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One of the biggest challenges that a superpower faces is figuring out what it can and cannot do. When you are a global hegemon, you might believe that you can micromanage wars, orchestrate foreign countries’ diplomatic relations and internal politics, and precisely calibrate how others perceive you. That tendency is evident in the American approach to Ukraine. Although the U.S. has provided Ukraine some strong diplomatic support and a significant amount of modern weaponry, it has done so with a catch. To avoid provoking Russia too much, it seems, the Biden administration has been very restrained in offering additional types of weaponry—and therefore additional military capabilities—to Ukraine. Until recently, the U.S. has given noticeably mixed signals about when or even whether NATO, the West’s preeminent military alliance, might accept Ukraine into its ranks.

The overall presumption seems to be that the U.S. can give Ukraine just enough help—without going too far. Lesser powers than the United States tend to make simpler calculations: Pick a side and do whatever you can to help it win.

The twists and turns at last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, revealed American strategy making at its worst and best. The opening day could have been disastrous. The alliance’s official communiqué—which the U.S. presumably played a major role in shaping—said up front that Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” Yet the statement included a word salad of qualifications and obfuscations about whether Ukraine—the country now actually at war with Russia, and thus protecting many NATO states—would be allowed into the alliance. Though the statement said “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” it offered only the vaguest idea of when even the process bringing about that future might start. The key paragraph puzzlingly concluded that NATO “will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.” So Ukraine seemed to be being offered a deeply conditional chance to receive an invitation to possibly join NATO sometime in the unknown future. The implication was: We view Ukraine as a partner, but only up to a point.

[Read: In Vilnius, NATO got two wins and one big loss]

Ukrainian leaders were not happy. President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is usually extremely complimentary of the U.S. and NATO, publicly blasted the statement after its wording became known. Describing its language as “unprecedented” and “absurd,” he expressed the reasonable fear that NATO was leaving open a “window of opportunity” to bargain away Ukraine’s membership in future negotiations with Russia. The hostility and intensity of the Ukrainian reaction seemed (strangely) to take the Biden administration by surprise—so much so that, according to The Washington Post, U.S. officials considered striking back by further watering down the statement’s support for Ukraine. This would have been a catastrophic blunder.

Yet after the U.S. unnecessarily provoked the Ukrainians, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and then considered making things worse by punishing them, the administration pivoted sharply and, on the second day at Vilnius, provided far more reassurance. President Joe Biden himself clarified that he believed that Ukraine could get into NATO quickly once the current fighting was over, and the Ukrainian armed forces received pledges of extensive military support. By the end, not only did the alliance seem far more united about Ukraine’s status but Ukrainian leaders were much happier.

The summit offered an important lesson in what the U.S. should and, more important, should not do. American leaders, like their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War, frequently act as if they are in control of other countries and the course of events. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. did not trust the South Vietnamese to defeat the Communists and progressively took over more and more of the fighting until the war was essentially between North Vietnam and the United States. So when the U.S. lost the desire to sustain the conflict and started withdrawing in the late 1960s, the South Vietnamese state that it had infantilized over the previous decade was incapable of preserving its own independence. Both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. made a similar error in Afghanistan.

America’s approach toward the war in Ukraine bespeaks some understanding of the limits of American power. The Biden administration, with seemingly strong bipartisan backing, has studiously avoided Americanizing the war by introducing U.S. combat forces into the fray. It has provided significant support for Ukraine with weapons, training, intelligence, and the like—but the Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying. These limitations on U.S. involvement are a positive development, heralding a less intrusive form of U.S. intervention in future conflicts.  

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The future of American warfare is unfolding in Ukraine]

Still, the United States must also understand that it cannot dictate the course of the war. Some American decisions about which weapons to supply—or not—seem designed to constrain Ukraine’s options, and very much at times seem to be aimed at trying to direct a certain outcome for the war.

The U.S. has been providing Ukraine with systems that are powerful but have limited range: 155 mm howitzers, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System equipment, anti-radar missiles, armored fighting vehicles, and anti-aircraft systems. These are effective in a defensive war but provide little or no capacity to strike deep inside enemy (or enemy-controlled) territory. They would be of little use, for instance, in helping Ukraine liberate Russian-occupied Crimea. In response to Ukrainian requests for longer-range systems, the U.S. has either slow-walked them (as in the case of F-16 fighters) or declined to provide them (as is currently the case with Army Tactical Missile Systems).

This kind of carefully circumscribed support might make sense if the U.S. were also trying to broker a peace deal with Russia. Indeed, it has heightened Ukrainian fears that Washington sees control over Crimea or even other parts of occupied Ukraine as potential bargaining chips in future talks with Russia. In practice, America’s restraint has backfired. Ukraine has been forced to fight a longer and costlier war than it otherwise would have. Because they lacked the option of hitting strategic targets well behind Russian lines, Ukrainian military planners have opted this summer for a slow, deliberate, wastage campaign against entrenched Russian forces, in preparation for a direct counterassault in the future. European countries—particularly the United Kingdom, which has provided Storm Shadow cruise missiles—have been more supportive of extending the Ukrainian military’s range.

The U.S. approach has also backfired on the Biden administration by forcing it earlier this month to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions—something the White House surely wished it never would have had to do. But in its slow, grinding war, Ukraine has used up massive amounts of ammunition faster than anticipated. As stocks have run low, cluster munitions—which break into smaller pieces that heighten the risk of injuring children and other civilians—became perhaps the only ordnance available that could make a difference in the campaign against Russia.

The best thing the U.S. can do to end the war is give Ukrainians the support they need to push the Russian military out of their country. Even if Washington wanted to, it can’t force Ukraine to agree to a specific peace deal (such as handing over Crimea). If the U.S. cut back aid significantly, that would not necessarily make Ukraine give up. More likely it would lead to an even longer and bloodier war, because Ukraine would fight on, with the support of European states that believe more fervently than the U.S. does that Russia must be defeated.

The real choice the U.S. faces is whether to help the Ukrainian military win the war in the quickest, most efficient manner possible, with the smallest number of dead on each side. This would be both the wisest and the most humane outcome. But it would require an American recognition that the Ukrainians are the ones in combat, and that the U.S. cannot always be in control.

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