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If Washington were intentionally to design a formula for Ukraine's destruction, it might look a lot like the aid package passed by Congress this week. Of course, that is not the impression one gets from celebratory reactions to the legislation in Ukraine, Congress, and the media. The package "sends a unified message to the entire world: America will always defend democracy in its time of need," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
"This support will really strengthen the armed forces of Ukraine," commented Ukrainian President Zelensky, adding, "and we will have a real chance at victory."
"We will stand with Ukraine until victory is won," proclaimed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Such triumphalism is misplaced. The package includes enough military and economic support to sustain Kyiv's hopes for a few more months, but nowhere near enough to defeat Russian forces. Of the roughly $61 billion it allocates, $14 billion is reserved for procuring weapons for Ukraine, and it includes an additional $8 billion in financial support to help keep the Ukrainian government afloat. The bulk of the package, however, will go toward replenishing America's own diminished military stockpiles — which will take years to accomplish — and funding its broader operations in the region. Some of Ukraine's more sober-minded supporters concede as much. The package "will provide both a materiel and morale boost," according to Washington Post columnist Max Boot, but "much more needs to be done. To wrest the battlefield advantage from Russia and to convince its dictator that he cannot win his cruel war of conquest … more U.S. aid will be necessary in the future." Those hailing the package see the new aid as a holding action, staving off a collapse of Ukraine's lines and buying time for the West to ramp up military production. This would allow Ukraine new opportunities to regain the offensive in 2025 and beyond. This optimistic view ignores a discouraging reality, however. The package will not bridge the enormous gap between Russia's artillery, bomb, and missile production and that of Ukraine and its Western supporters, because the West simply lacks the manufacturing capacity to meet Ukraine's massive needs, and this will be the case for many years to come. Congressional funding can enable procurement orders, but it cannot create machinists and other skilled workers necessary to man new factories. And it cannot address the enormous manpower disparity between Ukraine, whose birth rate has plunged to one the lowest in the world, and Russia, which has almost five times the population and one of the highest birth rates in Europe. Moreover, one key to the success of such a long-term approach is America's own ability to provide Ukraine with large aid packages for many years to come. But the controversies in Congress over this package, coupled with trends in opinion polls that show growing American public skepticism about the war, strongly suggest that such largesse is not politically viable for much longer. Additional aid would be justified — indeed, it would arguably be required — if it were to be used as leverage in a broader diplomatic strategy for negotiating a compromise settlement of the war that would secure Ukraine and allow its reconstruction while addressing Russian security concerns. But it is tied to no such strategy. The fact that the new aid package includes language requiring the Biden administration to articulate a strategy within 45 days after enactment is a testimony to its absence. Does the White House intend to pursue negotiations after the November elections, when it might have greater political room to deal with Russia? Does it indeed believe that Ukraine can ultimately drive Russian forces off all of its territory, even though its counteroffensive clearly failed in 2023, when it had significantly more troops and weapons? Or does it intend to be Ukraine's military benefactor for many years to come, keeping fingers crossed that it can maintain a battlefield stalemate or that Russia will break before the much smaller and much poorer Ukraine collapses? Absent answers to these questions, the new aid is spending that lacks a coherent plan for making it effective. That makes it a formula for prolonging, not ending, the war. It will almost guarantee that Ukraine will continue throwing its dwindling reserves of manpower into a war it cannot win, and which is wreaking ever more havoc on Ukraine's infrastructure and its prospects for future prosperity. It will amount to both a waste of money and, even more disturbingly, a waste of Ukrainian lives.

It has become commonplace to observe that NATO is the world's most successful alliance, now observing its 75th anniversary. That was certainly true for its first four decades of existence: the feared Soviet military invasion of Western Europe never materialized, in no small part due to the deterrence effect of NATO. During the Cold War, NATO nurtured a growing sense of self-confidence in the West that served as an important barrier to the spread of communism. The web of cooperative links it established between U.S. and European officials ensured that the United States remained a key stabilizer in European security affairs and that the growth of German power — which had been so problematic during the first half of the 20th century — was contained within the friendly confines of the alliance. Since the Cold War's end, however, NATO has been far more successful at expansion and self-perpetuation than at making the United States safer and more prosperous. With the addition of Sweden and Finland to its ranks, NATO has now doubled in size from the 16 members it included when the Berlin Wall fell. But greater size has not translated into greater benefits for the United States. In fact, the more members the alliance has incorporated, the more our expanded obligations have risked dragging America into regional and local conflicts that have little to do with America's own security. NATO's eastward expansion has also exacerbated the threat of Russian aggression that the alliance was originally intended to prevent. Moscow first objected to the prospect of such expansion under Gorbachev, then under Yeltsin in response to the first post-Cold War round of new members, and more recently under presidents Medvedev and Putin, as it became clear that NATO had no intention of stopping its enlargement short of Georgia and Ukraine. While not the sole cause of Medvedev's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the desire to block a Western military presence in these key states was a fundamental Kremlin motivation. NATO's unwillingness to respect Russia's concerns, coupled with the Kremlin's growing conviction that the United States was seeking regime change in Moscow, also prompted Russia to pursue ever deeper security cooperation with China to counterbalance the United States and NATO. The United States now faces threats to its security that are graver than any we encountered during the Cold War. We are on the brink of direct warfare with Russia, the world's largest nuclear power, but without the arms control measures and confidence-building dialogue that helped keep the Cold War cold. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was a military behemoth but an economic basket case, China is an industrial powerhouse, deeply integrated into the world economy, far more populous than the United States, and increasingly partnered with the world's greatest source of natural resources, Russia. Instead of deftly dividing our adversaries, as we did between the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War, we have bumbled our way toward uniting them against us. These developments can hardly be regarded as American foreign policy successes. And they were not just predictable results of crossing clearly articulated Russian redlines; they were in fact predicted both by American scholars and by experts within the U.S. government. Ignoring these warnings has left Washington and the NATO alliance facing an existential question: how can the West counterbalance the combined might of China and Russia while mitigating the risks of escalation into a catastrophic great power conflict? The most important step toward this goal should be to encourage greater European strategic capability and autonomy within the NATO alliance. This would allow Europe to serve less as a weak though obedient appendage of Washington and more as force-multiplier in counterbalancing Russia and managing the complex tensions and interdependencies in Western relations with China. And it would allow the United States to focus its limited resources and attention on Asia, where U.S. security is most at risk. Our goal should be to establish a stable balance of power among the key players in an increasingly multipolar order, not to pursue a quixotic and danger-laden vision of eliminating Russia or China as threats to the West. This would not mean American withdrawal from NATO or abandonment of our obligations under its charter. But it would demand much more than urging European allies to increase their military spending and share more of NATO's defense burden, as Washington has done rather unsuccessfully for decades. It would require deliberate steps to Europeanize NATO itself, which has long been dominated by American military control, even though its political leaders have typically been European. Installing a European as Supreme Allied Commander and insisting that Europeans assume greater responsibility for planning and guiding NATO's military operations would go far toward transforming Europe into a more capable pole in the evolving multipolar world. And, if coupled to a broader effort to manage our precarious competition with Russia over the shape of Europe's security order, a more Europeanized NATO could help mitigate the presently acute dangers of direct U.S.-Russian military conflict. Although a less fraught relationship between Russia and the West would not drive a wedge between Russia and China, it would make Moscow less dependent on China and decrease Moscow's incentives to pursue even deeper security cooperation with Beijing. China, in turn, would have strong reasons to pursue a pragmatic course with Europe, now its largest trading partner, rather than treating Europe as a hostile American proxy. Such circumstances would amount to an American "divide and counterbalance" strategy, as opposed to what has de facto become our current "unite our adversaries" approach. Will the United States shift course in this way, or will we double down on continuing NATO's expansionary course and our related attempts to inflict a "strategic defeat" on Russia in Ukraine and Europe? Current thinking within the Washington foreign policy establishment is not encouraging. If we pursue the latter approach, we are headed at best toward decades of precarious confrontation with Russia and an increasingly formidable anti-Western entente between Russia and China. That would make NATO's future birthdays decidedly unhappy.

If there were ever a time when American intelligence officials could empathize with their Russian counterparts, it would be now, in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack on Moscow concertgoers a few days ago. The sense of failure and frustration that Russian security officials must be feeling should be all too familiar for Americans whose job it had been to detect and prevent the September 11 attacks by al-Qaida radicals on the United States. A shocked American public wondered why the CIA and FBI had failed to "connect the dots" that could have revealed the plot. Russian President Vladimir Putin had even telephoned President Bush a few days before the attacks to warn that Russian intelligence had detected signs of an incipient terrorist campaign, "something long in preparation," coming out of Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the Moscow attack, much Western media coverage has derided the Russian government for failure to capitalize on a similar American warning of possible attacks on a concert or other public venues. But the 9/11 experience showed that "connecting dots" is far easier in retrospect than in advance, and that translating warnings into effective security measures is often a complicated endeavor. In fact, Putin announced publicly after the American warning that he was putting Russia's security services on heightened alert, despite calling that warning a "provocation." American analysts can also appreciate the enormous political and psychological pressures their Russian counterparts must now be facing. There is a widespread human tendency to try to fit new events into preexisting narratives, as well as to attribute big shocks to big causes. In the case of 9/11, this prompted the White House to strongarm the CIA for evidence linking al-Qaida to Iraq, which had long been a bête noire for key Bush administration officials — not in a conscious effort to cook the books, but out of sincere conviction. Some of them continue to believe there was Iraqi involvement, despite the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that it did not see "evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." Putin has not – at least not yet – explicitly blamed Ukraine for the concert attack. But he has asserted that the Tajik suspects in Russian custody had attempted to flee across the Ukrainian border, where the Ukrainians had allegedly "prepared a window" for the escape. And although he has acknowledged that these suspects are "radical Islamists," he has questioned whether they were acting at Ukraine's behest. Whether this is true – or whether Putin sincerely believes it – remains unclear. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the Kremlin is predisposed to seek evidence linking the attack to Ukraine and its Western supporters, which would help deflect blame for failing to defuse the plot and satisfy the psychological need to link a great evil to one's most immediate adversary. Given Putin's unrivaled dominance of the Russian government apparatus, as well Russia's deep mistrust of Ukraine and the United States, investigators will be sorely tempted to connect the dots in this case in a particularly anti-Ukrainian and anti-American way. America's pre-attack warning and quick post-attack insistence that Ukraine was not involved could be viewed as signs that Washington was trying to mask Kyiv's plot, rather than as evidence that U.S. intelligence had been tracking ISIS involvement from the start. The choice of Tajik triggermen could be seen not only as a false flag operation, but one aimed at poisoning Russian attitudes toward Central Asia immigrants and workers, whose labor has been critical to addressing Russian labor shortages created by the demands of the Ukraine war. One of the Kremlin's many incentives to pin blame on Ukraine might in fact be to minimize the likelihood of public pogroms against Central Asians. It is easy to imagine that Russia's desire for revenge will be enormous in the emotionally supercharged reaction to the concert attacks. The need for retribution was certainly strong in the United States following 9/11, leading Washington first to rebuff Taliban offers to turn over Osama bin Laden and later to supplement its military operation in Afghanistan with an invasion of Iraq. "We wanted revenge," according to one former U.S. official, "and so we made a lot of mistakes that we shouldn't have made." What forms could such revenge take with Russia? The downsides of retributive attacks in Central Asia would loom large for Moscow, already concerned about the potential for losing influence in its border areas to China or the West. The much more tempting target would be Ukraine, where the Russian military could launch massive air strikes on residential areas of Kyiv or other major cities, a step that Putin has largely avoided to this point in the war. Russia's appetite for a compromise settlement, already diminishing in proportion to its growing success in exhausting Ukrainian forces, would almost certainly plummet even further should Russians become convinced that Ukraine masterminded the concert attack. The base emotions, misperceptions, and mistrust fueled by the concert attack underscore just how precarious the U.S.-Russian relationship has become. If officials in Moscow and Washington are unable to manage such a seemingly straightforward matter as the duty to warn each other about the plans of a common terrorist foe, how can we expect them to defuse the dangers that an unintended clash over Ukraine might escalate into direct — even nuclear — combat?

The military situation in Ukraine is pushing the United States and NATO towards a fateful moment of decision — and it is doing so more quickly than most analysts predicted even a month ago.The Ukrainian defeat at Avdiivka is an indication of just how far the balance of forces has swung in Russia's favor. The collapse of an outnumbered, exhausted, and outgunned Ukrainian army is now a real possibility.In response to this looming threat, some NATO governments are now talking about the possibility of sending their own troops to Ukraine — something that all of them had previously ruled out. Speaking after a conference of European leaders in Paris on Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France said that ground intervention was "one of the options" they had discussed. The Kremlin responded that this would "inevitably" mean war between NATO and Russia — as indeed it would, if Western forces went into action against Russian troops. To recognize the extent of the danger, it is important to understand the extent of the Ukrainian defeat at Avdiivka. This was not a planned and orderly retreat, like the Ukrainian withdrawal from Bakhmut in May 2023 or the Russian withdrawal from Kherson in November 2022. The Ukrainian forces had to leave behind their seriously wounded and much of their heavy weaponry. The Russians took hundreds of prisoners. Avdiivka, which is virtually a suburb of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, had also been fortified by the Ukrainians since 2014, and was one of the strongest points in their line.Of course, the Russians have also suffered very major defeats in this war: most notably, the rout of Russian forces in eastern Kharkiv in September 2022. The difference is that with more than four times Ukraine's population and 14 times its economy, Russia had the resources to recover from this defeat. Ukraine has no such resources of its own to draw on; and while the West can — up to a point — provide more weaponry, it cannot provide Ukraine with the troops to reinforce its severely depleted army — unless, as President Macron suggested, it sends its own troops into battle.Western supplies of weaponry on a sufficient scale to enable Ukraine to hold out are also now in doubt, with the U.S. aid package still held up in Congress, and European officials admitting that the EU can meet only half of its target of million artillery shells to Ukraine by this spring. As the Biden administration has stated, without continued U.S. military aid, the collapse of the Ukrainian army is a certainty.Part of the goal of the European discussions on Monday and Macron's statement about them does indeed seem to be to galvanize U.S. Republican congressmen into passing a long-delayed Ukraine aid package, and pressuring the German government into dropping its opposition to sending German long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. The provision of these missiles would appear a safer way of helping Ukraine than sending NATO troops, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz in any case promptly ruled out sending soldiers to Ukraine, as did officials from other European NATO states, including Ukraine's strongest supporters, Poland and the United Kingdom.Safer however is not the same as safe. In the first place, if the Russians actually break through and advance rapidly, then long range missiles will not stop them and NATO will still be faced with pressure to send its own troops. If on the other hand the Ukrainians manage to hold out for months to come, then — based on their record so far — it seems certain that they would use these weapons (and the F-16 warplanes provided by NATO) to strike deep inside Russian territory, including probably Moscow itself.Of course, the Ukrainians have a perfect legal and moral right to do this, given two years of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, and there is a mood both in Ukraine and among some Western establishments that the Russian people should be given a taste of their own medicine. Indeed, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and other Western officials have publicly encouraged the Ukrainians to do this. Legal and moral is however not the same thing as sensible and wise.In terms of practical economic effect, such Ukrainian strikes would be mere pinpricks, given Russia's huge size and resources. In terms of moral and political effect, we know from Russia's campaign against Ukrainian cities — and have known since the German bombing campaign against Britain in 1940-41 and the U.S. campaign against North Vietnam — that heavier attacks have the effect of infuriating the populations on the other side and strengthening their will to fight. Meanwhile, devastating the Russian economy would require bombardment on the scale of the campaigns against Germany and Japan in 1943-45, which is completely beyond NATO's means unless we simultaneously destroy ourselves by launching a nuclear war.The danger is, however, that if the Ukrainians managed to hit a very high profile target (like the Kremlin), or killed a large number of Russian civilians in a single strike, the Russian government might feel impelled to escalate quite radically in response. Already, many Russian hardliners are asking publicly how long Putin will tolerate NATO massively arming Ukraine without retaliating directly against NATO countries. The West could then find itself with the worst of all worlds: direct clashes with Russia (and a probable world economic crisis) that would not save Ukraine from defeat. In these circumstances, the pressure to dispatch NATO ground troops would return.It should be noted however that sending NATO troops to Ukraine does not inevitably mean sending them into battle with Russia. Should the Russians break through, it is possible to imagine NATO-nation troops being sent to preserve a rump Ukraine by holding Kyiv and a line well to the east of the Russian advance, as the basis for proposing a ceasefire and peace negotiations without preconditions. This would however imply the loss of much greater Ukrainian territories. To prevent an unintended battle with Russian forces would take extremely careful and transparent talks with Moscow. Western generals would be deeply unwilling to see their troops deployed without air cover, but with NATO and Russian air forces both operating over Ukraine the chances of an aerial clash would be very high indeed. To eliminate the risk of NATO being drawn into war with Russia, Western governments would not only have to compel Ukraine to accept a ceasefire, but most likely order the Ukrainian army to fall back to NATO lines (which many Ukrainian soldiers would probably be doing anyway). There would then have to be a wide demilitarized zone between the two sides, patrolled by United Nations troops.Should a limited NATO presence in fact lead to full-scale war with Russia and the intervention of the U.S. armed forces, then the danger of escalation to the use of (initially limited and tactical) nuclear weapons would grow immensely, bringing the world to the brink of Armageddon. One possible scenario is that after a demonstration nuclear explosion (for example, over the Black Sea), Russia would threaten to target not U.S. or European cities, but American military bases in Western Europe. How long would the nerves of European publics and governments hold out before they sued for peace?Faced with the alternative of Ukrainian defeat and running these literally existential risks, it is essential — as we have argued in a recent paper for the Quincy Institute — that pressure for continued aid to Ukraine, and statements like those of Macron, be accompanied by a serious and credible push for a compromise peace with Russia now, while we still have leverage to bring to talks. Complete victory for Ukraine is now an obvious impossibility. Any end to the fighting will therefore end in some form of compromise, and the longer we wait, the worse the terms of that compromise will be for Ukraine, and the greater the dangers will be for our countries and the world.

Russian progress in the Ukraine war is pushing the United States toward a painful choice. If we want a prosperous Ukraine with a viable path toward liberal governance and European Union membership, we will have to concede that it cannot be a NATO or U.S. ally, and that this neutral Ukraine must have verifiable limits on the types and quantities of weapons it may hold. If we refuse to agree to those terms, Russia will quite probably turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional wreck incapable of rebuilding itself, allying with the West, or constituting a military threat to Russia. Russian progress is not yet evident on the map, where the battle lines have not moved appreciably over the past year. Ukraine's counteroffensive failed to break through Russian defenses, and Russia has not pushed Ukrainian forces significantly westward. An observer comparing territorial holdings in January 2023 with January 2024 might reasonably conclude that the war has become a stalemate. But this picture is misleading. The Kremlin is almost certainly not seeking such a breakthrough, at least not yet. Rather, it is methodically grinding down Ukraine's capacity not only to wage war, but also to reconstitute a post-war military, by killing and wounding enormous numbers of Ukrainian soldiers and exhausting Ukrainian and Western arsenals of arms and ammunition. Ukraine is running short of artillery shells, and the U.S. and Europe cannot manufacture new ones quickly enough to meet Ukraine's needs. Russian barrages of long-range air and missile strikes are increasingly overwhelming the capacity of Ukrainian air defenses, and the West simply lacks the ability to continue providing Patriot missiles or other advanced air defense systems. It is quite true, as the Biden administration has warned, that ending U.S. aid to Kyiv would quickly result in Ukraine's collapse. Sufficient aid to help Ukraine to stand successfully on the defensive should therefore continue. But what U.S. policymakers need to understand and honestly acknowledge is that absent a compromise peace settlement, massive levels of aid will have to continue not just for the coming year, but indefinitely. There is very little realistic chance of the West being able to outlast Russia and force it to accept peace on Ukrainian terms. The controversies in Congress over aid to Ukraine reflect these realities and are unlikely to diminish. Under such circumstances, for the Biden administration to pledge American support to Ukraine for "as long as it takes" to defeat Russia is unwise, and even dishonest. It is widely believed in Washington that the failure of Ukraine's counteroffensive means that the West has no choice but to back Ukraine's fight against Russia for many years to come. Seeking compromise with Moscow is regarded as not only undesirable but also futile. Lacking alternatives, we must stay the present course, hoping that time will improve Ukraine's position. But time is not on Ukraine's side, either militarily or economically, and so Ukraine's position in any future negotiations may well be very much worse than at present. Russia's population is at least four times that of Ukraine and its GDP 14 times. The Russian army is far better led and more tactically adept than it was at the start of the war, and Western sanctions show no signs of being able to cripple the Russian economy, which is more and more geared for war. And whatever Brussels may say, as long as the war continues it is exceptionally unlikely that Ukraine will be able to develop economically and begin the extremely difficult process of joining the European Union.Most importantly, the United States has not tested the assumption that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in talking. It is indeed very likely that Putin believes Russia now has the upper hand in the war and can afford to wait. Nonetheless, Putin has repeatedly insisted that Russia is ready to talk, and also that Washington – not Kyiv – makes the key decisions in the war and therefore it is for Washington to engage in talks. This may be posturing; but it is also possible that Putin recognizes that absent a settlement, Russia is headed toward the dangers of a permanently volatile confrontation with the West, an economy distorted by the demands of military production, and a constricting degree of dependence on China. Russians' concerns about these problems are likely to grow as their fears they may lose the war in Ukraine diminish. It is further alleged that Putin believes that a future Donald Trump presidency would be the Kremlin's best hope for a settlement on Russian terms. However, Trump's first term produced some friendly rhetoric but much hostile action toward Moscow, including withdrawal from nuclear arms agreements and increased flows of U.S. weapons and training for the Ukrainian army. Moreover, given the animosity toward Trump evident in Congress and the U.S. foreign and security policy establishment, Putin has little reason for confidence that Trump could actually deliver any deal. By 2020, Russians were thoroughly disillusioned with Trump. As the leading Russian foreign policy thinker Fyodor Lukyanov told Radio Liberty about the 2020 elections, "Why should Russians care? I don't believe anyone here expects any change regardless of who will win." Given that Russia now has the advantage on the battlefield and senses that time is on its side, to get Putin to end the war and end his ambition to subjugate Ukraine or seize more territory, Washington will have to offer some serious incentives. These will need to include showing that the U.S. is prepared to meet Russian concerns about the U.S. and NATO security threat to Russia (concerns that are genuinely held throughout the Russian establishment). This will mean agreement to a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality, with security guarantees for Ukraine, that will allow that country to follow neutral Finland and Austria during the Cold War and develop as a free market democracy. Western sanctions against Russia would need at least to be eased if not suspended, but with a binding commitment that they would automatically resume if Russia launched new aggression.On the issue of the territories presently occupied by Russia, the only possible way forward is to defer this question for future talks under United Nations auspices, while putting the maximum possible security measures in place to prevent a resumption of war.An agreement along these lines would be extremely painful for both Ukraine and the Biden administration. However, we should see preserving the independence of 80 percent of Ukraine as a real victory, even if not a complete one. It is certainly far better than what appears to be the alternative: a war of attrition with dreadful losses for Ukraine, leading sooner or later to a far greater Ukrainian defeat.Sophia Ampgkarian contributed to the research for this article.

The United States faces two preeminent threats flowing from Hamas's attack on Israel and Israel's response. The first is the lethal threat to Israel that would be posed by a combination of assaults by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran (especially if helped by Russia), and a renewed Intifada. The second is the danger that such a regional conflagration would drag the United States and Russia reluctantly into the fighting on opposing sides, with China giving aid to Russia. Preventing both contingencies is critical both to America's own security and to our commitments to Israel. And our ability to do so depends to a significant degree on help from China and Russia in restraining their partners in the region in return for Israeli restraint in Gaza. The most likely path toward these twin dangers would be a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, for which Hamas is almost certainly prepared and which it may well have intended to provoke. Such an invasion would inevitably involve prolonged urban combat and massive civilian casualties. This would lead to widespread outrage in the region that could compel a military response from Hezbollah, which in turn would create enormous pressures on Iran to support its Lebanese partner. A northern front between Israel and an Iran-backed Hezbollah could also quite possibly expand into Syria, which in turn could drag Russia and even Turkey directly into the fighting. None of these actors is seeking direct combat with Israel — the Hamas attacks reportedly took Iran by surprise, Russia already is completely consumed by its war in Ukraine, and Turkey would lose the leverage it enjoys through tacking between the United States, Europe, Russia, and regional players to its south. Nonetheless, circumstances could compel these states to face choices they would rather avoid. Between China and Russia, Beijing's help will be easier to enlist. China has the most to lose from a wider conflict in the region, which could threaten access to the region's oil supplies, drive up energy prices, and undermine the global commerce on which China's economy depends. It also has much to gain from working with the United States to contain the crisis and stabilize the region, which would bolster Beijing's prestige on the world stage and potentially mitigate America's reflexive fears that China intends to destabilize the international order. For these reasons, Washington will be reluctant to bless a prominent role for China in the region; but China is already playing such a role regardless of U.S. wishes, as its facilitation of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement has demonstrated. Successful cooperation with China in the Middle East would mark a return to previous U.S. statements that Washington hopes that Beijing will become a "responsible stakeholder" and not an enemy on the world stage.Russia is the more important, but also the more difficult nut to crack. More important, because Russia has good relations with both Israel and Iran and has fought beside Hezbollah in Syria; more difficult, because of the immense distrust and hostility that was building up between Washington and Moscow long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine plunged relations into the abyss. Given deep U.S.-Russian enmity over the war in Ukraine, there are obviously strong temptations for Russia to cause trouble for America and exploit international anger over Israeli retaliation in Gaza to bolster its ties to Iran, Arab states, and the wider Global South at U.S. expense. Fortunately, Moscow also has reasons to worry about a deepening conflict in the region. Russia has since the end of the Cold War sought to maintain good relations with Israel, an important economic partner and the adoptive home of more than a million Russian emigres. It has not reacted when Israel has attacked Hezbollah forces or Syrian targets over the past several years, despite Russia's key role as a partner of Hezbollah and the Baath state in Syria. A war between Israel and Iran would end Iranian supplies to Russia of drones that have come to play an important role in the Russian campaign in Ukraine. Above all, Russia has long been concerned about the dangers of Sunni Islamic terrorism, the source of numerous attacks inside Russia, which is likely to flow from the burgeoning conflict in Gaza. In the wake of 9/11, there was a very strong sense in Moscow of common interests with the U.S. in the fight against terrorism. This perception of common threat meant that Western policy in Libya and Syria was greeted in Russia not just with fury but also with bewilderment. Faced with the obvious danger of Islamist extremism and the dreadful example of the war in Iraq, Russian analysts could not understand how the West could embark on policies that were likely to destroy the Libyan and Syrian states (and did, in the case of Libya) and create great opportunities for the spread of jihadi forces. A restoration of at least limited cooperation with Russia in counter-terrorism is both one path to an eventual wider settlement and urgently necessary for its own sake; because the present conflict is certain to increase the terrorist threat to the West. In Europe, terrorist attacks have already begun. The U.S. also needs to renew talks with Russia on the future of Syria, since the U.S. strategy of overthrowing the Baath regime has long since collapsed.Channeling these conflicting impulses into Russian cooperation in containing the dangers of escalation over Gaza will be no easy task. It will require opening a high-level channel of communication between senior Biden administration officials and the Kremlin to discuss the crisis, coupled with an implicit signal that Washington is willing to address some concrete Russian concerns about the U.S. military's role in Syria and about the need for rekindling Israel-Palestine diplomacy. Our chances of gaining Russian cooperation would improve if the United States and China begin serious talks about managing the Gaza crisis, as Putin will not want to cede the international stage to Beijing. Neither Russia nor China have enough coercive leverage to prevent Hezbollah from opening a northern front with Israel — and precipitating a cascade of further escalation — should the Israeli Defense Forces mount a full-scale invasion of Gaza. But they probably have sufficient clout to ensure Hamas's backers stay out of the fray in return for some measure of Israeli restraint, particularly if the United States is willing to back renewed Israel-Palestinian negotiations, open talks with Moscow about Syria, and share the international stage in managing the crisis. By contrast, stiff-arming Chinese and Russian involvement would only incentivize their opposition to U.S. policies. And if there's one thing Washington does not need in this crisis, it is yet more parties intent on exploiting instability.

How might Ukraine's war effort go bankrupt? Developments over the past few weeks recall the words of Ernest Hemingway: "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."Should that prove true, it will spell bad news not only for those insisting on an unconditional Ukrainian victory, but also for those pressing for a diplomatic settlement of the conflict. The gradual part is already well underway. The U.S. Congress's decision to pass a "clean" stopgap spending bill over the weekend to fund our government for another 45 days — bowing to pressure from some GOP members to strip Ukraine aid from the bill — is the latest sign of how quickly the political tide has begun to turn. Such a vote would have been unthinkable last December, when Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed a televised joint session of Congress to fawning media reviews, and ceremoniously presented a flag signed by the determined defenders of the besieged city of Bakhmut. Ten months later, Bakhmut has fallen. Ukraine's counteroffensive has sputtered. A series of opinion polls has indicated that most Americans now oppose additional aid to Kyiv. When he arrived in Washington last month, Zelensky was treated more as an interloper than as an inspiring hero. House Speaker McCarthy blocked Zelensky from addressing a joint session of Congress, claiming that there was insufficient time. Signs of "Ukraine fatigue" are appearing in Europe, too. Amid a row over Ukrainian agricultural exports that hurt EU farmers, Polish President Duda compared Ukraine to a drowning victim submerging its would-be rescuers. Hungarian President Orban has said his country will no longer provide any support to Ukraine. Slovakia was the first country to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine after Russia's invasion, but in last weekend's parliamentary elections, its voters opted for the party of ex-prime minister Robert Fico, who had campaigned on ending aid. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Deutschland party, long opposed to breaking with Russia over the Ukraine war, has climbed to second place in German polls. These trends raise the prospect of a vicious circle of mutual intensification. Ukraine's stagnation on the battlefield prompts more Americans to wonder whether billions in aid are being wasted on an unwinnable war. Growing skepticism in Europe reinforces concerns in Washington that our NATO partners will not share the burden of supporting Ukraine. In Washington, the White House's failure to articulate an exit strategy feeds fears of yet another American "forever war," this time a proxy battle against a nuclear power. Worries over Western support undermine Ukraine's military morale and political resolve, leading to further erosion of its position on the battlefield. The combination could produce a tipping point at which the gradual erosion of Western support for Ukraine spills into an abrupt reduction or collapse. What might follow? It is unlikely that this would result, as many claim, in Russia's conquering all Ukrainian territory, incorporating it into the Russian Federation, and turning a resuscitated Russian military toward Poland and the Baltic States. The Kremlin almost certainly recognizes that attempting to conquer and govern the bulk of Ukraine, dominated by a well-armed and anti-Russian populace, would be a self-defeating ambition. Moreover, Russia has demonstrated neither the capability nor the desire to fight a war of choice with the NATO alliance. Rather, Moscow would be far more likely to turn Ukraine into a failed rump state. It would aim to capture the rest of the Donbass and perhaps the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. After creating an extended no-man's land separating Russian forces from Ukraine-controlled territory, it would then declare a unilateral cease-fire and build extensive fortifications against new attacks. Should Kyiv sue for peace under such duress, it could threaten Zelensky's rule. Should it refuse, it could destroy the Ukrainian state. In either case, funding and governing what remains of Ukraine would become the West's problem, not Russia's. Absent an agreed settlement of the war with Russia, few donors would contribute the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary for Ukraine's reconstruction. Prospects for democracy and the rule of law in Ukraine would diminish. Refugee flows into Europe would intensify, fueling more divisions within NATO and the EU. Washington would be racked by debate over who lost Ukraine. In these circumstances, Putin would have few incentives to seek compromise with either Ukraine or the West, leaving the broader East-West relationship in a dangerously unstable state of confrontation, lacking the arms control and conflict-management mechanisms that helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot. Europe would have to contend not with a new Iron Curtain, but rather with a gaping, Libya-like wound that could infect the West for years to come. Russian military cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea would advance. All this is of course far from inevitable. But those tempted to believe that the United States could end the war by simply ending its aid to Ukraine should think hard about these possibilities. And those insisting that the West can simply double down on delivering aid to Ukraine should recognize that present trends bode ill for the Biden administration's "as long as it takes" strategy, either for winning the war outright or for turning Ukraine into a thriving fortress state, capable of holding off the Russians for many years to come. Avoiding such sobering possibilities will require compromise. The White House will have to compromise with domestic opponents of aid by making clear — at least behind closed doors — its plans for marrying military aid to a viable exit strategy. Opponents of aid will have to compromise with proponents to ensure that Ukraine does not collapse altogether, with all the attendant implications for the West and the world. The West and Russia will each have to compromise – not necessarily over territory, but certainly over the broader architecture of European security and Ukraine's place in it. Compromise is seldom possible unless both sides have cards to play in negotiations. The United States should not remove cards from its hand by ending aid to Ukraine unilaterally or playing them prematurely. But unless it moves quickly to complement aid with diplomacy, it may find that the opportunity to play its cards has suddenly disappeared.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came to the United States last month bearing a powerful moral message: Ukraine's cause in fighting back against Russia is an unusually clear case of good versus evil.
Like Churchill rallying his people against Hitler's forces in World War II, he urged continued American resolve in ensuring that the war ends in Ukrainian victory, and he warned that any compromise with Moscow will only invite more aggression. America, he argued, faces a stark choice between right and wrong. If only things were that clear. In fact, the lengthening and increasingly bloody conflict in Ukraine is forcing the United States to grapple with a moral dilemma: a choice not between right and wrong, but between right and right. It is right to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia's invasion. After all, Ukraine did not attack Russia, and under the terms of the United Nations Charter, Russia had no legal basis for waging war on its neighbor absent authorization by the UN Security Council. And it is right to oppose Russia's brutal conduct in the war, which includes strikes on civilian facilities and numerous instances of rape, murder, and abuse of individual Ukrainians, all violations of international law. But these elements tell only part of the moral tale in Ukraine. German theorist Max Weber contrasted an "ethics of conviction" that battles against all injustice with an "ethics of responsibility" that calls for considering the potential results of such battles when weighing moral choices. An ethics of conviction argued that Western military intervention in Libya in 2011, intended to prevent mass atrocities by the barbarous Qadhafi regime, was the morally correct policy. An ethics of responsibility points out that America's good intentions resulted in disastrous instability that continues to radiate into Africa, the Middle East, and Europe to this day. These contrasting approaches complicate our calculations in Ukraine. Viewed through the lens of conviction, the correct response to Putin's invasion seems clear: one does not indulge evil; one fights and defeats it. Viewed through the lens of results, the case for such an uncompromising approach is far less certain. For now, the balance sheet in Ukraine features more assets than liabilities. Western aid has been instrumental in preventing Russian forces from capturing the vast bulk of Ukrainian territory and rendering Kyiv a Kremlin puppet, and the United States has so far managed to defend Ukraine while avoiding the escalatory dangers of a direct clash with the Russian military. But the conviction that any compromise with evil is wrong prompted Ukraine (with Western encouragement) to break off settlement talks that were progressing with Russia in April of last year, opting instead for a "counteroffensive" aimed at driving Russian forces off all Ukrainian territory, while so weakening Russia that it could never again contemplate such aggression. That counteroffensive has gone poorly. If Ukraine continues attacking into the teeth of formidable Russian defenses, it risks depleting its increasingly scarce supplies of men and munitions to such an extent that it could become vulnerable to new Russian advances. Should Russia threaten to overrun Ukrainian forces, could the Biden administration refrain from some form of direct involvement in the war, if that seemed to be the only way to prevent a Russian victory? Having ruled out compromise with Putin, Biden's political room for maneuver in such a scenario would be perilously narrow. Yet the consequences of a military clash between the world's preeminent nuclear powers could be horrific for everyone. Short of a Russian battlefield breakthrough, we must also consider the potential impact on Ukraine of a prolonged stalemate. Zelensky himself has also warned that a long war of attrition would mean "a fork in the road for Ukraine" and a "totally militarized economy." Having already lost millions fleeing to Europe and Russia, Ukraine would lose even more people, both on the front lines and to emigration. A demographic study published last year indicated that by 2040, Ukraine's working age population could fall by a third of its present size, with the number of children declining to half its pre-war level. A shrinking Ukraine would grow ever more dependent on the United States and Europe just to support its aging and war-crippled population's needs for social services. A prolonged war also threatens to reshape the world order in dangerous ways. The loss of cheap Russian energy supplies is damaging the German economy and fueling the rise of Germany's leading far right party, Alternative for Deutschland. Western economic sanctions are also driving increased Russian trade and military cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea, compounding America's geostrategic challenges. Is helping Ukraine recover Crimea and Russian-controlled portions of the Donbass worth a radicalized Germany, a threatening entente between Russia and China, an accelerated North Korean ICBM program, and robust Russian-Iranian military cooperation? These are not questions that those favoring an ethics of conviction in Ukraine want to answer. But they are questions that our elected representatives, as agents entrusted with safeguarding the interests of the American people, are duty-bound to consider. It is right to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression. And it is right to consider the potential fallout from the war on American and world security. Our challenge is to strike a pragmatic balance between these contending interests in justice and order. We will not achieve it through moral grandstanding, but through a judicious blending of military strength with diplomatic skill.

If the deaths of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and several of his mercenary group's top commanders in a fiery plane crash Thursday were indeed deliberate and directed by Vladimir Putin, it could be said the Russian president has restored his authority by the methods of the Godfather's Michael Corleone.


In the months leading up to the Wagner mutiny, Putin's failure to suppress the increasingly bitter public feud between Prigozhin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was beginning to weaken his image within Russia's elite as a decisive leader. Today, few in Russia will be doubting Putin's capacity for decisive ruthlessness, whatever they might say about his morals.


The Wagner affair marked a serious breakdown of Putin's longstanding strategy of elite management. Far from being the Stalinist autocrat often portrayed in the West, Putin has generally operated more like the strong chairman of a squabbling board of directors, maintaining his own position by balancing one elite faction against another. He thereby prevented any individual or group from becoming too dominant, and also prevented their disputes from emerging in public and threatening the image and stability of his regime.


If in a given case Putin decided in favor of one side, the losers were not destroyed, but kept in reserve while being compensated with lesser positions — and after all, if you can't be a director of Gazprom, a directorship of Rosneft is not a bad consolation prize. However, this was only the case so long as they remained publicly loyal and deferential to Putin and did not allow their discontent to become public.


As Putin showed in the case of former "oligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, any elite figure who emerged as an independent potential rival to Putin himself would be taken out in one way or another. The exact course of events leading to Prigozhin's death is not clear and probably never will be. No evidence has been presented that points to a deliberate act of killing by the Kremlin or the Russian security service. As of late Thursday, the cause of the crash is still unknown.


We can only speculate why Putin might want to take this course. Perhaps he saw the deal by which Prigozhin was pardoned as a humiliation that weakened his own image. Perhaps Prigozhin broke the terms of the deal by returning to Russia instead of staying quietly in Belarus.


This combination of authority and flexibility on the part of Putin has been generally welcome to the Russian elites. A key feature of Russian politics over the past generation has been the elites' profound distrust of their own ability to manage and limit their differences without Putin or a figure like him to keep them in order.


They fear that if he is replaced or severely weakened, their rivalries will break out into the open and destroy the entire state order on which their own positions and fortunes depend. Doubtless, many in the elite will regret that things were ever allowed to come to a point where Prigozhin would have to be killed, and shocked by the blatant nature of the act, if confirmed. Few however are likely to regret the consequent strengthening of government power.


As to the future of Wagner (or whatever new name it is given by the Kremlin), Putin's intention is clearly that it will continue to act as Russia's proxy in Africa, Syria, and possibly (though this is less certain) in Belarus. Only two days ago, Russia's deputy defense minister met in Libya with rebel warlord Khalifa Haftar, a sign that the Kremlin was already seeking to assure Wagner clients in Africa that Russian support will not diminish. But Wagner henceforth will almost certainly be subject to much tighter Russian state control, probably exercised through installing a Putin loyalist at its helm and closely monitoring its operations.


Similarly, the violent end of Wagner's top leaders is unlikely to have much impact on the war in Ukraine. Most of the mercenary group's rank-and-file fighters have now signed contracts with the regular Russian military.


Although Russia was highly dependent on Wagner's manpower and fighting prowess in 2022, once Moscow completed its partial military mobilization from late last year and brought tens of thousands of fresh forces to Ukraine, Wagner became much less important to Russia's war effort. Putin was content to exploit Wagner's fighters and their expertise in urban combat during the bloody battle for Bakhmut, but the Russian military is now well positioned to prosecute its attrition strategy in Ukraine without the need for Wagner's support.


Prigozhin's demise dashes hopes that Putin's rule — and by extension, Russia's war effort in Ukraine — might soon be undermined by internal turmoil. For the time being, any assumption that Putin had Prigozhin killed will discourage would-be political challengers to the Kremlin. Coupled with the recent removal of General Surovikin (regarded as a Prigozhin sympathizer) as head of Russia's Aerospace Forces, and the arrest of hardline nationalist critic Igor Strelkov, the Kremlin has sent strong signals to Russia's restive political rightwing that opposition to the state will not be tolerated.


The final chapter in this story remains to be written, however. Although Putin has overcome the abortive Wagner challenge, his political fate over the longer term remains far from assured. And one factor looms larger than all others in determining that future: the still very much uncertain course of the war in Ukraine.