Is Ukraine the ‘war before the war’?

When Russia began its effort to conquer Ukraine a year ago, there was every reason to believe the end result would be disastrous for the West. Moscow had Kyiv outgunned and vastly outmanned. The West had done little in response to previous Russian land grabs in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and the European economy was in thrall to Russian energy. If somehow we did muster the courage to push back, surely the result would be a NATO-Russia war, perhaps a nuclear war — or so the thinking went at the time.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a heinous crime which the whole world would have been better off without. Yet it has gone far better for Ukraine than any could have hoped at this time last year, thanks both to Ukrainian bravery on the battlefield and the home front, and a perhaps surprising level of Western resolve and material assistance. What’s more, the war, for all its miseries, could prove to hold unexpected benefits for U.S. national security: It has revealed much about the West’s strengths and vulnerabilities, and these lessons can help prepare us for — or better yet, prevent — the next great-power conflict, should we choose to heed them.

The most important of these lessons is that the West has both the will and capacity to stand up to a nuclear-armed power bent on territorial aggrandizement — something that was not at all obvious at the war’s beginning. To be sure, the task in Ukraine is far from finished, and it is vital that the West help Kyiv bring the war to a victorious conclusion. But just as important is that we consider how we could replicate the relative success of this past year in other scenarios — most crucially, if China were to attempt to seize Taiwan.

This means not simply ensuring that Taiwan has the means to defend itself and that the U.S. is positioned to come meaningfully to its aid, but that Taiwan’s supporters in the West have prepared for the economic consequences of a conflict in Asia, which would dwarf those of the Ukraine war. 

The U.S. and its partners must plan not only to impose economic pressure on China, but to protect themselves from Beijing’s own economic leverage. We should focus first on inputs such as mining of rare earth minerals, which are vital to the high-tech and defense industries and depend almost entirely on Chinese supply chains that would be impossible to quickly replace in a time of conflict. Taken together, such steps not only would enhance Western readiness to respond to a Chinese move on Taiwan, but ideally deter Beijing from making the attempt.

During the Ukraine conflict, the West’s efforts to isolate Russia have been hampered by a lack of support from partners outside North America and Europe. These states have largely accepted Russia’s framing of the conflict as pitting Moscow against NATO, when in reality it is a war of naked aggression against Ukraine. They also reject efforts by the West to cast the war in moral terms, instead prioritizing their own national interests, which in many cases have been well served by buying up Russian oil made cheaper by Western sanctions.

The problem of recruiting such states to our side — including vital powers such as Turkey, India and Saudi Arabia — in a conflict involving China could be even more acute, given Beijing’s dominant role in global trade. Persuading them will require casting aside talk of “with us or against us” or value-based coalitions and instead identifying narrower actions they can take, which serve rather than undermine their interests. Making clear to them the economic consequences of a conflict in Asia may lead them to urge Beijing to forswear a move on Taiwan.  And while a wealthy state such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may be reluctant to broadly condemn Beijing, it is far likelier to finance rare-earth mines, chip fabrication facilities, and similar ventures outside of China ahead of any conflict — steps that will mean far more than any vote in the United Nations General Assembly.

The second key lesson of the Ukraine war is that the West’s militaries were not ready for it. For all the attention paid to Germany’s decision about sending its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, the lion’s share of military aid to Ukraine was provided by the United States. The perception that this assistance has undercut American readiness for conflicts elsewhere is a key factor in waning support for the war effort among some Republicans, which may prove to be a significant factor in determining the conflict’s course this year and next. The harsh reality, however, is that the U.S. defense industry would not be ready for a conflict in Asia even without the diversion of materiel to Ukraine — recent war games suggest the U.S. would run out of precision-guided munitions within just a few weeks of such a war.

Even a reinvigorated U.S. defense industrial base will not be sufficient to supply the West in the event of more than one major conflict. Nevertheless, the need for vigilance against Russian aggression will not diminish even as the chance of conflict in Asia increases. The upshot of these realities is that it is vital that Europe be ready to assume a greater role in its own security. This means not simply spending more on defense in parallel with the United States, but invigorating its defense industry so that the sort of systems that only Washington can provide today — which is most of them — needn’t be shipped across the Atlantic. Some worry that a stronger European defense industry and capability will threaten NATO; in fact, it may be vital to NATO’s continued credibility should the United States need to more seriously turn its attention to Asia.            

Looking back decades hence, it may be that the Ukraine conflict is remembered as “the war before the war” — a conflict that prefigured other, sharper conflagrations amid a turbulent 21st century. If so, the course of those subsequent wars may depend on whether the West heeds the lessons of this one.  

Michael Singh is managing director and Lane-Swig Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and director of the Glazer Program on Great Power Competition and the Middle East. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelSinghDC.