7 Questions Everyone Should Be Asking About Ukraine
1) What’s the end game? If you say, “Ukraine wins and Russia loses,” that sounds nice, but how do we get there? Putin may perhaps correctly consider this as a war he has to win to survive. It doesn’t look as if sanctions are going to force Russia to give in. A best-case scenario would be Ukraine forcing Russian troops out of the country, but is that possible at all? If it is, then what? Ukraine certainly can’t go on the offensive and conquer Russia.
2) How much money are we willing to put into Ukraine? We’re in for over a hundred billion dollars in less than a year. Are we willing to go two hundred billion? 500 billion? A trillion? We’re spending an enormous amount of money on this and it’s entirely possible that the juice isn’t going to be worth the squeeze any more than it ultimately turned out to be in Afghanistan.
3) When does support for the war start to crater in the United States? We’ve seen the same pattern in war after war in America. When the war begins, it has high levels of support. Over time, it becomes a partisan issue and support for the war drops. Eventually, the war becomes a political hot potato, and we pull out, whether it makes sense at the time or not. In America, you can already see significant resistance to the war building up on the Right and it’s very possible that whoever the GOP candidate is in 2024 may be running on an anti-war platform or at least a “war skeptical” platform. So, how long does Ukraine have to “win?” Maybe not all that long and you can bet Russia is well aware of it.
4) How much of our money is being stolen? Huge amounts of US aid were stolen in Iraq and Afghanistan and given that Ukraine is one of the world’s most corrupt nations, it’s certainly being stolen there as well. In fact, we’ve already
caught a government official stealing money. You can be certain that’s just the tip of the iceberg. How much of your money is going to end up in secret bank accounts belonging to Ukrainian officials? The smart money is on hundreds of millions, if not billions.
5) What are our strategic objectives at this point? We’re not talking about Britain, Israel, and Australia here. Ukraine isn’t an ally or a friend of America and they’re not in a crucial geographic location. Moreover, Russia is a hostile nation, but we’re not at war with the Russians. In other words, this is a very optional fight for us, so what are we trying to achieve?
According to the mainstream media/war propaganda we’ve seen, Russia’s military has already been heavily degraded in Ukraine, and given the unimpressive performance of their military, they’re clearly not a threat to invade any NATO nations. Additionally, we certainly don’t want to see the conflict go nuclear, which is unlikely, but possible if Putin gets his back against the wall. So, what do we ultimately want to get done? Are we willing to hold out any length of time and spend any amount of money just to get rid of Putin? If so, why so, given that he would probably be replaced by someone ideologically similar? What are we hoping to do here?
6) What happens if Ukraine loses? People seem to be starting with the assumption that since Ukraine is the “good guy,” they’re going to win in the end, but this is the real world, not a Tolkien novel, so it’s entirely possible that Russia will come out on top. Ironically, that might make the war less expensive and more sustainable on our end, because it’s a lot cheaper to supply IEDS and anti-tank rockets to insurgents than to supply a conventional force. However, if it happens, it could also be demoralizing enough that support for the war collapses and, of course, there is no guarantee a significant insurgency will form.
7) Are we willing to consider a peace treaty? Any politician in Ukraine who signed a peace treaty right now would probably be skinned alive by his own people, so they’re publicly going to be a hard “no,”, but we also get a vote because they can’t fight this war without us. Publicly, at least, we’re not making any effort to reach peace, but the longer this goes on, the more the momentum will likely shift to Russia. That means we may never have significantly more leverage to cut a peace deal than we do today. So, should we be talking about peace right now?
