By aggressively courting Ukraine as an ally and turning it into a military partner against Russia, Washington threw down a gauntlet to Moscow. This was the culmination of a longer process of reckless confrontation. The same post-Cold War bipartisan consensus of heedless liberal internationalists and proponents of a quasi-utopian global primacy that squandered American lives and treasure across the Middle East has now led the nation into a strategic dead end on the Great Eurasian Steppe, draining American money and scarce resources and weapons needed elsewhere. More than three years into the war, there is no compelling reason to believe Russia will suffer defeat. Its economy has proven resilient in the face of sanctions, and it fields a larger and more capable army than Ukraine.
Yet, in confirmation of Thucydides’ insight that men act on hope when reason fails them, America’s bipartisan elites, out of indignation and wounded pride, cling to the belief that Russia will somehow be vanquished—and so prolong a war they cannot win. Proponents of continuing the war argue that it has weakened Russia. That is debatable. What is not debatable is that the war has wrecked Ukraine, crippled Europe’s economy, and consumed American resources. It has also driven Russia into China’s embrace, handing America’s one peer competitor a long, quiet border and secure access to valuable natural resources.
To stifle dissent about the war and its origins, its bipartisan defenders deplore Trump and other skeptics as either ignorant, naïve, or somehow secretly beholden to Vladimir Putin. The reality is that hardheaded skepticism of the war and the policy that produced it stands in the tradition of some of America’s most accomplished diplomats, intelligence officers, and national security officials who waged—and won—the Cold War. This elder generation of Cold War veterans spoke loudly against NATO expansion. Among their successors were those who likewise questioned the wisdom of Washington’s course, yet at the behest of less discerning leaders they carried out that expansion, voicing their candid reservations and objections only in private or in the pages of their memoirs. America’s Ukraine debacle, then, is the product of a bipartisan coalition in which the misguided were full of passionate intensity, while might‑have‑been wise men lacked all conviction.