No Matter Who Wins Ukraine, America Has Already Lost

Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership.

Knowing that it can no longer keep Europe as its top energy customer, Moscow has logically moved to grow its fossil fuels sales with Asia, notably China and India. Since the Ukraine invasion, Russia has become China’s top oil provider, replacing Saudi Arabia. It is true that in the short to medium term, transfer capacity will limit how much more fossil fuels Russia can sell to China. Russia currently has just one overland oil route to China, the ESPO pipeline. The only gas pipeline currently in operation is Power of Siberia. Pipeline sales of both oil and gas are supplemented by seaborne routes to mainland China. In the years ahead, China and Russia will doubtlessly make substantial investments to expand oil and gas transmission between the two countries, better enabling Russia to be the primary supplier of fossil fuels to China. The Chinese will likely be able to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel shipments from the Middle East which must pass through vulnerable naval choke points such as the Malacca Straits.

Closer energy relations between China and Russia will help to draw them closer as strategic allies with “no limits” on the Eurasian continent. By having a committed Russian energy supplier in its backyard, China will inevitably obtain more strategic flexibility for dealing with the United States and its Indo-Pacific regional allies, all to the detriment of Western democracies.

Russia has also greatly increased its energy business with India since the Ukraine invasion. According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, “India has been the main buyer of the cargoes out of the Atlantic that Europe doesn’t want anymore.” Before invading Ukraine, India bought almost no oil from Russia. Now it is importing over 760,000 barrels a day. Increases in Russian fossil fuel sales to India will be detrimental to efforts by the United States, Australia, and Japan to continue to draw Delhi into a closer orbit with democratic countries in the Indo-Pacific region.

In fact, India—the world’s largest democracy—has taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the United Nations, India abstained from votes that condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has refused to blame Russia for the attack. Besides a new and growing energy supply relationship, Russia has also been the long-time, primary supplier of weapons for the Indian armed forces. Importantly, Delhi remains appreciative, as well, of Russia’s longtime support on Kashmir. The Indian response to the Russo-Ukrainian War underscores the reality that India will likely not fully integrate into a Western Pacific alliance such as the Quad. If China is smart enough to avoid more border fights with India, momentum for India to become more involved with the Quad could well decline.

In more bad news for the West, India was not alone in abstaining from the UN General Assembly resolution that censured Russia for invading Ukraine. Thirty-four other countries declined to take the West’s side. Two-thirds of the global population live in countries that have refrained from denouncing Russia. Even neighboring Mexico refused to condemn Russia or join economic sanctions.

These are tough strategic realities for the United States to absorb. After the Russian invasion, the Western democracies swiftly coalesced, passing a broad array of sanctions against Moscow, including deadlines for ending fossil fuel purchases from Russia. The West’s energy sanctions have to an extent backfired, causing inflationary and supply disruptions so severe that Brussels now is struggling to cope with the economic consequences. The EU has even quietly announced steps to ease Russian energy sanctions to help stabilize energy markets. While the West complains that Russia weaponized its oil and gas exports, the reality is that it was Brussels and Washington that first raised the energy sword when they announced their intent to cut back Russian fossil fuel purchases immediately after the Ukraine invasion.

One positive byproduct of the Russo-Ukrainian War has been the rejuvenation of NATO, which has rallied to support Ukraine. The alliance will become even stronger when Finland and Sweden join. On the negative side, the United States is carrying more than its pro rata share of the burden to support Ukraine compared to other alliance partners except for Baltic states and Poland. Through May 20, 2022, the United States supplied or committed $54 billion in military aid to Kyiv. The United Kingdom was a distant second at $2.50 billion, followed by Poland at $1.62 billion and Germany at $1.49 billion. As of May 20, the United States had committed more than three times as much aid to Kyiv as all other European Union countries combined. The United States is the largest supplier of military aid notwithstanding that Russia’s invasion is far more of an immediate threat for European allies than for the United States, which is 5,700 miles away from the war, across the Atlantic Ocean. Ukraine shows again how dangerously dependent Western Europe is on American leadership and its military. That will not change until the U.S. foreign policy establishment can shake off the conviction, firmly cemented over seven decades, that only the United States can lead NATO, providing the military backbone for the alliance.

The United States must adapt, particularly as an even more jarring, ugly reality is the fact that NATO’s Article V defense commitments are limited by treaty to the Atlantic region. Were Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, or Guam attacked by China, North Korea or Russia, NATO’s collective defense commitments would not apply. Nonetheless, even though there is no chance that the NATO treaty will ever be amended to help the United States in the Pacific, Washington should not and cannot abandon NATO. Instead, the U.S. foreign policy establishment must work harder to enable European allies to pick up more, even if not the lion’s share, of the burden on their side of the Eurasian continent. If the United States continues to keep its head buried in the historical assumptions that prompted the creation of NATO in 1949, things are going to get steadily worse for over-stretched United States military resources and capabilities. The United States is no longer the world’s sole dominant power. More burden sharing in the U.S. alliance system will have to happen sooner or later to deal with the reality of an increasingly multipolar world.

“The Ukraine cheerleaders will pay no attention to this, because they cannot see beyond the obvious, that being Russia invading Ukraine.”

I remember growing up in the 1960’s when a Democrat administration took us into an unnecessary and costly proxy war with Russia in Vietnam. At that time the the elites were entranced by the domino theory claiming allowing Vietnam to fall to the communists would result in the remaining countries in south Asia falling like dominos - one by one.

Once the pain of the war began to be felt at home - high inflation, sons of the middle class being drafted and dying, politicians and intellectuals on the left quickly joined the anti-war movement. Conservatives stayed the course for “national honor”. Eventually the left deposed Richard Nixon, who tried to negotiate an “honorable” end to the war that would allow South Vietnam to remain independent. Democrats in Congress pulled support from the South Vietnamese government and everything American fought for was lost in 1975 when the communists conquered South Vietnam.

The major learning from Vietnam was the domino theory was false. The rest of South Asia did not fall to the communists. Unified Vietnam focuses on internal issues and the remaining south Asian countries chose their own paths independently. Ultimately communist Vietnam became a major trading partner of the United States — we learned to coexist with different forms of government. China, not Russia became the major power in the region — primarily with our help in moving our industrial infrastructure to China. The world evolved in ways the believers in the domino theory who took us into a pointless war could not imagine.

We see the same erroneous thinking today. US intellectuals and politicians, on both the left and the right in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, missed the opportunity to partner with Russia and chose enduring animosity and economic conflict instead. Once the Soviet Union fell, the United States was unwilling to give up its hegemony over western Europe. The EU economy was equivalent in size to the US economy. It was the perfect time to disband NATO and tell Europe enough time had passed since WWII for it to stand alone, determine its own foreign policy, and provide for its own defense.

With no imminent threat of Soviet invasion we could have brought our troops home from Europe (at a substantial savings to the US taxpayer) and let the western European countries determine how to coexist with Russia and the rest of the world. Instead we insisted on preserving and expanding NATO, a move which could only be perceived by Russia as hostile. We also worked to destabilize Ukraine. We meddled, controlled and destabilized Europe instead of letting Europeans determine their own destiny.

Before President Johnson manipulated Congress into funding a war in Vietnam, without a formal declaration of war, US “advisors” were secretly and actively involved in combat operations in Vietnam. Given the successes Ukraine has experienced stopping the Russian advance using US supplied advanced weapons it is almost certain we have advisors on the ground in combat areas helping the Ukrainians with our advanced weapons systems. If Ukraine cannot break the existing stalemate, or Russia begins to gain the upper hand, the history of Vietnam suggests US politicians and intellectuals will find an excuse to commit US forces to combat in Ukraine.

If so the essential miscalculation is the US forces will be directly engaging the Russian army, not fighting fighting Russia through proxies like we did in Vietnam in the 1960’s/early 1970’s, and Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Russia will be fighting for its strategic interests and homeland. We will be fighting a war on another continent to protect “Europe” or “Democracy”, not to protect our homeland. Ultimately a war undeclared by Congress, fought on foreign soil, in which no real threat exists to the homeland will not sustain the support of the American people. To supply soldiers our volunteer military, which can’t meet its quotas today in peacetime, will be forced to use the draft to man the front lines. When the woke children of suburban progressives are drafted to serve as cannon fodder for Ukraine, the liberals currently proclaiming solidarity with Ukraine will quickly become rabid anti-war pacifists. Likewise, the farmers and small businessmen of middle American will oppose sending their children to fight a far off war. The memories of Vietnam are still fresh and memories of the disastrous end to nearly two decades of wasted effort in Afghanistan are even fresher.

Our elites also may be underestimating Russia. If US troops enter direct conflict with Russian troops Russia cannot afford to lose the war. If Ukraine, assisted by US weapons and advisors, pushes back the Russian army and takes the war into the Russian homeland, Russia may choose to use tactical nuclear weapons to push back Ukrainian attacks on its soil. How will the United States respond? Will we give the Ukrainians tactical nukes to use on the Russian homeland? Will we use our own strategic nuclear weapons, launched from the US mainland or submarines, to attack Russia. If so we will certainly trigger a nuclear response on our homeland. Is Ukraine worth this risk? Why is Ukraine worth one American city, much less the nuclear destruction of our nation?

The semiconductor factories on Taiwan are a strategic issue for the United States as is the industrial infrastructure we exported from our homeland to China in the 1990’s and 2000’s. If China invades Taiwan, and we get involved, we lose both, which will cripple our economy. China can beat us without firing a shot. A Chinese embargo of exports to the United States will cripple our economy in months. We are dependent on Chinese factories for too many consumer and industrial products. Contrast with Ukraine. If Russia conquers Ukraine, the United States homeland, and economy, is not threatened.

Our elites are dragging us into a European land war with Russias third tier economy owning a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying our homeland. Meanwhile we continue to ignore the very real threat of China. At a time when we should be in an all out effort to rebuilding our domestic supply chains, and ending our dependence on China, we are allowing our politicians and academics to spend billions, and decimate our military supplies, on a war that is meaningless to the safety of the homeland, and which is negatively impacting our economy with high fuel prices.

World War II ended over 75 years ago. Western Europe has a wealthy economic infrastructure fully capable of funding its own defense. Let Europe deal with Russia. The United States must focus on rebuilding our industrial infrastructure, to make American great again. Otherwise, the day will come when China embargos us and brings us to our knees.

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