“While the U.S. has many vital national interests,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote recently, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”  

The comments inspired a wave of disapproval from conservatives and Republicans, including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the Washington Post columnist George Will, who quipped, “If that is his settled view after the dust settles and he elaborates on this, then he’s not fit to be president, period.”

As an inveterate critic of Woodrow Wilson, Will should know better. DeSantis was merely taking a realist foreign-policy stance at a time when elites in both parties have gotten into a dangerously Wilsonian frame of mind. With support for Ukraine aid falling among Republicans, DeSantis’s comments were also more in tune with where GOP voters are, and are likely to be in the months ahead.

[Read: Zelensky has answers for DeSantis]

The legal case against Russia is open-and-shut. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government recognized the borders of the new Ukraine, and further guaranteed its sovereignty in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine is a sovereign state, entitled to political independence and territorial integrity. Russia’s war of aggression is clearly a violation of international law.

But the matter is more complicated than that. One of the most far-reaching consequences of Wilsonian idealism has been to turn all international conflicts into primarily legal disputes in which the key question is who is right and who is wrong. The trouble with that approach is that the strategic and historical dimensions of those conflicts tend to disappear from the policy calculus, with baleful consequences.

How Ukraine Became Independent

The hard truth is this: Ukraine’s 1991 borders were partly a subterfuge of Soviet propaganda and did not fully make sense for an independent country alongside Russia. Containing large swaths of historical Russia, millions of ethnic Russians, and a crucial Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula (which was transferred to Ukraine only in 1954 and is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now), those borders actually guaranteed Russian hegemony in the short term. They’re why pro-Russia presidential candidates won almost every election in Ukraine from 1991 until the “Euromaidan” revolution of 2014. Indeed, Ukrainian-nationalist parties have ruled for the past decade partly because the electorate no longer includes residents of the Donbas or Crimea, the heavily Russian areas that either broke away or were seized by Russia after the pro-Russian government was deposed in 2014.

Hence, from Russia’s point of view, the commitments of 1991 and 1994 were mostly a formality, because Moscow expected Ukraine to remain firmly in its orbit. But those guarantees only kicked an explosive can down the road, because if a strong Ukrainian-nationalist movement should ever arise, as it has now, oriented toward Europe and bent on independence from Russia, the 1991 borders would create a fatal conflict between Ukraine’s nationhood and that of the Russians, many of whom view Ukraine—especially east of the Dnipro River—as an inseparable part of Russia.

[Max Abrahms: I teach international relations. I think we’re making a mistake in Ukraine.]

Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law, but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine. And as former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said recently, “Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends.”

When the U.S. agreed to recognize Ukraine in 1991, it should have realized that Ukraine’s borders could prove enormously destabilizing, like the nuclear forces and Black Sea fleet that Ukraine had also accidentally inherited and which the U.S. wisely insisted be transferred to Russia in 1993–94.

The U.S. should have treated the 1991 borders as provisional and encouraged Russia and Ukraine to agree on a peaceful adjustment. With Europe flourishing on one side and Russia a moribund kleptocracy on the other, Ukrainians’ desire for independence from Russia was almost certainly inevitable. As Ukrainian nationalism gathered strength, Russia could perhaps have been persuaded to agree to a territorial adjustment.

Governor DeSantis was right on another score: The proximate cause of the war was definitely a territorial dispute, but of a very special kind. After the Euromaidan revolution, Russia felt it had no choice but to annex Crimea, because it couldn’t risk losing Sevastopol. But it still did not annex the eastern Donbas, which it was also occupying, insisting instead on its reintegration into Ukraine under the terms of the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, which it saw as vitally necessary to restoring its control over the whole of Ukraine. For the same reason, Ukraine’s nationalists soured on the Minsk Agreements: With those territories in limbo, the nationalists had been able to achieve a degree of independence that would have been impossible otherwise.

America’s Blank Check

As tensions mounted in 2020 and 2021, Germany and France grew anxious to persuade Ukraine to implement the Minsk Agreements, in which all the major issues were territorial. But, with their customary professions of high moral and legal principle, the Americans undercut those diplomatic efforts, encouraging the Ukrainians to dig in their heels and dare Russia to do something about it. It was an implicit blank check and had the same effect as when the kaiser wrote one a century ago, namely to entice the recipient to risk a catastrophic war with Russia.

It is crucial to understand the dangerous role that America is playing. The sheer scale of U.S. aid to Ukraine has become a decisive factor in the course of the war. Don’t be deceived by President Joe Biden’s claims that we are helping Ukraine without getting involved in the conflict ourselves. Even according to the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, the U.S. is already a de facto belligerent in the Ukraine war.

The lack of strategy behind the deluge of American missiles and tanks flowing into Ukraine is frightening. The U.S. is giving Ukraine enough aid to prevent a Russian victory, but the stated aim of liberating all of Ukraine’s territory, “as long as it takes,” isn’t remotely plausible and is contradicted by other aspects of U.S. policy. This is not the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the Soviets could afford to cut their losses. Even a return to the status quo ante of January 2022 would likely be unacceptable to the Russians. The Russians are almost certainly prepared to lose—and kill—millions of people before giving up the territory they have now. And because the U.S. has thus far insisted that the weapons donated to Ukraine not be used inside Russia, U.S. strategy is currently optimized for making the war last as long as possible without a decisive result.

What’s more, even if Ukraine’s war aims could be achieved, what would Ukraine do then? It could either reintegrate the Russian populations and risk once again becoming a Russian puppet, or disenfranchise them through repression or wholesale expulsion, which, besides violating international humanitarian law, would likely trigger another war. Hence, Ukraine’s stated war aim—the complete liberation of its 1991 territory—might not even be desirable from Ukraine’s point of view.

America’s Vital Interests

The overriding priority of U.S. foreign policy in the century ahead will be to tame the rising power of China. DeSantis’s observation that “the Biden administration’s policies have driven Russia into a de facto alliance with China” is a crucial one. One might add that U.S. policy is accomplishing that quite against Moscow’s will, because a brief glance at the map suffices to see that China’s increasing control over its “near abroad” puts it on a collision course with Russia along a roughly 6,000-mile front, if you include buffer states. In the century ahead, Russia’s only alternative to domination by China is very likely an alliance with the United States, and that is an alliance the U.S. cannot afford to forfeit. Allowing Russia to slip into China’s orbit would bring Chinese power into the very heart of Europe.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

To be sure, there is a “realist” case for supporting Ukraine in its stated war aims. The linchpin of that argument is an analogy to 1938: If Vladimir Putin isn’t stopped now, then, like Hitler, he will only try to seize more territory. That argument is creditable but misses a key difference between the two situations. In the 1930s, Czechoslovakia was the central pillar of the Allies’ entire defensive strategy. It had to be defended at any price—otherwise the correlation of forces would shift overwhelmingly in Germany’s favor, and Hitler’s conquest of Europe would become unstoppable. By contrast, even if Russia can overcome its surprising military weakness and defeat Ukraine, it will be no closer to realizing Putin’s impossible dream of reincorporating the Baltic states, which, while small, are firmly under NATO’s nuclear umbrella. Putin surely knows that every inch of NATO territory is hopelessly beyond his reach, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must know that as well, his warnings to the contrary notwithstanding.

Ending the War

Before Woodrow Wilson left his dubious stamp on international relations, wars typically ended in peace treaties. Many of those treaties involved territorial settlements, reparations, and other inducements to stop fighting.

Scholars have noted the vertiginous decline in peace treaties in the era of the United Nations. Part of the reason is that modern international law penalizes compromise. For example, international criminal prosecutions have gravely complicated truth-and-reconciliation processes, whose amnesties are often not recognized outside the country where they were granted. Similarly, although Putin surely knew that he was committing a war crime by invading Ukraine, the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for him can only make the stakes of the war even more apocalyptic for the Kremlin.

Wilsonian professions of high moral and legal principle can be an obstacle to compromise, particularly when they become inflexible policy positions. But they also represent what is best in Americans’ view of themselves and of the world—pacifism and benevolence tempered by the instinct to stick up for the underdog and stand up to the bully. Presidents like Ronald Reagan succeeded by finding the balance of idealism and realism, tapping into deep wellsprings of democratic sentiment to give compelling force to their realpolitik. The most important part of DeSantis’s comments signaled a similar approach: “Without question, peace should be the objective.”

Peace should be the overriding objective now, but it will require a willingness to compromise. As the great Cold War game theorist Thomas Schelling observed, parties to a conflict are always negotiating, even if tacitly. If we get beyond their maximalist positions to what each side really needs, a compromise may be possible.

The 1991 borders created a painful dilemma for Ukrainian nationalists. They could have political independence or they could have full territorial integrity, but not, in the real world, both. In the years since the rupture of 2014, Kyiv has tacitly chosen political independence over territory. Russia is facing the mirror image of that dilemma. Putin wants Ukraine to cede the territory Russia now occupies, and to pledge that it will stay out of NATO. Russia must know that it can’t have both of those things while NATO is backing Ukraine. By “annexing” Crimea and now Donbas, it has tacitly chosen territory over political control.

That should help us see the outlines of a durable peace through the fog and din of war. The U.S. should encourage Ukraine to sell the Russians the territory they now occupy in exchange for a large sum that includes reparations. Many wars have been honorably settled that way. A more homogeneously Ukrainian state would be more politically stable and could join the European Union and perhaps even NATO one day.

Absent a negotiated settlement, the most likely (and fraught) end to the war in Ukraine is a unilateral Russian cease-fire, backed by a threat of massive escalation (read: nukes) if the fighting continues. In the long run, a war that ends without a formal peace settlement could mean decades of sanctions, turning Russia into a pariah state, and almost certainly forcing it to accept de facto Chinese suzerainty. The nonrecognition of forcible territorial changes has become a bedrock principle of U.S. foreign policy, but it is another example of how an excessively rigid legalism can sometimes aggravate rather than cool international conflicts.

If Russia declares a cease-fire, the Biden administration will face the decision toward which its policy has been driving it all along: whether to break its promises to Ukraine or dramatically escalate U.S. involvement. The first would gravely damage American prestige and embolden China, while the second would almost certainly lead to a nuclear showdown. Both horns of that dilemma carry totally unacceptable risks, which is why the United States should never have gotten involved in this war to begin with.

A little realism can make idealism go a long way.

This week’s summit between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin was a highly choreographed affair, aimed at showcasing deep and enduring solidarity between the two countries.

Read more...

Russia is "deliberately trying to disinform," said the UK Ministry of Defense on Tuesday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned London against providing Ukraine with ammunition that contains depleted uranium.

President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin bid each other farewell after talks in Moscow.

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The near-collapse of the global banking behemoth Credit Suisse, shortly following two high-profile American bank failures, complicates regulators’ efforts to restore confidence in the banking system. It’s also stoking fears of a contagion effect across the financial sector worldwide. Experts say it’s not a crisis—but we’re not in the clear just yet.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Nobody likes Mike Pence. The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies The one cause of poverty that’s never considered

Swimming Naked

On Sunday, one of the world’s biggest banks, Credit Suisse, narrowly escaped annihilation when it was bought by an even bigger Swiss bank, UBS Group, in a government-brokered deal. The hasty move did the job of averting the “too big to fail” lender’s, well, failure. But in the aftermath of the insolvency panic that triggered the falls of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the U.S.—not to mention the current precarious standing of First Republic—it’s fair to say that the world’s financial institutions, and their customers, are spooked.

Shaky confidence in global financial markets could spell further trouble, potentially setting off a massive cascade of bank runs that destabilizes the entire system. Right now, that possibility is not off the table. But is it a crisis?

“I would say no,” Arthur Dong, an economics professor at Georgetown University, says. But we’ve gotten a preview of what could happen next, he told me.

In short: After years of very low interest rates, the decision in the U.S. and elsewhere to begin raising interest rates in order to curb inflation led to lowered asset value. That, in turn, led to depositors’ whisperings of relocating their holdings and not-totally-unwarranted fears of bank insolvency. For SVB, and other lenders that similarly serve a narrow band of customers (who are likelier than a more diverse pool to react in unison to market shifts), these conditions can add up to a major stress test of client confidence. And as SVB has shown, bank failures don’t exactly alleviate wider anxieties—even if federal governments and regulators step in to protect customers’ holdings, as was the case for SVB.

Dong acknowledged that, although the sagas of SVB, Credit Suisse, et al., have certainly created “shock waves through the financial markets” (and inspired worry in the average consumer about whether their deposits are safe), the present climate of economic uncertainty is probably more aptly viewed as a momentary shake-up than an existential disaster. “There are other institutions out there that might be imperiled, in the way that SVB was imperiled, but I don’t think it’s a global crisis,” Dong explained.

But although it isn’t a full-blown crisis, it might be a “mini-crisis,” suggests Paul Kupiec, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Could it get worse? Yes. Could it be just a bump in the road that goes away? Yes.”

Kupiec says that if the Fed continues to raise interest rates, many institutions’ mark-to-market losses will get worse. More people might be moved to pull out their deposits, which could have far-reaching consequences—especially if multiple banks find themselves in a position of needing to replace those deposits (that they’d collected minimal interest on for a long time in the first place) with Federal Reserve loans whose target rate range is already 4.5 to 4.75 percent, and projected to climb higher.

“We’re not totally out of the woods,” Kupiec told me. “We might avert a panic. There’s going to be some pain going forward, though.”

“This is what happens in this type of environment with higher degrees of volatility, as well as very rapid interest-rate increases around the world,” Dong noted. “And it will very quickly expose the weaknesses of banks that were not necessarily in a state of failure, whose balance sheets were kind of creaky to begin with.

“As the tide goes out, you kind of see who’s swimming there naked,” Dong added with a chuckle, borrowing a well-known aphorism from the investor Warren Buffett. “I think that’s more of the issue here, rather than a widespread or global financial contagion like we saw in 2008.”

For now, we can expect more damage control. Earlier today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a conference of American bankers that she was willing to protect depositors at smaller U.S. banks in the event of future bank runs, if necessary.

We can’t know what will happen next. But the picture of what’s happened up to this point, and how to read it, is coming into focus. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last week on the SVB collapse and bailout:

There’s no success story here. The complexity of financial regulations and the dullness of balance-sheet minutiae should not lull any American into misunderstanding what has happened. Nor should the lack of a broad meltdown make anyone feel confident. The bank failed. The government failed. Once again, the American people are propping up a financial system incapable of rendering itself safe.

Related:

You should be outraged about Silicon Valley Bank. The end of Silicon Valley Bank—and a Silicon Valley myth

Today’s News

Classes for nearly half a million Los Angeles students were canceled as bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and other educational-support workers launched a three-day strike. Surveillance video from a state psychiatric hospital in Virginia shows a group of staff and sheriff’s deputies pinning a Black man named Irvo Otieno to the floor for about 11 minutes before his death. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared their economic partnership and signed 14 agreements.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson argues that all the ChatGPT predictions are bogus.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Atlantic; source: Library of Congress

Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal

By Adam Serwer

The conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently froze up on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines woke, the term her book is about.

On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important. Much of the utility of woke as a political epithet is tied to its ambiguity; it often allows its users to condemn something without making the grounds of their objection uncomfortably explicit.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone. A major clue to COVID’s origins is just out of reach. Is this the singularity for standardized tests?

Culture Break

Getty / The Atlantic

Read. Rebecca Makkai’s novel I Have Some Questions for You probes the line between justice and revenge.

Watch. Living (available to rent on multiple platforms), a movie by Kazuo Ishiguro that interacts richly with the universe of his novels.

P.S.

If the current banking saga has you scratching your head, or you’re asking yourself why global finance seems kind of made-up and strange, I have the book for you—Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism, by the University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Heath. Don’t be fooled by the title; you don’t need to hate capitalism to appreciate Heath’s reasoned, ideologically balanced takedown of a dozen beliefs (or as he frames them, misconceptions) about the global free-market system.

When Filthy Lucre came out in 2009, I was a college super-senior preparing to graduate from the University of Toronto and into the roaring global recession, a fluke of timing I would not recommend. Several of my friends had been students of Heath’s, and a copy of his book made its way onto my shelf. That hardcover edition was lost to the years. But lately, I find myself wanting to revisit it.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.