Russia-Ukraine war: US must change its role in Europe’s defense

Regardless of its outcome, the Russia-Ukraine War ought to make the U.S. and its allies seriously consider European defense for the first time since the Cold War. Ironically, this conflict presents the United States with an opportunity to resolve the diplomatic-military imbalance in Europe’s security architecture and to ensure that, whether it conquers Ukraine or not, Russia emerges weaker from this adventure in brutality.

There should be no mistake: Although Ukraine is not within NATO’s defense perimeter, the U.S., its Atlantic Alliance allies and all European states have a key interest in maintaining an independent Ukraine beyond Russia’s orbit. Ukraine is a crucial buffer between Russia and NATO. Even after the Kremlin’s theft of Ukraine’s Crimea region, Ukrainian military capabilities jeopardized Russia’s control of the Black Sea, thereby complicating its ability to project power in the Eastern Mediterranean against NATO’s soft underbelly.

{mosads}An independent Ukraine also jeopardizes Russia’s Belarusian salient, increasing logistical and planning considerations in the event of a Russian attack on the Baltics or Poland. The Russian military has had to “price in” Ukrainian military capabilities during war planning, at least in a defensive manner, because Ukraine surely would not have remained silent during a Russia-NATO confrontation. And the economic frailty of Russia’s Donbas proxies, along with the supply difficulties it faced in Crimea, further stressed Russian forces. 

Given the difficulties of total subjugation, Russia’s most likely territorial objective is the conquest of “Novorossiya,” a Tsarist term describing Ukraine’s southern coastline through to modern-day Moldova. Holding this territory would allow Russia to dominate the Black Sea and pressure Romania and Bulgaria directly; if Russia can deploy more air forces to the Black Sea, it could make Turkey formally reconsider its NATO affiliation. Russian success would open another seam in NATO’s defense architecture to exploit in the next confrontation.

This transformed European balance demands a reconsideration of the diplomatic, political and military assumptions that have guided European defense since the Cold War’s conclusion. Leadership, as shown by Winston Churchill’s magisterial biography of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, is essential to successful alliances. American leadership is crucial if Europe’s security structures are to be prepared for long-term Russian pressure. 

The U.S. must resolve the divide between NATO’s military role in European defense and the European Union’s diplomatic role in a European political bloc. As currently conceived, the EU is antithetical to a coherent NATO, not because it stands as an alternative to American leadership but because it is not oriented toward political reality. 

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Former German chancellor Angela Merkel, once praised as the free world’s true leader in contradistinction with a bumbling Donald Trump, set Europe on the path to calamity; her supposed moral clarity and diplomatic shrewdness would make her the standard-bearer of post-Obama liberal internationalism. Instead, despite her public statements, Merkel consistently opposed American efforts to wean Europe off Russian energy, and she negotiated the Minsk II agreement, whose vacillation and openness to interpretation calcified the Russo-Ukrainian conflict leading to today’s crisis. The former chancellor continuously tilted toward China. Her foreign policy paradigm — and, by extension, the EU’s paradigm, considering her defining role in the bloc’s evolution — treated security concerns as irrational distractions from economic and climate-change questions, to be remedied through “dialogue” and “mediation.”

The EU now enters its post-Merkel era. French President Emmanuel Macron is likely to win another term, repeating his second-round electoral success against perennial right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen. Macron’s Russia policy has been one of tactical accommodation — particularly in Libya, where Russian and French interests aligned against Turkish objectives — but the new European Cold War may force him to shift his stance. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, initially viewed as Merkel’s intellectual successor, has shifted tacks, announcing a complete reorientation of Germany’s foreign and defense policy, more military spending, and the provision of weapons to Ukraine.

Now is the moment for the United States to eliminate the division between the EU and NATO. The EU’s economics-suffused view of international affairs, with its prattling and mealy-mouthed avoidance of international disputes, should be eliminated. The Biden administration ought to use the Ukraine war to align the EU’s major players — France and Germany — with American objectives, to ensure that Russia is contained, regardless of its victory, defeat or de-escalation.

The “Eurocracy” will still stand in the way of any such political reframing. The U.S. must pressure it.

The U.S. should diplomatically and militarily prioritize vulnerable Central and Eastern European (CEE) states. It should advocate for a political-diplomatic arrangement that links the Baltics, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and, if possible, the currently Russophilic but NATO-member Hungary; this arrangement would recognize that these border states now have a demonstrable interest in coordinating their defense at every level of society. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not Moscow’s first drive east: The Soviet Union engaged in a similar broad-front war of conquest in 1919-1921, targeting all of Eastern Europe; it was defeated by Eastern Europe’s nascent post-imperial states, at times working in concert, at times at war with each other. 

{mossecondads}Apart from, perhaps, Poland, none of these states will field major conventional capabilities for wholesale NATO integration today. However, all can implement territorial defense strategies like Ukraine’s, relying upon their depth and population to slow a Russian offensive in preparation for high-end NATO counterattack. Washington could support defense preparations by giving and selling the weapons to NATO’s CEE states that ought to have begun in earnest when Russia seized Crimea eight years ago. This approach would have the benefit of signaling American resolve within the Atlantic Alliance. By working with NATO’s CEE states, Washington could emphasize its commitment and circumvent Paris and Berlin. Moreover, such cooperation demonstrates to Eastern European nations in Russia’s sights that the U.S. and NATO, not the EU, are their security guarantors.

This approach would allow the U.S. and NATO, at minimum, to delineate lines of effort between the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union. Brussels may coordinate sanctions and trade policy — but any course of action must be developed in parallel with NATO military policy, and must buttress it, not replace it.

Economic sanctions may shape the outcome in Ukraine, but the heft of an axe is less formidable than its blade. NATO has ruled out the blade because Ukraine is not a member, because the outcome of Ukraine’s success on its own is far better than if purchased by direct NATO action, and because Putin’s nuclear spear-brandishing frightened the U.S. and other Atlantic Alliance members. The scare is real but avoidable. Had the muddle of interlocking NATO/EU security responsibility been clear enough to harden Ukraine’s deterrence beginning even before the invasion of Crimea in 2014, today’s war could have been avoided.

Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy.