An Endgame in Ukraine: American Strategic Options

Editor's Note:  This is the first in a three part series seperated by the three strategic options for Ukraine.

Regarding Ukraine:  What exactly is the goal of the U.S. intervention?  What is the outcome that we believe serves our national interests? Regrettably, neither American nor allied Western politicians have clearly answered this question.

Pundits and analysts have spilt much ink (here, here, here, here, here as a few examples) attempting to predict what outcome might occur in Ukraine, but they rarely address what outcome would serve American interests.  Their speculations instead focus on the changing disposition of Russian and Ukrainian forces, outcomes of battles and campaigns, the bite of economic sanctions, and support by the U.S. and NATO for Ukraine as compared with support by China and Iran for Russia. They view the conflict as if they were commenting from afar on a geopolitical game of Risk in which the most powerful player, the United States, cannot control, alter, or even influence the outcome. Pundits list all the probable outcomes—Ukrainian victory, Russian victory, stalemate, negotiated settlement, Russian collapse, regime change in Moscow—and how the war might arrive at each outcome, while excluding from their analysis from what outcome is in the national interest of the United States.

Their all-too-distant perspective on the conflict could not be further from reality; the actions of the United States government have already had a dispositive influence on events in Ukraine. While the U.S. cannot control the actions of Russia, Turkey, Iran, or China, the U.S. and its NATO allies have the capacity to influence the outcome, provided of course that there is agreement among the members of the alliance—something rarely achieved—to implement a coherent strategy articulated by the leader of that alliance. And therein lies the rub.

Given the fractured nature of American strategic culture, there are multiple, contradictory conceptions of the U.S. national interest, and thus of what our goals should be regarding the war in Ukraine. One challenge lies in connecting proposed actions to desired outcomes. However, the first task is to articulate the strategic goals that might be served by any given set of actions, with consideration of limited resources. Next is to consider the desirability of those goals in a world of unintended consequences.

This paper suggests several potential outcomes of the war in Ukraine and indicates which conception of U.S. interests each outcome serves. Given the competence, dedication, and strength demonstrated by the Ukrainians, it has become clear that the U.S. has the capacity to influence decisively the outcome of the war. So, the critical question is:  What exactly do we believe serves our national interest, and what resources—material, prestige, attention, money, personnel, et cetera—are we prepared to commit to obtain the desired outcome?  We present three outcomes as options for U.S. policy makers.

U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine is clearly critical to their continued success. A number of authors, most prominently John Mearsheimer, have counseled that the risk of nuclear escalation with Russia is so great as to make the war in Ukraine foolhardy.  Others have suggested that the war in Ukraine is a distraction from the primary conflict of our time, which is between the West and China.

If one believes that Ukraine is a distraction, and that the risk of escalation is so high as to make a fight foolhardy, then one is left with the question:  What strategic gain could the U.S. achieve in Ukraine by allowing a Russian victory? It is possible for the United States to concede Ukraine—all or in large part—and, in exchange, secure a detente with Russia against China.  Is a diplomatic negotiation possible—between the United States and Russia—out of which the West secures an ally against China while Putin and his kleptocratic regime emerge from the Ukraine conflict with their prestige and power enhanced?

Autocratic continental powers, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, have allied with maritime democracies in the past to defeat those states, such as Nazi Germany, which threatened both.  Putin is currently an adversary of the West, sharing neither our values nor a strategic interest, while he shares significant strategic interests with China. Both China and Russia share a desire to curb the influence of Western democracies and create a world in which the autocracies of Eurasia displace the United States and its allies as the dominant power. But what about their respective strategic interests? How closely aligned are they? The history of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a proto alliance of many Eurasian autocratic regimes, suggests the possibility of substantial threat to the West.

However, China and Russia share a long, historically contested border. The Russian regime realizes that the CCP also views controlling the natural resources of Siberia as a considerable temptation. The Chinese want access to these resources but not at the cost of making their economy dependent on Russian goodwill. On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China is prepared to rely on Russian resources—food, natural gas, and minerals—provided the Russian state becomes a client of the Chinese regime. While these conflicts may create an opportunity to turn Russia into a Western client in the future, it seems most unlikely that this could be achieved in the near-term.

Conceding a substantial portion of eastern Ukraine to Russia and acceding to the neutralization of western Ukraine might well de-escalate the conflict–for now–but how would such a maneuver lead to a Russian alliance with the United States against China? Likely, such a deal would give Russia more grain, more offshore oil and natural gas, and more coal and iron to sell to China, while also enabling Russia to use that wealth to rebuild its military and become a more effective threat to the former Warsaw Pact countries.  What guarantees would the United States and its NATO allies regard as acceptable from Russia, given the long history of Russian violation of agreements and treaties pertaining to what remained of Ukrainian territory and its claims to sovereignty? Turning Russia against China would be a considerable challenge, requiring both subsidies and continued appeasement vis-a-vis the states stretching from the Baltic Sea to the shores of the Black Sea.

Nevertheless, such an outcome could have at least one secondary benefit. A U.S. tie to Russia would demonstrate for our NATO allies that they must rely on their own wealth and power to defend themselves. However, such a maneuver would prompt the Baltic States, Poland, and other front-line NATO allies to wonder what national interests of theirs, if any, were sacrificed to turn Russia.

Should the United States threaten to withdraw support, the Ukrainians might then be forced to the negotiating table, trading land for peace, which would undoubtedly lead to the fall of the Zelensky government. A border west of the Dnieper River, or along the riverbank, would turn Ukraine into a failed state, ripe for Russian subversion and further military interventions.  Should Odessa and the Black Sea littoral be absorbed into Russian territory, Ukraine would become landlocked. It would become a client state, almost entirely surrounded by Russian and Belarus, and would no longer be a viable independent power. Such a settlement would enable Russia to shut off Ukraine’s access to international markets on a whim.

Initial Russian war aims were clear:  Destroy Ukraine by encircling Kyiv and forcing the Ukrainian government to capitulate to Russian demands.  When the attack on the Ukrainian capital city failed, Russian strategists turned to creating a strategically located land bridge from the Donbas region (famous for its industrial activity) to the Crimean Peninsula, where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based in Sevastopol. The Donbas and Crimea were where Russian speaking populations were concentrated prior to Russia’s conquest of these areas in its 2014 military campaign. Any negotiated settlement allowing Russia to hold both the 2014 conquests and territory conquered in 2022 would include provisions denying Ukraine the right to join the EU and become a NATO ally.  These are critical Russian strategic goals.

Nor can the economic consequences of such a deal be discounted. As the maritime democratic powers increasingly decouple economically from autocratic continental ones, NATO powers would lose access to Ukraine grain, steel, rare earth minerals, and technical expertise. Such an outcome would also demonstrate that an electoral democracy in eastern Europe cannot provide security, thereby raising the threat to NATO allies in central Europe. A disarmed or neutralized Ukraine would achieve many of the same Russian goals, but perhaps with less diplomatic embarrassment to the West. However, short of a full military defeat, it is hard to imagine the Ukrainians accepting territorial dismemberment or disarmament.

International relations realists, like Henry Kissinger, argue that Russia, as the regional great power, must be appeased, since Russian power in its ‘near abroad’ cannot be denied.  To do so, U.S. security guarantees provided to Ukraine, such as the Budapest Agreement, would need to be ignored or repudiated. In their analysis, the value of an accommodation with Russia far outweighs the value of Ukrainian territorial integrity and independence.

However, such a strategy neglects the character and values of the United States; the citizenry sees the U.S. as the defender of liberal and democratic values around the world, and this war has been promoted by the American political elite as a contest between an authoritarian invader and a democratically elected resistance. The idea that the U.S. might deliberately ‘sell out’ Ukraine to Russia will be met with dismay, contempt, and ridicule, leading to a further loss of legitimacy for the policy makers that occupy positions of power in Washington.  Any administration pursuing such a strategy would be compared to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazi regime.

The harsh reality is that, for the foreseeable future, the current Russian regime will not become an ally of the United States, nor will the Russian kleptocratic autocracy be replaced with a liberal-democratic state that shares Western values. Russian political culture, the history of repeated invasions, and the geostrategy of threat to Russia’s long borders all militate against establishing a limited government. At best, Russia could be a client state to the U.S., sharing a suspicion of Chinese intentions, rather than an ally that shares both interests and values. It is far from clear that any level of capitulation in Ukraine would help turn Russia into a client, aligned against the threat from China.

Michael Hochberg earned his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech and is currently the President at Luminous Computing, a company building supercomputers for machine learning.  He founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service.  He co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics, and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, etc.

Leonard Hochberg taught at Stanford University (among other institutions), was appointed a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founded Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (i.e., STRATFOR).  He has published work in Social Science History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Orbis, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, etc.  He is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves as the Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum-U.S. (www.mackinderforum.org).