Lessons from Ukraine

Among the many disturbing passages in War, famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book on the Biden administration’s response to crises like those in Ukraine and Gaza, is a section that has nothing at all to do with the gut-wrenching scenes of human suffering currently haunting those theaters of war. Towards the end of the narrative, after describing the efforts of Biden administration officials to keep Ukraine on its feet amidst a Russian invasion, Woodward relays comments on Vladimir Putin from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in May 2024 that will strike many readers as disconcerting. “I think it is very hard to argue that [Putin] has not been weakened” by his actions in Ukraine, Haines says. “It’s incredible to our military analysts what he’s willing to lose in terms of people and equipment on the front lines for what he gains in territory.” It is also “pretty extraordinary” to see Putin overspending on defense– Putin had long criticized the Soviet Union for doing the same– and while Russia is handling sanctions “better than we thought,” there remain “critical fractures in their economy.” Haines is seconded on this point by national security official Daleep Singh: “Nosebleed inflation and interest rates will inevitably choke off Russia’s growth…. Less capital, less technology and less talent implies a smaller, weaker, less productive Russian economy for a generation to come.” 

 

These remarks would be understandable if they came on the eve of a dictatorship’s full-scale invasion of a neighboring country. Coming more than two and a half years after one, they smack of denial. International sanctions have failed to prevent the Russian economy from growing healthily, let alone to mire it in crisis; failure to recognize this suggests a refusal to accept the inadequacy of one of the Biden administration’s go-to tools of international influence. Even worse, Haines’ remarks suggest an ongoing failure to understand the mentality and situation of one of the United States’ most important international antagonists. Vladimir Putin, it is by now apparent, does not care about the material or human toll of his actions because he lacks humanity, and he does not have to care because he is a dictator. That facts like these continue to strike the Biden administration as “incredible” and “extraordinary” does not encourage confidence in its ability to read and react to aggressive dictatorships elsewhere.

 

For the reader preoccupied with one such dictatorship, the irredentist China of Xi Jinping, War contains still more disheartening news. Though the book says little on China directly,  it depicts an administration genuinely committed to doing the right thing in foreign policy (many of Woodward’s sources are members of that administration discussing themselves, after all) yet plagued by serious errors of execution and a penchant for self-defeating caution. The United States’ catastrophically mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, the book suggests, did more than just abandon that country to an abysmal fate; it also led Vladimir Putin to regard Biden and his officials as weak in the crucial period when Russia was building towards an invasion of Ukraine. Around the same time, the Biden administration also undercut its own deterrence: Joe Biden declared publicly that he would not send American troops to defend Ukraine, a reasonable policy whose open advertisement nonetheless discarded the threat most likely to induce Russia to stand down. After the invasion, fear of catastrophic escalation dogged Washington’s efforts to support Ukraine, even on matters of questionable risk. Dreading “escalation that could draw NATO into war with Russia or push Putin to use a nuclear weapon,” Joe Biden not only resisted granting foreign countries approval to supply Ukraine with US-developed F-16s, but even took persuading merely to allow Ukrainians to train on that platform. 

 

The consequences for Ukraine of these problems will not become clear until the conflict is over. Nonetheless, they are rich with implications for the China-minded reader. When Biden discarded his military leverage, he demonstrated how easily a lapse in messaging discipline can undermine deterrence against a threat to global stability. In bungling his withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden confirmed that foreign policy mistakes are connected: that debacle poured fuel on the fire of Putin’s ambitions, just as a comparable failure in Ukraine would be likely fan Xi’s. (War reveals that CIA Director Bill Burns, for one, considers this to be true: Russia’s problems in its invasion and US and Ukrainian successes are “getting [Xi] to pause a little bit about Taiwan scenarios,” he says.) Finally, foot-dragging on giving Ukraine everything from cluster munitions (which were already in use, by Russia) to F-16s (which were providable through third-party countries) to world-class Abrams battle tanks suggests that the present administration frequently lacks boldness and flexibility in curbing international aggression after it has taken place. These failures undermined the Biden administration’s undeniable limited successes, including its intelligence triumph (it publicly predicted the invasion, thereby denying Putin the element of surprise) and its maintenance of a substantial flow of vital aid to Ukraine. Needless to say, for the China-watcher concerned with Beijing’s escalating military threats against Taiwan, these findings do not encourage confidence in Washington’s ability to rapidly and flexibly support that island in the event of a Chinese attack.

 

Just as important for the China-watcher is what War reveals about Putin’s flirtation with crossing the nuclear threshold in Ukraine. In addition to concocting false reports that the Ukrainians were thinking about using a radioactive “dirty bomb,” a clear pretext for nuclear use, Moscow officials apparently held closed-door conversations which suggested to American intelligence sometime before late September of 2022 that Putin was “seriously considering using a tactical nuclear weapon.” Though deeply disturbing, this should not come as a surprise. Putin had already violated one massive international norm and gotten away with it, so ineffective was the Western response to his 2022 invasion of Ukraine and so apathetic was that of Russia’s non-Western partners; there is no evidentiary reason to expect him to fear violating another. These reports are nonetheless a sobering reminder of how drastically even limited conflicts increase the risk of nuclear use in the present age. Even more important, they give the lie to Russia’s declaratory nuclear policy, which contains no clause permitting nuclear use in the event of an imaginary attack with a dirty bomb. This point, which should close the book on the common belief that declaratory nuclear policy constitutes either a meaningful constraint or a reliable predictor of states’ behavior in wartime, deserves particular attention from analysts reassured by Beijing’s public declarations that it will never engage in nuclear first use. 

 

Also potentially informative to the China-minded reader is what one anecdote from War suggests about the Biden administration’s unexpected departure from the United States’ longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan. Joe Biden repeatedly tells the people around him that his “problem”– a clear reference to his notorious penchant for gaffes– is “not that I say what I mean” but “that I say everything I mean.” This refrain can be taken as vague evidence that Biden’s repeated public declarations that he would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack do in fact reflect his actual thinking, although Woodward’s frequent failure to inform the reader when, where, to whom, in what format, or in what context his subjects are speaking makes analyzing such snippets a markedly imprecise exercise. This is perhaps especially frustrating of Bill Burns’ occasional pronouncements on China; it is not even clear on what evidentiary basis, if any, Burns makes the basic observation that Xi dislikes Trump’s erratic style of leadership.

 

This methodological shortcoming, no less than Woodward’s tendency to relay officials’ self-serving accounts of their own actions uncritically, lessens the book’s analytical usefulness to the China-minded reader. Nevertheless, even War’s frequently vague reporting makes this much clear: the Biden administration’s failure to understand an authoritarian adversary, timidity in the face of large-scale aggression, and telegraphed aversion to military costs hampered its well-intentioned and morally laudable response to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. These are lessons, it need hardly be said, that will prove important if future administrations should encounter similar efforts to revise the international order from Beijing.