Ukraine diplomacy in the West has long ceased to be about winning the war. It is about red lines and bargaining positions in peace talks. Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use US-supplied ATACMS missiles to strike targets in Russia could take us closer to a peace deal. Its more immediate purpose is to help Ukraine defend its position in the Russian oblast of Kursk, where Vladimir Putin is currently planning a counter-offensive with the help of North Korean soldiers. But Biden’s move will not change the course of the war. His administration leaked the decision a day before it was announced on 17 November. This tells us that this is little more than an incremental policy shift.
The Kremlin’s reaction to Biden’s decision was predictably negative, and yet comparatively measured. Putin’s spokesman talked about an escalation, but he did not say that Russia now considers itself to be at war with Nato. This is what Putin had threatened in September when he said that a decision by the West to allow Ukraine to hit targets in Russia would constitute “direct involvement of Nato countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine”.
We are not in this scenario because neither the US nor Europe are ready for a war with Russia.
After Biden announced his decision, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said he will now not follow suit, doubling down on his earlier decision not to despatch his Taurus cruise missiles. German politics may change after the February elections. But even I would not expect to see any deliveries of missiles until the autumn of next year. This would be far too late.
Disunity and the failure to agree on a war goal have bedevilled the Western alliance since the start of the war. I am struggling to discern a strategic purpose behind Biden’s latest move. Ukraine’s foray into Kursk was in my view a strategic mistake. Those forces would have been better deployed to defend Ukraine against the Russian advance.
If the goal had been for Ukraine to liberate the occupied territories, the amount of Western military aid would have to be several times what it is today. The West would have plugged the giant loopholes in its sanctions regime against Russia. One of the largest is the Belgian port of Zeebrugge through which large volumes of Russian liquified natural gas reach European markets. Western support for Ukraine was conditional from the start, surrounded by a web of red lines. Scholz, for example, said he would not sacrifice social policies to fund Germany’s support for Ukraine.
Biden does not appear to have coordinated his decision with other Western allies – or with president-elect Donald Trump. The latter’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted: “The military industrial complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives.” I am not going to speculate on what Trump himself may be thinking, but the fact this is still the narrative in his closest circle should give us pause.
All of this leads me to conclude that the road towards a peace deal is more complicated now than Trump imagined, but we are still heading in that general direction. My hunch is that Trump’s position on Ukraine will be more nuanced compared to what he himself said in the past. He will clearly not end the war in 24 hours as he once promised. But he will likely break with the directionless policy of the current administration. This is why I think a deal in 2025 remains the most likely outcome.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, the broad outline of an eventual deal has already been delineated within the Trump team: the freezing of the current 1,100 kilometre-long battleline, with a demilitarised strip on either side. The Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia to the east of that zone would fall to Moscow. The most important part of the agreement would be that Ukraine shall not join Nato for at least 20 years. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made a similar peace proposal, with a Nato ban for Ukraine of at least 10 years. The US and Germany are both opposed to Ukraine joining Nato in any case, so this is not an issue likely to come up soon. Still, I am not sure it is wise to make such a big concession before the negotiations even start.
For the Europeans the hardest part will be to fund the peacekeeping operations after the war and Ukraine’s reconstruction. European governments will have to make fiscal sacrifices as the sums required cannot be funded out of existing budgets. I am not sure the Europeans are ready for this. Everybody will find themselves confronted with the same political trade-off Scholz was talking about – between domestic policies and financial support for Ukraine. Some of Ukraine’s strongest supporters seem to be living in a world in which money for weapons is unlimited. Military spending is consumption, not investment. You pay for it through higher taxes or cuts in other expenditures, not through higher debt.
You will not often hear this from me, but on this point Donald Trump is right: we will need to cut a deal. This cannot go on. A judiciously executed escalation can be of help in such a situation. This may well be the upside of Biden’s decision. The change of the rules of engagement for Western missiles will not help Ukraine liberate Russian-occupied territories. But it raises Russia’s cost, and may help get Putin to the negotiating table.
The goal of our policy should be the deal, not the prolongation of a hopeless war.
[See also: Trump’s war on the “deep state”]