Russia will be a political and diplomatic challenge for the Biden Administration. And for NATO governments that have gone along with that framing.
Marcetic, Branko (2023): Can Washington pivot from its maximalist aims in Ukraine? Responsible Statecraft 08/14/2023. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/08/14/can-washington-shift-away-from-its-maximalist-aims-in-ukraine/> (Accessed: 2023-14-08).
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1986): The Cycles of American History, 193. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Record, Jeffrey (2007): The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler, 74. Washington: Potomac Books.
Record, Jeffrey (2005): The limits and temptations of America's conventional military primacy. Survival 47:1, 33. <https://doi.org/10.1080/00396330500061711> (Accessed: 2023-15-08).
D’Anieri, Paul (2023): Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (2nd Edition), 17. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.