Susan B. Glasser
President Biden, squinting in the May sun, delivered what he called “historic” and “momentous” news on Thursday morning. Standing in the Rose Garden, he was flanked by two guests whose presence showed that this was not a case of standard-issue Presidential hyperbole: Finnish President Sauli Niinistö and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. A day after formally submitting their countries’ applications to join nato, they had come to receive America’s blessing for the endeavor, the most concrete shift yet in the geopolitical order resulting from Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Biden gave it, offering them a folksy welcome to the Western alliance and promising them the full security protection that membership confers. “There is nothing going to be missed, as my mother would say, between the cup and lip,” the President said. “We’re in.”
Two hours after Biden’s Nordic photo op, the Senate approved—with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 86–11—a forty-billion-dollar aid package for Ukraine. The twin developments on Thursday reinforced the point that, in the not-quite three months since Russia attacked Ukraine, the war has already changed Washington in striking ways. New realities, such as the decisions of Finland and Sweden to join nato—after decades of official neutrality, despite the predations of Hitler and Stalin—were recently seen as politically impossible. “After two hundred years of military nonalignment, Sweden has chosen a new path,” Andersson said, in remarks at the White House. Putin’s war, in other words, has now caused a once-every-two-hundred-years event. Other developments, such as suddenly present fears of a twenty-first-century nuclear war in Europe, were unthinkable before the invasion. Washington sending tens of billions of dollars to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Putin happened so quickly, meanwhile, that few have fully processed its meaning: an American decision to bankroll a proxy war against a hostile superpower.
When we spoke recently, Ivo Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to nato during Barack Obama’s Presidency, referred to “the shock of February 24th”—the date that Putin launched this war against his neighbor, with no real pretext beyond a messianic belief that Ukraine is a non-country belonging to Russia. That date, it is now clear, represents one of those hinge-point moments that happens every decade or two—a transformative event not just for Ukraine and Europe but for Washington, too. American power and purpose will be redefined by Putin’s decision for years to come. There will be a before February 24th and an after.
One of the most alarming changes since then has been the return of nuclear anxiety to America’s foreign-policy debate—a fear that reached its previous apogee in the Reagan era, when kids like me watched the Soviets bomb the Midwest into the apocalyptic dark ages in the television movie “The Day After.” But that fear dissipated after Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1986 and decided that neither of them was going to blow up the world after all. For most of the intervening years, the animating nuclear worry among U.S. policymakers has been the threat of nuclear-weapons proliferation to states such as Iran. Yet here we are, in 2022, worrying about whether Putin will go nuclear, rather than risk further humiliation and outright defeat for his military, given its remarkably poor performance. These days, my e-mail in-box is filled with speculation about Armageddon. “Will Russia use nuclear weapons in Ukraine?” the Atlantic Council asked, earlier this month. The Center for the National Interest, meanwhile, offered a Zoom session—“Does Nuclear War Loom with Russia?”—featuring its president, Dimitri Simes, just back from Moscow.
Inside the U.S. government, the prospect of nuclear conflict has been debated at the highest levels since February 24th. I spoke about this, on Thursday, with Michael McFaul, who served as a senior official on the National Security Council during the Obama Administration, and then as the Administration’s Ambassador to Russia. McFaul, now a Russia expert at Stanford, said that he had participated in detailed discussions over the past couple of months with “the most senior people in the U.S. government,” debating the probability of nuclear attack and working through what would happen if Russia employed tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine—which is now a real, if extremely low-probability, risk. “They are rightly focussed on that, and that is fundamentally new,” McFaul told me. “I served five years in the government. . . . Nobody ever seriously talked about the use of nuclear weapons in any scenario, in any country.”
Certainly, Finland and Sweden’s swift decisions to join nato have created one of the most concrete and hard-to-reverse changes since February. The move has very specific military consequences for Russia, which will now face an additional eight-hundred-plus miles of border with nato, two additional militaries that are among the most heavily armed and capable in Europe, and the prospect of the alliance being able to “bottle up the Baltic Sea and keep the Russians from coming out,” as Eric Edelman, a former Pentagon under-secretary in the George W. Bush Administration, put it to me. “It’s huge from a geostrategic point of view,” Edelman said. He also pointed out that the two countries have among the largest stockpiles of artillery in Europe, and “if we’ve learned anything from this war in Ukraine it’s that artillery does matter still.” Suffice it to say that one did not hear a lot about the Nordic angle on transatlantic security from the Biden foreign-policy team or anyone else before Putin’s invasion—nor, for that matter, about the game-changing importance of artillery.
Before February 24th, the future of nato was also not entirely clear, particularly after the embarrassing end to its two-decade-long war in Afghanistan. Former President Donald Trump had declared the alliance “obsolete,” and came close to blowing it up, all while admiring Putin as a strategic “genius.” Trump’s former national-security-adviser John Bolton recently warned that if Trump were reëlected he would seek to withdraw the U.S. from nato, an effort that now seems more inconceivable than Trump’s still-quite-possible return to office in 2024. “Putin’s war has given new life and meaning to nato that will not go away,” McFaul predicted. “It reaffirms the central function of nato as a defensive military alliance around which European security is organized,” Daalder said. “You can’t wish it away.” Instead, nato officials are preparing for a summit in June, at which they will discuss the possibility of new permanent troop deployments along Russia’s frontier, additional European bases, and a long-term strategy far different than what they would have contemplated before February.
Putin’s war has some obvious beneficiaries in Washington, the defense budget and the Pentagon being perhaps the most predictable. But the scope and scale of the American commitment to arming Ukraine was unthinkable until Ukraine’s surprise victory over Russia in the battle of Kyiv. Earlier this month, when Biden asked for a new, thirty-six-billion-dollar aid package, Congress swiftly raised the ante to forty billion. It should be noted that Russia’s entire annual military budget is estimated at some sixty-six billion. The cumulative effect of American aid, in other words, along with contributions from other Western allies and from Ukraine itself, will make this an even more competitive fight than it already is.
The Biden Administration, like both Obama’s and Trump’s before it, came to office talking about a need for a strategic shift to Asia, given the challenge to American power that China’s rise represents. The imperative to focus on China remains, which is why on Thursday, immediately after meeting with the Nordic leaders at the White House, Biden departed on his first trip to Asia, to visit the U.S. allies South Korea and Japan. But Russia’s aggression against Ukraine—which now looks likely to settle into a “prolonged conflict,” as Avril Haines, the director of National Intelligence, told Congress last week, lasting years and potentially becoming a grinding “war of attrition”—has again discredited the idea of a pivot, for Biden or for future Presidents.
“That was a miscalculation—that they could just have a stable and predictable relationship with Putin and focus on what they wanted to. And now they can’t,” McFaul told me. “Now all those meetings in the White House—all of them are about Ukraine. They are not about China and Taiwan. . . . And they are going to be dealing with Ukraine for the rest of their time there.”
Much of the continuing fallout from the war looks to be far more challenging for the Biden Administration than having two strong and capable democracies raise their hands to join nato. Turkey, for example, has said it will block their accession, an obstacle that U.S. officials say they are confident can be overcome—for a price, whether that means additional arms sales to Turkey or a bilateral meeting between Biden and the country’s increasingly autocratic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which Biden has been so far reluctant to offer. Washington may also have to look more favorably on problematic oil-rich countries, such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, after Putin’s war sent the price of energy skyrocketing. And then there are the horrific human costs: the mass migration of millions of Ukrainians, Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain exports, which are now trapped and held hostage in Black Sea ports, threatening famine in food-insecure places across the globe. None of it was what the White House had in mind before this war began.
All this suggests a reckoning of sorts, for which there are no good political answers yet in Washington, where problems at home, in an ever more divided America, understandably dominate. The rapid upending of the world as we knew it before February 24th should be a reminder of the humility needed in the months and years to come. Many observers did not believe that Putin would invade. Others did not believe his military would fare so poorly, and expected Kyiv to fall in days. And yet, now, a new conventional wisdom is taking hold in Washington—that Russia can actually lose this war, be routed from Ukraine, and be banished from the community of responsible nations. Would that it were so. But even a defeated Russia—perhaps especially a defeated Russia—will remain a consuming threat for the United States. This was Putin’s choice, though the consequences are, at least in part, Washington’s to determine.
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