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The wrong kind of security guarantee for Ukraine

April 13, 2023

One of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s core demands for a political settlement is that his country receive internationally backed security guarantees to resist future Russian aggression. For the most part, this vision largely aligns with the emerging consensus in Western capitals: Ukraine’s partners will support Kyiv’s self-defense capabilities over the long-term without providing a security commitment similar to Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty.

However, some analysts have gone further and suggested that an international military coalition composed of NATO and non-NATO troops be deployed to Ukraine to “act as a tripwire to prevent fresh Russian aggression.” Writing in Foreign Affairs recently, Brookings Institution military strategist Michael O’Hanlon and Georgetown University professor Lise Morj́e Howard argued that such a force would “legitimize the indefinite presence of Western military troops on Ukrainian soil” and “must include U.S. troops.” Despite Russia’s military being continually stonewalled by dogged Ukrainian resistance, O’Hanlon and Howard declared that “[n]othing short of American boots on the ground can ensure Ukraine’s future.”

By any reasonable standard, deploying U.S. troops in Ukraine to serve as a “tripwire” is a nonstarter.

Deploying U.S. forces on Ukrainian soil would significantly increase the chances of a direct NATO-Russia conflict—an outcome President Joe Biden and his advisors have all sought to avoid. O’Hanlon and Howard admit this “would virtually guarantee that the United States and the rest of NATO would enter any future war if Russia were to renew its to attacks on Ukraine or its other neighbors.” For all the clandestine measures the United States and its allies have taken in Ukraine, they have avoided direct involvement in the fighting and sought to minimize the risk of the conflict expanding beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is hard to see Washington discarding this basic risk aversion to support what will be an uneasy post-war settlement.

In Russia’s view, the presence of NATO forces and military infrastructure in Ukraine would cross a long-standing redline that will not be erased as part of a postwar settlement. Absent in O’Hanlon and Howard’s proposal is any discussion of why Russia would peacefully accept these conditions. Given the imbalance of resolve between Russia and the West, it is reasonable to instead assume that Moscow would resort to escalatory measures to deny NATO forces a foothold in Ukraine.

Then there is the question of how the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine would affect the prospects for salvaging the West’s relations with Russia over the long term. O’Hanlon and Howard correctly recognize that “[i]f after the war ends Russia is permanently banished from the international community, it will emerge, furious and humiliated, as a renewed threat.” But they stipulate that readmitting Russia into the international system should only occur “[o]nce [Vladimir] Putin’s regime falls and is replaced by a government committed to peace.” A cursory review of the Russian domestic political scene reveals that this outcome is extremely unlikely. The ministers and officials most well-positioned to take power after Putin are stridently anti-Western, and the Kremlin’s loudest critics are not reform-minded liberals but hardline nationalists aggravated at the Russian military’s failures in Ukraine.

The long-term result would be a Russia even more isolated from the Euro-Atlantic order with no incentive to improve its relations with the West, virtually guaranteeing a prolonged militarized standoff over Ukraine and the continued development of an anti-U.S. Sino-Russian bloc.

Fortunately, there are better options available to Ukraine and its Western partners.

The guiding principle for a post-war security framework should be to ensure that Ukraine can defend the territory under its control without dragging its partners into a direct conflict with Russia. While Zelenskyy has proposed establishing a NATO training and exercise regimen on Ukrainian territory, this should be rejected to keep NATO forces out of what could potentially become an active war zone again. More importantly, Ukraine’s partners should explicitly state that they will not intervene directly on Kyiv’s behalf to defeat renewed Russian aggression. A critical corollary is ruling out the transfer of long-range weapon systems able to strike targets beyond Ukraine’s borders, potentially leading to Russian escalation.

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However, the Russo-Ukrainian War has also exposed the limitations of Western defense industrial bases. Although U.S. firms are expanding their production lines following years of reduced demand, European contributions to Ukraine’s post-war defense will be essential. The reality of strategic scarcity means that the United States cannot sustain an indefinite large-scale commitment to Ukraine without greater assistance from its wealthy European allies. The European Union, or self-organized national blocs within it, should ramp up the manufacturing and purchase of armaments and munitions to shoulder far more of a burden that has largely fallen on U.S. taxpayers so far.

Finally, ensuring the viability of a post-war settlement will be a difficult task for the United States and its allies. This difficulty, however, could be alleviated through direct post-war negotiations with Russia to address broader Euro-Atlantic security issues that disincentivize further aggression. In the long run, the stability of Eastern Europe will hinge on reciprocal diplomacy with a wounded Russia as much as it will on the strength of Ukraine’s defensive posture.

Matthew C. Mai is a research associate at Defense Priorities.

Orange County Register

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The wrong kind of security guarantee for Ukraine

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