Does the Biden Administration have a war-termination plan for the Russia-Ukraine War? Maybe.

Wolfgang Münchau thinks the Biden Administration has adopted a war termination plan for the Russia-Ukraine War. He calls it “a dirty deal.” (Otherwise known as “foreign policy.”) You may have to scroll down to the “Ukraine has six months” story.¹

One of the analysts he cites is the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who says:

Listening closely to Biden and senior officials from his administration, I'm increasingly persuaded that the underlying US strategy is to use the prospect of Israel-style security commitments, and eventual NATO membership, to incentivise Ukraine to make a peace agreement (with concomitant loss of territory).

The diplomats can say a thousand times over that only Ukraine gets to decide on the peace agreement. But that's just not how this works.

These statements of Biden’s from last week² include a flat-out statement that mking Ukraine a member of NATO while the war is going on would mean NATO would be immediately involved in World War Three. He also more-or-less declared victory over Russia in the current war. “Putin’s already lost the war,” he said. And repeated, “He’s already lost that war.”

Recriminations over whatever happens will go on for decades. Historians and international-relations experts are still arguing over what happened in the early years of the first Cold War with the coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948³ and the Soviet blockade of Berlin⁴ that same year that prompted the Berlin Airlift.

In The Guardian, Garton Ash writes on the same theme:

On Sunday, he told the CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria that Ukraine was not ready for Nato membership and that Israel-style security arrangements should be available “if there is a ceasefire, if there is a peace agreement”. He emphasised the word “if”. Cross-checking this with public and private statements by senior US officials, one detects a rather hard-nosed stance. Nato membership is to be deployed as a future reward for Ukraine negotiating the best peace it can get, probably accepting some significant loss of territory.

If this were to be the outcome of the Vilnius summit, there would be massive disappointment in Ukraine. (The morally dubious gift of American cluster bombs is no substitute for long-term security commitments, and only confuses the debate.) We already heard indications in Kyiv of growing anger against the west. Left to fight on alone for another 500 days, without a firm promise of future security, even the bravest of the brave would find it difficult to rebuild their battered, exhausted, traumatised country.⁵

There is no strict geographical homogeneity in NATO policy matters. But it has been the case since the Iraq War days and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the “frontline” countries now in NATO (Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and others) are often in accord with American neocons and other eternal-Cold-Warrior types to always demand more and more opposition to Russia. And the tone and content of their arguments hark back to some of the most revanchist and militaristic types of the first Cold War.

Elizabeth Pond wrote about this ideological alliance during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 when Germany and France insisted on restraint in dealing with Iraq rather than launchinng an illegal invasion based on blatantly false claims:

Whatever the real sequence of cause and effect, Washington certainly did erupt in anger. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed France and Germany as the "old Europe" and praised the "new Europe" of those countries that backed the United States, including the central European candidates for NATO and EU membership. As if on cue, Tony Blair, Spain's Jose Maria Aznar, and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, along with the Portuguese, Danish, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech leaders, signed a joint op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. Under other circumstances the text of the op-ed would have been an unexceptionable statement of transatlantic solidarity, but in the context it endorsed the American march to war. This was followed shortly thereafter by a similar, but more explicit statement in support of the United States by the "Vilnius ten" central and southeast European candidates for NATO and EU accession. Despite all the pious professions over decades of a desire for a common EU foreign policy, both sets of signatories wrote their declarations behind the backs of their EU partners-and in their own defense charged France and Germany with having themselves launched a diplomatic initiative in the name of Europe without having consulted them.

This superpower cherry picking of central Europeans, who trusted only American, and not European, guarantees against any resurgent Russia (and were flattered by their sudden prominence), was devastating to the pretensions of EU unity. [my emphasis]⁶

As a general matter, from the Bush I Administration to the Biden Administration, US policy has been to discourage political alliances among EU and NATO nations that might contribute to Europe becoming any kind of “peer competitor” to the US in strategic affairs.

The “Vilnius ten” to which Pond refers iincluded: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. It is now referred to as the Vilnius Group of 11 nations, including North Macedonia.⁷

Because of its prominent role in supporting the Ukrainian war effort, Poland’s voice is particularly prominent at the moment. The newest NATO member, Finland, may not turn out to be as hardline anti-Russian as the New Cold Warriors might prefer.⁸

Even assuming that Garton Ash’s and Münchau’s views of US intentions are correct, that doesn’t mean that the US gets to call all the shots: “Secretary of Defense James Mattis is fond of pointing out, ‘The enemy gets a vote.’ However masterful a maneuver the United States executes, the impact depends on how the adversary responds, and not just on what the United States has done.”⁹

And, allies also have options. Ukraine’s government would clearly prefer direct NATO intervention in the war to an imposed settlement, which they and other anti-Russia hardliners will surely denounced as “another Yalta,” the Yalta agreements¹⁰ on the post-Second World War order in Europe being a perennial bogeyman for the Dr. Strangeloves of the world. And anti-Russia hardliners in the US and Europe prefer maximum damage to Russian military capabilities in a much longer war more than they want to see the destruction inside Ukraine come to an end.

1. Münchau, Wolfgang (2023): Ukraine has six months. Eurointelligence 07/17/2023. <https://www.eurointelligence.com/> Direct link to individual article not available. (Accessed: 2023-17-07).

2. Biden: 'No possibility' Russia will win war in Ukraine. MSNBC 07/13/20123. (Accessed: 2023-19-07).

3. Feinberg, Joseph Grim (2018): Czechoslovakia 1948. Jacobin 03/13/2018. <https://jacobin.com/2018/03/czechoslovakia-1948-communist-party-repression> (Accessed: 2023-17-2023).

4. Berlin Blockade. PBS American Experience n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/bomb-blockade/> (Accessed: 2023-17-2023).

5. Garton Ash, Timothy (2023): In Ukraine I saw a brave but ravaged land in limbo. It needs a future – it needs Nato. The Guardian 07/11/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/11/president-biden-nato-summit-ukraine> (Accessed: 2023-17-2023).

6. Pond, Elizabeth (2004): Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance, 68-69. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.

7. Vilnius letter. Wikipedia 06/29/2022. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vilnius_letter&oldid=1095555033> (Accessed: 2023-17-07).

8. Vanhnen, Henri (2022): Something New, Something Old – Finland on the Verge of a New Russia Relationship. Wilson Center 09/07/2022. <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/something-new-something-old-finland-verge-new-russia-relationship> (Accessed: 2023-17-2023).

9. Alterman, Jon (2018): The Enemy Gets A Vote. Center for Strategic and International Studies 05/16/2018. <https://www.csis.org/analysis/enemy-gets-vote> (Accessed: 2023-17-2023).

10. Fried, Daniel (2020): The Yalta Conference at seventy-five: Lessons from history. Atlantic Council 02/07/2020. <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-yalta-conference-at-seventy-five-lessons-from-history/> (Accessed: 2023-17-2023).