In the run-up to today’s encounter between Trump and Putin, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, posted that during Trump’s meeting the other day with “European partners, we assured him of our ongoing support for Ukraine.” Given the odds against what the Europeans and Zelensky would consider a favorable deal, that support is highly likely to continue, at least for some months. My point in this post is that that support, no matter how heartfelt, is severely limited; that such limitation should not be surprising; and that as a consequence, the Russia-Ukraine War is likely to stagger on for months, if not years.
Let’s start by reviewing the nature of military support for Ukraine, by both the Europeans and the United States. In part, that support takes the form of intelligence, of training on particular weapons systems, and of advice both tactical and strategic. But the support also is in terms of hardware, everything from armor and artillery to missiles and fighter jets. Putting aside the quantitative issue of how many deliveries are occurring per month, before and after Trump, there are two stylized facts, as economists would say, about these deliveries. First, almost every time that a more powerful weapons system was deployed, the decision was preceded by much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Western side, with grave concerns being expressed that such qualitative escalation might provoke the Russians into using nuclear weapons or even attacking other countries. Second, and this is along the lines of Sherlock Holmes’s “curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” what was never even considered was deploying Western troops for combat purposes. Quite the contrary: at the start of the war, Biden made it clear that he had “no intention of fighting Russia.” Even when, as some months ago, the possibility arose of sending troops to Ukraine, it was specified that this would only be to serve as peacekeepers in the context of a ceasefire.
In other words, from the very start, the U.S. and the Europeans have sharply limited their military involvement, slowly climbing lower rungs of an escalation ladder while making it clear that upper rungs were entirely out of bounds. Although the military aid that was delivered has been of great importance in allowing Ukraine to keep fighting, there has been systematic and across-the-board avoidance of anything that might smack of, or lead to, direct military confrontation with Russia. If we’re not in the middle of Catfish Row, we’re at least in the neighborhood.
Why this limitation? It’s difficult to say, not least because we’re talking about a non-event: something that didn’t happen. But such non-events have occurred, or, shall we say, non-occurred, often, since 1945. A short list would include the Soviet Union limiting its escalation against the U.S. in Korea, as well as the U.S. not attacking Chinese territory then; the U.S. not acting militarily against the USSR following the Hungarian and Czechoslovak interventions; the USSR not acting militarily directly against the U.S. during the Vietnam War; the U.S. not acting militarily directly against the USSR during the latter’s Afghan war; Russia not acting militarily against the U.S. during the Kosovo War; and Iran not sending forces directly to Iraq during the recent wars. All of these cases, of course, involved extensive weapons transfers, and, in the case of Iran, the use of proxy forces, but the line was clearly drawn at going further: no U.S. or Soviet or Russian or Iranian troops, or ships, or planes.
To explain these non-events, we can borrow a concept from game theory: first-mover advantage. In a so-called sequential game where players move in turns, the first player is able to restrict the second player’s options. Each of the cases cited above involved a great power committing troops to support a client state, oppose an enemy, or both. Once those troops were committed, the cost to another state of committing its own forces immediately went up, because if or when those forces encountered the great power’s troops, the great power could be expected to widen the war by attacking the other state. Hence the second mover had a strong incentive to limit its involvement: yes, it would send weapons, and perhaps even proxies; but no, it would not send its own forces. What we see with the Europeans and the Americans in Ukraine is just the latest example of this. If we want to see the phenomenon through rose-colored glasses, we could say that it’s a way of avoiding dangerous escalation; if we’re a bit more cynical, we could describe it as fighting to the last Korean, or Vietnamese, or Afghan, or Iraqi – or Ukrainian.
Eppur si muove. In almost every one of the examples listed above, the great power that first committed troops ended up unable to achieve its stated mission, and in most cases, had to withdraw. To establish a causal link between the limited escalation by the second mover and the first mover’s subsequent withdrawal is difficult if not impossible (for example, the highly mediatized claims about the role of Stinger missiles in forcing the USSR to withdraw from Afghanistan is in the end simply an urban legend); but what we can say is that the furnishing of arms, by prolonging the war and dragging it out eventually gave space for domestic opponents of the war to finally force an end, or at least a long-term armistice. This, fairly obviously, is what the Europeans are hoping for in Ukraine; it’s also what at least some of Trump’s advisers would like to happen. Viewed from that perspective, unless Trump sides entirely with Putin, the nothing that’s likely to emerge from the Alaska summit ain’t necessarily…bad.