Op-Ed: Counterpoint on the Russian invasion of Ukraine

War is the realm of chaos, miscalculation and mistake, and even when it begins with limited aims and less than total means, things tend to escalate and get out of control. The deeper a nation commits, the more it has to lose, and a resort to the most powerful weapons in its arsenal can end up back on the table.

Civilization has been on the brink several times since the late 1940s, but someone always pulled back. Nuclear powers, no matter how implacably hostile to one another, have engaged in subversion, insurgency and counterinsurgency, bluff, brinksmanship and proxy wars, but never direct combat against one another.

In Ukraine, the U.S. and NATO have engaged nuclear-armed Russia in the hottest proxy war yet – because it is on Russia’s doorstep, in a conflict defined by Russia as one of vital national interest. NATO leaders, including our own President, have stated their intent to remove Vladimir Putin from power and try him for war crimes, and to dismember the Russian federation or render it powerless and compliant. It is imprudent, at best, to push a nuclear-armed adversary against the wall and threaten to decapitate and dismember it.

Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is a second-rate power with enormous structural weaknesses, unable to pose any serious threat to NATO, the United States or the West. Its one great military capability – the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union – is like all nuclear arsenals, unusable except in the last resort. It is a powerful deterrent, as is every other nuclear force on the planet. The one goal we should share with Russia, and with every other nuclear power, is to keep that genie in the bottle, no matter our differences.

By every other measure of real and potential military power, Russia is far too weak to be the conquering colossus that U.S. and NATO propagandists pretend that it is. The most common indicators of military potential are population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). According to the World Bank and NATO, in 2021, Russia’s population was only 15% of NATO’s, and its GDP was less than 4% of NATO’s combined GDP. Direct comparison of actual military strengths confirms that Russia is simply incapable of waging offensive war against the NATO alliance.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the NATO alliance promised not to expand eastward toward Russia’s borders, in return for Russia’s acceptance of the reunification of East and West Germany as a NATO member.

NATO, however, reneged on its promise, expanding through all of Eastern Europe. In 2008 it invited Ukraine and Georgia, right on Russia’s borders, to join the alliance; the only two Russian military actions outside its borders since 1991 were a direct result. Russia had objected consistently throughout the years of NATO’s eastward expansion, and was consistently ignored. Our inattention to that concern was a direct and proximate cause of the war now underway.

Russia will not tolerate Ukraine becoming a NATO member, placing NATO forces directly on its border, any more than the United States has allowed European military bases in the Western Hemisphere since the advent of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. A neutral Ukrainian buffer state is what it had, from the fall of the USSR until 2014, and that status quo restored is Russia’s primary objective. It might have been achieved by good faith negotiations, and might still, if we were not so committed to an open-ended, insanely costly war with Ukrainians doing all the dying.

Risking direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia in pursuit of regime change and removal of its head of state is not a rational policy nor is simplistically demonizing Russia and sanctifying Ukraine. A far more rational solution would be to end the fighting in Ukraine, and set about its reconstruction, by a negotiated settlement providing international guarantees for both an independent but neutral Ukraine, and for legitimate Russian security concerns, leaving neither party fully satisfied (the definition of compromise).

Territory will be one of the bargaining chips in those negotiations, but breathless propaganda notwithstanding, Russia has shown no interest in acquisition of any new territory beyond the Donbas, as it is incapable of conquering much less occupying the rest of Ukraine. Let the killing stop, and the deal-making begin.

It is time to end a war that need never have been fought and should not be encouraged to continue or to escalate. America has much more serious concerns to address, within our own borders and in the western Pacific.

(Bill Tallen spent two years in the Army and two years in the New Mexico Army National Guard. He also worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration within the Department of Energy with the Office of Secure Transportation for 20 years.)