The Ukraine Situation: The Road from Foreign Policy to War is Deathly Serious
The Shifting Onus of National Security
Here’s a scenario: a patient is fighting a known, aggressive cancer for years but is hit by a car and sustains critical injuries. How can this scenario possibly relate to American foreign policy? In the case of our leading adversaries — China and Russia — the analogy has meaningful applications for the potential scenarios the United States may see in the future and is currently confronting. While close and unrelenting attention has been devoted to China and its ascendancy, vigilance seems to have waned on Russia and its designs until very recently.
To extend the analogy, the rapid and substantial buildup of conventional forces at the border of Ukraine and Russia is the car. This dramatic shift in attention on Russia and the threat it poses to Ukraine’s sovereignty demonstrates how quickly foreign policy paradigms can shift and sway. As a first resort, our diplomat corps and foreign policy professionals pursue peaceful resolutions through strategic communication, but these efforts may languish or fail. A secondary effect of an abrupt focus shift in foreign policy is the pressure this shift places on the rest of our national security enterprise.
Most notably, history has shown us in these tense times that the countries involved begin to mobilize their armed forces for war. While preparation and posturing is necessary, employing military solutions to geopolitical issues is a world apart from using foreign policy and diplomatic tools. In an age where the United States’ military has fought thousands of miles from our shores, the seriousness of going to war has faded from the collective consciousness of the country. As conflicts evolve and trend towards escalation, the dire consequences of military action cannot be equated or conflated with our non-lethal, diplomatic toolkit. Above all, we need to evaluate and prioritize the treatment of our national security maladies in a way that preserves our health as a nation and that of the global order, maximizes the reach of diplomacy, and reserves war for when every other imaginable tool has been exhausted. And every step of the way, we must embrace caution, consideration, and consensus on roads that have the potential to intersect with war.
The First Line of Defense: Foreign Policy
Foreign policy is how we approach other nations, manage our relationships with them, and advance our national interests globally. Establishing and managing foreign policy requires identifying not only the nations that possess the will and capability to cause harm to the United States, but also those whose interests and identities align with the goals of the United States. Overestimation of a near peer can result in wasted energy and resources that could be dedicated to an underestimated adversary.
Beyond finding the correct allocation of time and resources, fruitful foreign policy hinges on successful communication. The United States seeks to establish regular, consistent, and predictable communications with our partners, allies, and especially global competitors, but this goal is not always a shared one. In the case of Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, history and culture have rendered national objectives that do not align with a desire to be regular, consistent or predictable in the realm of strategic communication, much less action.
As Catherine the Great famously said of Russia, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Ukraine is not a NATO member, however it strongly desires membership and the transatlantic protection it confers. Putin’s Russia is demonstrating its commitment to ensure Ukraine’s goal of NATO membership never reaches fruition. Further, Putin’s motivation to potentially invade Ukraine harkens back to a dynastic grudge, that is, the belief that Russia as inheritors of the Kievan Rus, cannot truly be Russia when territorially separated from Ukraine.
Just last summer, President Vladimir Putin issued a roadmap of Russian intentions., Chief among these is the primacy and historical right to large swaths of Ukrainian territory. This lengthy written piece, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” reveals a set of priorities for which Putin is willing to break the rules of the international order. As tensions continue to rise along the eastern edge of Ukraine and the potential for kinetic action grows daily, member nations of NATO and the United States are pursuing bilateral and multilateral negotiation, but the gains produced from these talks have been limited. What happens next, and how we talk about it, matters immensely.
When Foreign Policy Fails, War is Still Not a Foregone Conclusion
As news headlines and television commentary blooms with speculation and rhetoric, a disturbing question has emerged: “Do you think we’re going to war?” More proclamatory renditions of this question sprinkle the national dialogue with varying degrees of fatalism: “We should go to war” and “If Russia invades, we have to go to war.” This is both a dangerous and destructive line of logic that degrades the seriousness of war. War is not a concept or a tool that only touches our enemies; it is a whole of nation act that can engulf the globe in loss and suffering. The very word — war —should send a chill down your spine.
The situation at the Ukrainian border provides a chance to renew our perspective on the road from foreign policy to war and the seriousness with which we treat the latter. If foreign policy does not produce an off-ramp for Putin and his nationalistic agenda, then armed conflict with Ukraine is a distinct possibility. Rhetoric like, “If Russia invades, we should go to war,” creates a cause-effect tripwire in the American dialogue that permeates across world media and increases the temperature on an already tense and sensitive environment. Other mechanisms, to include the censure of the international community and severe economic sanctions, are viable and legitimate measures to hold Russia accountable for the violation of a sovereign nation’s territory.
Some might contend that these measures are not harsh enough and pave a pathway to emboldening Russia and its aggression. Regardless of opinion on Russia’s aggression and how severely they should be penalized and by what measures, the transition from foreign policy to war should be walked with extreme caution, deliberation, and clarity of intent. Consensus among our elected officials is a cornerstone of this process. Ultimately, our Constitution vests the power to declare war with Congress although military force has been authorized many times without Congressional approval throughout U.S. history. In our nearly two and a half centuries as a nation, by most historians’ accounts, the United States has gone to war thirteen times.
Having just emerged from a war in Afghanistan that lasted two decades, we should take time to reflect on the costs war imposes and take care to realize that those costs are sometimes unrealized or unfelt by American society in day-to-day life. Not since the Civil War, our country’s deadliest with more than 600,000 killed, has war crept onto American doorsteps and been fought on our soil. Not since the World Wars I and II, our nation’s second and third deadliest wars, have we witnessed a wholesale change of daily life and rearrangement of our economy to support a full scale global endeavor against an existential enemy. A military at war is a nation at war and the consequences —in economic prosperity, global security, international stability, and human life — should never be undersold or minimized through flippant rhetoric.
Speak Carefully About War
One of history’s greatest military theorists Carl von Clausewitz said, “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. [It is] an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” Another paragon of military philosophy, Thucydides, believe that war is inevitable between rising powers who will invariably find an end to foreign policy and resort to war. Whether Thucydides’ assessment rings true for the contemporary global order remains to be seen. Burgeoning asymmetric capabilities, particularly in the cyber domain, that produce effects below the threshold of traditional air, land, and sea war may delay or divert kinetic engagements. However, Clausewitz’ characterization of war as violence remains accurate for the modern day. Even in the age of information and expansive non-kinetic optionality, war still comes down to force, compulsion, and violence.
If war is politics by other means, it is crucial to recognize that military force sits at the extreme end of the means spectrum. And even when we enter the gray space of the spectrum where foreign policy has lost traction but military force has yet to be applied, deterrence can play a powerful and effective role. The robustness of our military arsenal and ability to employ it forces potential aggressors to calculate relative costs and benefits. Until that deterrence disintegrates, a bevy of options exist along the spectrum before we should hear “We’re going to war.”
Why? What is it worth? If war, as Thucydides claimed, is inevitable then why be careful with our words? A similar attitude could be applied to death and illness, both inevitable facets of the human condition. But as we know, even the most serious illnesses often have cures and hopeful prognoses despite doubts, pain, and struggle on the return to health. We must conscientiously frame our perceptions and opinions on foreign policy, war, and the vast spectrum of thought and action that lives in between these two kingdoms of national security.
Major Jenn Walters graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 2011. After serving as a KC-10A instructor pilot, she completed her PhD in public policy at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, CA. She is currently a speechwriter serving on the Joint Staff, Pentagon, VA.
* The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent those of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.