We should do whatever it takes to achieve the removal of the Russian threat
Threat removal, not escalation management, should guide Western governments
Summary
Western military assistance to Ukraine since February 2022 has gone through several phases of hesitancy and delay ahead of the possible delivery of more potent weapon systems. These phases of hesitancy have been motivated most decisively by fears of escalation, notably fears of a wider war against Russia. Their effect has been painfully obvious: Ukraine has had to fight a war for its national survival without a full range of relevant capabilities. Most notably, its planned major counter-offensive of summer 2023 proved to be a disappointment. In this post, I make the case for redefining the way Western governments view their decisions to supply certain weapon systems to Ukraine - away from concepts of escalation management and towards a more effective framing based on threat removal.
Background
It is well-known that Western governments have deliberately delayed the supply of certain weapon systems that Ukraine was publicly asking for.
Germany resisted the idea of supplying so-called “Western-made tanks” for the first 11 months of the war, in spite of the fact that Poland and the Czech Republic had started to deliver Russian-standard main battle tanks already from April 2022. In January 2023, following intense diplomatic pressure, Berlin finally gave way and multiple NATO Allies - including Germany itself - supplied German-made Leopard 1 and 2 tanks to Ukraine.
On the heels of that success, Kyiv reiterated calls to also obtain NATO-standard combat aircraft, with a notable but not exclusive interest in the F-16. At that stage, it was the United States that proved to be the key stumbling block. There too, after some delays, the White House greenlighted the training and preparations to supply F-16s to Ukraine out of the arsenals of European Allies that were willing to do so.
A third example is the supply of longer-range strike capabilities - whether ballistic or cruise. The United States refused for over a year to supply Ukraine with ATACMS missiles, ground-fired conventional ballistic missiles with a range of up to 300 km. As the New York Times had noted on 6 October 2022, “Ukrainian officials have asked for a weapon that can strike targets 190 miles away. But the Pentagon — wary of widening the war — says the ones it has provided are powerful enough”.
It was only one year later, in October 2023, that Ukraine finally received ATACMS missiles from the U.S. - albeit only an older and shorter-range version of it, and reportedly only 20 of them in total.
While other narratives have often accompanied these controversies, every serious analyst following the war knows that a major driver for such hesitancy has been the fear of a Russian escalation towards a wider war or towards a Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
The behaviour of the United States and its Allies displays a clear pattern of incremental increases in the potency of the weapons they supply to Ukraine, followed by periods of waiting. A notable scholarly analysis of this very process was published by Janice Gross Stein in the Texas National Security Review in the summer of 2023.
As Prof. Stein has established: “President Joe Biden was determined to avoid a war between NATO and Russian forces that he feared could escalate and was simultaneously committed to helping Ukraine repel Russian aggression and defend itself. These two objectives, often in tension with one another, defined the boundaries of the strategy of escalation management that the United States developed to reduce uncertainty.”
The argument
Wanting to avoid war with another major power can be a misguided strategic goal if it becomes a hard constraint, and that is what has happened. We know that the insufficiency of military aid to Ukraine was caused by the adoption of a model, or mental map, of escalation management. But why was that mental map chosen? Because it's the mental map that respects the hard constraint of not going to war against Russia.
As a result, Ukraine is undersupplied in weapons and unable to prevail, which prolongs the war without sufficiently weakening the aggressor. If the strategic goal were threat removal rather than avoidance of war, then the perspective and the policy options would widen. The right constraints to be placed on the search for an optimal policy that aims at threat removal could include the containment of costs and harms to both Allied nations and Ukraine itself.
Selfishly, the U.S. and her Allies would put a lot of weight on reducing the costs and harms to themselves, but some weight nonetheless on Ukraine's. But if the goal of threat removal were central, a lot more attention and interest would be geared towards seeking decisive military and territorial setbacks for Russia.
Moving at the speed of battlefield relevance would become more important: the policy goal, and the constraints, would be better respected by beating the Russians faster, not more slowly. There would be less concern about strikes against Russian and Belarussian territory -- they would be conducive to a Ukrainian victory and would set back Russia's potential to do harm more decisively.
There would also be less hesitation to genuinely seek to break the Russian economy, to agitate its public opinion against the war, to seek cracks within Russia's elites and within the wider Russian society, including among its many captive nationalities.
There would also be considerably more desire to seek to interdict foreign military supplies to Russia, such as those of Iran and the DPRK, to explore ways of sabotaging the Russian defence industry and, on the battlefield, to seek to draw out more of Russia's assets so as to destroy them.
Rather than seeking to manage escalation by drip-feeding arms to Ukraine, together with prior public announcements about what arms Ukraine will get, Allies would systematically look to create very unpleasant surprises for the Russian invaders.
For example, while longer-range strike capabilities are by far not the only capability Ukraine needs, it is evidently the case that Ukraine could have achieved a wide range of military objectives considerably more effectively if it had secretly received, say, 300 full-range ATACMS missiles.
Instead, public discussions and indeed publicly visible delays and hesitations about what capabilities may be supplied have amounted to telling the Russians in advance that their positions in Ukraine will get hit unless they move them further back. This is, to put it mildly, an odd way to help Ukraine to liberate herself. The result is that Russia experiences lower losses, but it remains entrenched and arrogant on illegally occupied territory, whereas all Western governments agree officially that it has no right to be there.
The existing approach is also a bizarre mid-point. Western-supplied weapons have killed tens of thousands of Russian invaders. Clearly, the supply of materiel, even though it creates enormous costs and difficulties to Russia, is not a cause for escalation. On that basis, would it really make a difference if Ukraine’s armed forces succeeded in killing three times more Russian servicemen and secured a collapse of Russia's entire invasion force?
As one can see, applying the logic of 'escalation management' as the central analytical device is not merely questionable - it is evidently absurd. But more than absurd, it is the wrong objective.
A strategic definition of appeasement
In fact, one can view the adoption of a hard constraint of war avoidance as the essential cause of policies of appeasement, today and yesterday. In signing the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain and Daladier applied a constraint of 'no war'. Everything else had to be re-arranged around that constraint. It yielded a betrayal of a friendly nation and did nothing to reduce the threat.
Contemporary Western policy towards Ukraine is distinct and more honourable than the 1938 policy towards Czechoslovakia -- but it is nonetheless a form of appeasement in the sense that there is a hard constraint to avoid war and everything else is re-arranged around that constraint.
The strategic result is disturbingly similar to today’s policy choice: Western nations are not removing the Russian threat. Serious, indeed public, discussions and warnings about a wider Europe-Russia or NATO-Russia war have become commonplace. There is a widespread belief in relevant expert communities that Russia will come back for more unless there's spectacular political change inside Russia. European military leaders consider a wider Europe-Russia war to be quite likely within a timeframe of 1-5 years.
Why should Western governments accept that looming threat upon their nations and peoples?
An alternative policy goal that would address the problem head on is threat removal. This would rely on a combination of further kinetic destruction of some of Russia's military means and much strengthened and credible deterrence measures.
The most effective way to achieve that goal is to make Ukraine win this war as quickly as possible, based on the supply of more powerful military capabilities -- longer range, better, faster, smarter, more powerful.
Western policy makers have long repeated key mantras reflecting their policy priorities and the constraints they have placed upon them — that Russia should merely not win (without necessarily specifying that Ukraine should win outright), and that assistance to Ukraine should continue for “as long as it takes”.
The alternative policy principle that I propose is this:
The combination of Western military assistance to Ukraine and of the defence investments and preparedness of existing NATO members for their own defence should amount to whatever it takes to ensure the removal of the Russian threat against Europe, Ukraine included.