To defeat Putin in Ukraine, NATO needs a new strategy. Here’s a start

Vladimir Putin badly underestimated both Ukraine and the West two years ago, but he has adapted and will win unless both the West and Ukraine can build and execute a new strategy.

Ukraine’s allies need to radically rethink their approach to this devastated nation’s defense. That means delivering more weapons and ammunition, of course, but it’s also about changing the way the war is explained, because getting the “why” right is essential to achieving the “how.”

Back in February 2022, this wasn’t so important. The shock and outrage caused by President Vladimir Putin’s invasion was more than enough to persuade populations to lay down tax money for Ukraine. Countries had redundant weapons stocks; allies committed to help for “as long as it takes,” in the name of protecting both liberal democracy and the rules-based international order.

That’s no longer sufficient. Putin badly underestimated both Ukraine and the West two years ago, but he has adapted and will win unless both the West and Ukraine can build and execute a new strategy.

To begin with, the language used to justify support for Ukraine needs to change as the conflict morphs into a test of strength and will between competing coalitions, led by the US on one side and China on the other, as my fellow columnist Hal Brands has described. At the same time, November’s presidential election in the US could see drastic change in Washington, making it all the more important that a clear policy and viable exit strategy are in place before then.

It has taken until the third year of war for the Biden administration to state openly that it wants Ukraine to win, but what that means remains ill-defined. It’s taken just as long to talk seriously about what to do with the roughly $300 billion of sovereign Russian funds frozen in US and European banks, or to approve sending the long range ATACMS missiles and F-16’s that Ukraine so obviously needs. Debate continues even now on whether Ukraine should be able to use those weapons to strike targets in Russia.

This is a mess, not a strategy, fully understandable at the start of the war, but by now inexcusable. Ukraine’s increasing difficulties on the battlefield are focusing minds, but as they gather in Washington in July to celebrate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary, leaders should use the occasion to decisively reframe Ukraine’s defense. They should set victory as the goal, define parameters for what that means and spell out how they plan to achieve it. Then, and only then, can the pledge of “as long as it takes” be replaced with “whatever it takes.”

Ukraine’s allies should above all state openly that while the final decisions on any peace or ceasefire will be Kyiv’s to make, victory won’t necessarily hang on the return of all lost territory. After all, Ukraine could roll Russian troops back to the two nations’ internationally recognized borders as they stood in February 2014 -- before Putin seized Crimea -- and still not end the fighting.

It's when Putin decides he can’t win, and that there’s more risk than reward in continuing his invasion that any peace will have a chance at permanence. Russia’s leaders have to be shown they can’t afford to wait the West out, because the cost of trying is too high and the chances of success too remote. Every piece of the allied strategy for Ukraine needs to send the same message. I’ll suggest a set of concrete measures the build that case in a later column.

The language leaders use is just as important because democratic nations can’t continue to support wars for long once their populations turn against them. A good place to start would be to make much more clear what the implications of a Russian victory in Ukraine would be. In particular, what former US State Department and National Security Council official Dan Fried calls the “China-First crowd” must be persuaded that Putin’s invasion has so dramatically altered the rules of US-China competition that China first now means Ukraine first.

“Which problem gets better if Ukraine loses and Russia wins?” Fried, who served both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, told me recently at the Lennart Meri security conference in Estonia. That, certainly, is what the leaders of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan say, and they’re best placed to judge. It’s why they’re involved in helping Kyiv either directly or indirectly, fearful that a collapse of US will and policy in Ukraine would embolden China to try rolling on from Putin’s success by seizing Taiwan, or disputed islands in the South China Sea by force.

“Were Russia to succeed here, it would be another Saigon, another Kabul, in terms of the erosion of American power,’’ former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt told me at the same conference. This would have an even bigger impact on the balance of power in Europe, undermining stability and forcing a much larger rearmament than the European missile defense systems and “drone army” now under discussion.

Next up, stop justifying support for Ukraine as a defense of “liberal” democracy. Ukraine isn’t a liberal cause; it is a just one. In academia, liberal democracy has a very specific meaning. It denotes a political system that both secures the ability of societies to choose their leaders, and has the independent institutions to constrain them once elected. But this isn’t academia.

In an era of culture wars, anything tagged as “liberal” is an instant red flag to conservatives, to whom it signals a much wider policy agenda, from gender transition to migration. Calling democracy liberal also suggests there must be other, equally valid flavors, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “Illiberal Democracy,” to the whatever-we-say-it-is variety endorsed by Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping in their latest 7,000-word renewal of marriage vows.

Stay focused: There is democracy, or non-democracy, and having the ability to kick the bums out is as valuable to those with a conservative agenda as it is for liberals – as anyone who ever lived in a totalitarian state can attest.

Similarly, we need to ditch the “rules-based international order,” a concept that even proponents have trouble defining. It’s also open to legitimate attack by Russia, China and their allies for being a construct unilaterally dictated by the US-led West since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and riddled with hypocrisy in its application. Russia has used this straw man to paint itself, absurdly but with some success, as a defender of the United Nations Charter and its core principles of sovereignty, even as it shreds them in Ukraine.

So let’s be clear that by helping Ukraine, NATO is defending the UN’s most fundamental protection against nations having their borders altered by force. This is a principle the vast majority of leaders in Africa, the Middle East and beyond also prize, precisely because their own colonially drawn boundaries are so open to potential dispute. It is the revisionist powers coalescing around Russia’s expansion effort in Ukraine that are breaking this taboo to further their own territorial ambitions – whether in the Levant, the former Soviet space, the Korean Peninsula or the South China Sea. This needs to be called out again, and again.

Ukraine wants to join the club of democracies, which is inspiring and a requirement of its European future. But Kyiv’s defense won’t be helped by casting right wing voters in the West, or a majority of the world’s leaders as part of the enemy camp. There are now 91 autocracies to 88 democracies in the world, with 71% of the global population living under autocratic rule, up from 50% in 2003, according to the V-Dem Institute, a longstanding data collection project on democracy hosted by the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

This is above all a war to preserve the sanctity of borders and so prevent further wars. Ukraine’s allies should make that crystal clear at July’s NATO summit, and perhaps even invite a few “autocrats” to help drive the message home.

Credit: Bloomberg