By Stephen Smoot
Three years ago this week, the Russian Federation launched a war against Ukraine with the goal of absorbing territory containing both Russian ethnics and the richest farmland outside of North America.
The war itself has roughly resembled the Union’s efforts to subjugate the Confederate States. Russia has significant advantages and has used a strategy of attrition to try and cut Ukraine off from support. Ukraine mimicked Robert E. Lee’s expedition into Pennsylvania, achieving almost as little as the Army of Northern Virginia.
Currently, Russia has embraced Ulysses S. Grant’s end of war strategy to grind the opponent into submission through non stop pushing against the front.
But that is not the metaphor to focus upon at the moment.
Ukraine’s supporters, including many in Europe, have grown enamored of the idea that including Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, will give it complete security against Russia. They believe that Russia will fear taking on NATO enough that it could end the war favorably on Ukraine’s terms.
That sounds logical, but what does history teach?
At the end of the war between France and movements seeking independence for Indochina, the former French colony divided into Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. South Vietnam favored the West and North the Communist world.
North Vietnam was led by Ho Chih Minh, a former French Communist student built up by the United States Office of Strategic Services during World War II to fight the Japanese. He fought them well, then fought France after the war. All understood that he had zero intentions of leaving South Vietnam in peace.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s solution lay in creating the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO.
SEATO served as a carbon copy of NATO, both organizations serving as collective security. This means an attack upon one would be an attack upon all. In both organizations, that meant challenging the might of the United States of America.
Many minds thought that North Vietnam would shrink from that challenge, but they and their allies launched a guerilla war in the South through an organization called the Vietcong. Communists also seized control of the government of neighboring Laos.
By now John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, but a committed Cold Warrior, had come to the conclusion that not providing robust support to South Vietnam would make NATO allies also question America’s commitment and willingness to fight.
Starting under Kennedy and continuing under Lyndon Johnson, the United States gradually ramped up support until ground troops, air assets, and naval forces were engaged first against the Vietcong, but later against North Vietnam itself.
The SEATO commitment was the reason. Making an ironclad promise under international law bound the United States to conflict. Over 10 years, 55,000 US troops died in a war that no presidential administration had the courage to try and win, or the ability to end peacefully with South Vietnam remaining sovereign and free.
For the next two generations, every time the United States faced the possibility of armed confrontation, a Greek chorus of Congressmen (one of them almost always US Senator Joe Biden) would warn against “another Vietnam.”
Sometimes they had a point. Other times, the comparison was way off base.
Few comparisons, however, come closer than calls to add Ukraine to NATO and put the alliance in the same position the US found itself in with Vietnam.
President Donald Trump conducts what historian Walter Russell Mead calls a Hamiltonian foreign policy. Mead describes a Hamiltonian policy as one that puts the economic interests of the United States first and foremost – while seeing international conflict in the form of war anywhere as almost always detrimental to the interests of the United States.
Trump is currently following the path of Otto von Bismarck as he tried to end the Russo-Turkish War and Theodore Roosevelt’s work to terminate the Russo-Japanese War. Bismarck especially worried about Great Power instability and how a small war could lead to a world war. He understood that any major war would hurt Germany most, so he endeavored to stamp out any war after 1872.
Neither Bismarck nor Roosevelt cared about the justice of who started the conflict. Both saw the end of war as not only a moral good, but vital to their country’s security. and/or interests.
Now back to the initial metaphor.
Ukraine is approaching where the Confederate States were in late 1863 or early 1864, still fighting hard, but coming ever closer to social, economic, and finally, military collapse.
If Ukraine accepts the lifeline to continued existence offered by making peace now, they may find that Russia’s post Putin government may be amenable to working with them rather than conquering parts of their land. Russia’s historical pattern is to swing back and forth, from leader to leader, between Russian imperialism/nationalism and constructively engaging the West. Czarina Elizabeth fought bitterly to destroy Prussia in the Seven Years War (French and Indian War in America), for instance, but after her death, Russia dropped out of the war and morally supported Prussia.
Ukraine cannot win this war. And for all Europe’s blustering, they allowed themselves to slide into military irrelevance. Germany has chosen to abandon both economic and military power in the past decade. Britain is not far behind. NATO, in terms of relative military power versus opponents, better resembles the SEATO of the 50s in its complete dependence on the United States.
Certainly the United States could collect a coalition of the willing and fight directly in Ukraine. That said, the cost in American young men and women needed to win would be more than the nation would bear.
It’s best to understand that before the war starts rather than years into it.
Trump’s push to end the war will not satisfy the cause of idealistic justice. It will, however, rescue Ukraine from collapse and it will save the lives of countless young men in both nations currently doomed to fight and die in a war whose outcome is not in doubt, should it continue. .
