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Faculty & Staff Media 

The War in Ukraine, One Year On…

Alex Avaneszadeh 0 Comment

By Daniel W. Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

Retrospectively, a U.S. foreign policy win. Prospectively…

A year ago tomorrow, Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This means there is going to be at lot of throat-clearing about How We Got Here and What It All Means. There has already has been a geyser of one-year anniversary analyses: see, for example, the Foreign Affairs collection on the eve of the war’s first anniversary — or whatever is on the front page of War on the Rocks over the coming weekend.

You should probably read all of these assessments. It is worth remembering, however, that very few analysts expected the past twelve months to play out the way they did — myself included. Take that as a sign that many prognostications about what will happen in the future might be based on faulty assumptions — myself included.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been interested in how perceptions of time affect perceptions of power. That is how I am thinking about the war in Ukraine, particularly from the U.S. perspective.

If one looks backwards, the past year has been a solid success for U.S. foreign policy. Given where expectations were in February 2022, that statement is pretty extraordinary. The problem is that this is not how most people think about ongoing foreign policy crises. Looking forward, the picture that emerges is somewhat murkier, which is why I think these one-year analyses are skewed to be more pessimistic (more on that in a moment). This means that the Biden administration probably needs to make a concerted effort to frame the conflict in such a way as to make the U.S. commitment more credible and more sustainable.

First, consider where matters stood a year ago. U.S. deterrence had failed — by this point it was clear to everyone but the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service that Russia was invading Ukraine. This came on the heels of a Sino-Russian statement suggesting that Xi Jinping was ready to strengthen that strategic relationship. Europe seemed split about the invasion, and it was far from clear whether Germany would go so far as to cancel Nord Stream 2. The expectation was that Ukraine would not last beyond a few weeks; the hope was that a guerilla campaign would hamper Russia’s army for quite some time.

Compared to those expectations, the past year has gone spectacularly well for U.S. foreign policy. Putin’s invasion proved to be a mismanaged, colossal blunder. True, Russia managed to seize a fair amount of Ukrainian territory — and then Ukraine seized a significant amount of it back:

Along the way the Russian military has been embarrassed multiple times, ranging from the sinking of the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship to the loss of Kherson, the only provincial capital that Russian forces had captured. As I type this, Russia’s latest offensive is under way. It seems to be playing out like a carbon copy of their offensives last May, only with less trained forces.

All of this is just what happened against the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. Take a few steps back and one begins to appreciate the unmitigated strategic disaster that has befallen Russia comes into focus. Consider the following strategic reversals:

  1. Russia keeps threatening NATO about sending arms to Ukraine, and NATO keeps sending arms, revealing the limits to Russian coercive capabilities;
  2. Sweden and Finland are now in the process of joining NATO;
  3. Russia’s energy leverage over Europe has come to an end;
  4. The European Union continues to not buckle on supporting Ukraine;
  5. Russia is under ever-more-painful economic sanctions from the West;
  6. Russian society will feel the economic pain from the outward migration of a million citizens following the partial mobilization of the fall;
  7. At best, when this is all over, Russia will be asymmetrically dependent on China.

That is a long way to fall for a leader who ostensibly spent the last two decades trying to make Russia able to compete with the West.

None of these trends were pre-ordained. The primary reason Russia has entered a quagmire is Ukrainian skill and will. A secondary reason is that the United States and its allies orchestrated an adroit combination of economic statecraft, diplomatic skill, military aid, and intelligence sharing to assist Ukraine. Compared to that, tepid Chinese support ain’t gonna cut it.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that there is no sign that the war is going to end anytime soon. The U.S. foreign policy success is that Ukraine can continue to fight Russia. Indeed, a year in, both Russia and Ukraine seem ever more determined to decide this on the battlefield. Both sides continue to possess a plausible theory of victory. Until that changes, the war will persist.

Strategically, an ongoing war is not great but also not awful from a U.S. perspective. The risks and costs are obvious: more appalling losses of blood and treasure. That said, the conflict will continue to weaken Russia, thereby strengthening Europe’s security situation. Also, the effect of the war has been to push the United States and its allies closer together in dealing with China as well. As the initial supply shocks fade, the effects on the global economy will likely fade as well.

Politically, an ongoing war is a problem for the United States. It is only when conflicts end that it is possible to assess whether the policies conducted during it were a success or a failure.1The hedonic treadmill does not just apply to individual satisfaction; it applies to foreign policy as well. Most observers take what happened in the past for granted. Unless and until the war ends, folks will be warning about incipient negative trends that could dissipate the past year’s worth of success.

These trends include:

  1. Iran cooperating more closely with Russia;
  2. Other states calling for the United States to end the war;
  3. The Global South blaming the United States for rising food and fuel prices;
  4. The sanctions coalition cracking over time;
  5. China deciding to act like a real black knight;
  6. Public opinion in the West turning against supporting Ukraine.

Precisely because the United States has succeeded in rallying public support, fashioning a powerful coalition, and constraining the support of Russia’s partners, a lot of media analysis assumes that the future will be less favorable to the U.S. position.

Consider Vox’s Jonathan Guyer:

Tuesday’s split-screen speeches are a reminder that a year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both Biden and Putin are doubling down. “We have every confidence that you’re going to continue to prevail,” Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day earlier in Ukraine. But that confidence in public may be obscuring anxieties that foreign policy leaders are expressing in private as the war continues into its second year, as major democracies like India decline to take a firm side, and as the risks of the war expanding beyond Ukraine’s borders are heightened….

Guyer is not making up these anxieties. He referenced CNAS’ Richard Fontaine’s observations from the Munich Security Conference last week:

The corridor talk was considerably more anxious. The Russian spring offensive has begun. While optimists pointed to tank deliveries and the coming Ukrainian counter-offensive, worries about a prolonged war abounded. Western support cannot remain at current levels indefinitely. Political support may ebb, stockpiles are dwindling, and populations could grow less generous over time. In a long war of attrition, Moscow might have the upper hand.

These anxieties might be real… but they might be exaggerated. Remember when I said, “many prognostications about what will happen in the future might be based on faulty assumptions?” This is kinda what I’m talking about. For the past year I have been reading stories predicting a fracture on the transatlantic partnership, and that keeps not happening. The same could be said for risks of escalation. A lot of the prospective analysis assumes the strategic situation will degrade. But based on how Russia’s current military operations are going, it sure seems as if Moscow’s constraints are far more severe.

Until the war ends, however, these worries will be reported on with great detail. Which means the Biden administration faces a choice: it can either try to push Ukraine towards decisive military action or start laying the political groundwork for supporting an ongoing war that bogs Russia down and keeps Europe united.

Based on some recent journalism, it seems as though Biden is preparing for the former. But while Russia is not doing well, planning only for an outright Ukrainian victory seems misguided. As I said earlier this week, Biden needs to task some officials to start thinking about how to make the political case for supporting Ukraine for a longer conflict.

Absent that, expect even more media fretting in the weeks and months to come about a worsening situation for the United States. Just remember, most of these analyses will likely be using the word “strategic” when they really mean “political.”

This piece is republished from Drezner’s World.

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