Connor Echols calls attention to the role of American training, and presumably some amount of direction, by the US of Ukrainian military operations in US military trained Ukrainians days before they sank two Russian ships Responsible Statecraft 09/07/2022:
U.S.-trained Ukrainian soldiers sank two Russian ships in June, according to Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top acquisitions official. The incident came just two months after Washington gave Ukraine intelligence that helped it sink the Moskva, then Russia’s most powerful warship in the Black Sea.I keep referring back to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's statement of the American war aims in April, "We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine." (Dan Sabbagh and Helen Livingstone, US pledges extra $713m for Ukraine war effort and to weaken Russia Guardian 04/25/2022) This is a much more expansive goal that restoring Ukrainian control over all its territory.
Washington trained the combatants on how to use Harpoon anti-ship missiles over Memorial Day weekend earlier this year. “The next week, two Russian ships were sunk,” LaPlante said during an interview with Defense News.
The revelation emerged less than a week after news broke that Washington conducted war games with Kyiv in order to plan for its counter-offensive in Kherson, highlighting the close operational ties between the U.S. and Ukrainian militaries. The news adds to concerns that the United States is engaged in a full-scale proxy war with Russia ...
Experts say that such a proxy conflict brings up two concerns. The first is that the United States will be incentivized to draw out the conflict for as long as possible in order to maximize their damage to Russia’s strategic interests. [my emphasis]
Echols:
The second concern is perhaps the most significant: the risk of escalation to full-blown war between the U.S. and Russia. Washington already has CIA operatives in Ukraine and special operations forces nearby, and the obvious closeness of U.S. cooperation with Ukrainian forces could at some point convince Russian President Vladimir Putin that America is a true belligerent in the war.The New Cold War enthusiasts have tried to stigmatize the phrase "proxy war," which the Russians are using in their propaganda. And the war is a direct war between Russia and Ukraine, initiated by Russia. We're still referring to this year as the beginning of the current conflict, though it could also be said to have begun in 2014 with Russia's seizure and annexation of Crimea and de facto seizure of two "breakaway" parts of the Donbas region.
But it is also a proxy war between the US and Russia. DefSec Austin's statement of the war aims is a strong indication that the Biden-Harris Administration sees it as a proxy war. The Ukrainian army could not have put up the kind of resistance it has this year without NATO countries supplying substantial weapons and training.
The US foreign policy establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, seems to see Western policy toward Russia only as Cold War or as American triumphalism. But conventional geopolitical considerations certainly need to be taken into account. The US certainly needs to take account of international law and its own value priorities - the latter factor often turns out in practice to be a justification for policies motivated by very "practical" considerations. And from lobbying pressure by companies who benefit financially from those considerations.
But ideas do matter in international relations. And the way members of the foreign policy and defense establishment conceive the world and US interests do shape their actions which in turn shape events.
The current state of the war in Ukraine makes it likely that it will go on for at least another year. As various analysts regularly point out, serious peace negotiations won't happen until both sides decide that continuing the war is likely to bring them most costs than benefits. Although those judgments are not mathematical calculations. The difference is that Russia can make its own decisions on that calculation, while Ukraine must share its decision-making with its NATO (de facto) allies.
Russia is currently concentrating on dividing the European allies, not least by its reductions of oil and gas supplies. But they will also encourage sympathetic rightwing parties in Europe to agitate the anti-immigration sentiment, which is one of the EU's greatest political weaknesses. I would say it's already happening, but anti-immigrant rhetoric is such a staple now of far-right and many conservative parties that they don't need much encouragement to roll it out.
Europe is looking at significantly more disruptions from the energy shortage than the US. US energy companies in fact benefit from it because it raises prices and widens the markets in the West. The Biden Administration's deal with Saudi Arabia to produce more oil to help with the European shortfalls seems at the moment to have fallen through, and Saudi Arabia is balking. American New Cold War enthusiasts like to bash their NATO allies for not showing enough manly fortitude in standing up to Bad Guy Putin. But the real negative effects on the voting populations in Europe are notably more negative and potentially politically volatile, as we are already starting to see on the energy problem.
So at the moment, the political vulnerabilities of European government around energy shortages and refugee issues are the more immediate challenge for NATO unity in the Ukraine-Russia war. But once Russia and Ukraine are ready to negotiate peace, if the American policy preference really remains what Austin said it is, the US is likely to be looking to extend the war for years into the future, that could make for some serious policy disputes.
It's worth remember here the sneering distinction another Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, make between "new Europe" (east-central countries, strongly anti-Russian) and "old Europe" (more oriented toward peace and stability). Both NATO and the EU have survived for longer than may have sometimes seemed possible. But the America First MAGA sentiment that dominates the US Republican Party sees NATO at best as an annoyance.
But complacency is not a good position for policymakers to take, either. We're talking here about an ongoing military conflict between the world's two biggest nuclear powers right near the border of one of them. When a similar situation occurred in 1962, the world was very lucky to have avoided nuclear war.
I'm including here earlier videos featuring the analysts of the two Über-Realist of the moment, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Mearsheimer is a particular bogeyman for the New Cold Warriors at the moment, a role he seems happy to play for now.
Wrecking Ukraine: The cost of Winning the War with Geopolitics Expert John Mearsheimer 06/19/2022:
The interviewer there, Jasmin Kosubek, was formerly with the German RT channel. She talks about her departure from RT last year in this video.
Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War-Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław Sikorski 05/13/2022:
The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war A lecture by John J. Mearsheimer 06/16/2022 (full text available here):
Joe Cirincione gives his own perspective on What’s Missing from Mearsheimer’s Analysis of the Ukraine War in the Harvard Kennedy School website Russia Matters 07/29/2022, in what for me is a surprisingly critical take on Mearsheimer's position. In his conclusion, he seems to dismiss the idea that we even need to look at "the root causes of the conflict." He seems to have adopted something like the "democracy vs. autocracy" view that Biden espouses, at least when it comes to the Russia-vs.-Ukraine conflict.
Yes, Putin's malicious intentions and imperatives of his particular autocratic government played a role in his decision to initiate this year's invasion. But to understand the dynamics of the war, the actual history of US-Russia relations and the role NATO expansion also has to be understood. And since the Clinton Administration, the Russian government has expressed openly and the US government was very much aware that Russia regarded NATO enlargement as threatening to their security.
No one actually believes that if Canada or Mexico entered a military alliance with China that allowed China to station troops and weapons under their own control in those countries that the United States would not regard that as a threat to national security and act in accordance with that perception.
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