No one should be satisfied with the unjust peace that Ukraine may be forced to accept. The aggressor would be rewarded with territory and other concessions from the victim it has brutalized. Yet the horrified reaction in Washington to recent peace proposals is troubling in its own right.
The Trump administration’s recent 28-point planroundly denounced in Congress and the commentariat as a “capitulation” to Moscow, actually offered Kyiv a remarkable strategic outcome. Under its terms, Ukraine would face no meaningful limit on its peacetime military, despite Russian attempts to impose draconian restrictions since 2022. (The only requirement, a cap of 600,000 personnel, probably exceeds the number of active-duty forces Ukraine would maintain anyway.) Moreover, Ukraine would receive a substantial security guarantee from the United States and Europe – the strongest in history, even if short of a Nato-style commitment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion to break Ukraine’s alignment with the West and against Moscow. When the fighting stops, Ukraine will be militarily stronger, more hostile to Russia, and better protected than ever before.
Yet it is already clear that this outcome, if and when it may be realized, will be deemed unacceptable and immoral by powerful voices in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. Continuing the war indefinitely is highly likely to leave Ukraine worse off – smaller, weaker, and even more devastated – but that won’t keep senators such as Mitch McConnell or Shaeen from railing against a least-bad compromise. It is easy to call for ideal outcomes when one is thousands of miles away and pays no price for sounding morally superior.
Ukraine risks becoming the latest victim of America’s chronic inability to see the outcomes of its wars for what they are. In prior conflicts, the United States has repeatedly refused to “take the win” or accept that it could not attain everything it sought. Instead, the country has become consumed with its failure to achieve absolute victory or perfect justice, and taken destructive actions as a result. It should not make the same mistake now.
In prior wars, the United States has struggled both to accept loss and to accept victory – two distinct manifestations of the pursuit of ideal solutions, each relevant to Ukraine’s war today.
The United States has several times allowed faltering military campaigns to drag on unnecessarily for years, not because presidents believed they could pull out a win but because they wanted to avoid taking the loss. In Vietnam, Richard Nixon chased “peace with honor” by continuing to fight for four years after taking office, before finally signing peace accords in 1973. He secretly bombed Cambodia and Laos, devastating both countries, merely to delay America’s inevitable defeat. Nixon purchased a “decent interval” between America’s withdrawal and North Vietnam’s victory with enormous quantities of blood.
Similarly, one decade into the war in Afghanistan, Barack Obama recognized that the Taliban would not be militarily defeated. Yet he made minimal attempts to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement that might have ended the war and preserved, in part, the US-backed government in Kabul. The United States drew down but fought on and steadily lost ground for another decade. Unable to win yet unwilling to compromise, the United States left itself no choice but to withdraw unconditionally. When it did so, the Taliban swept back to power across the country. Armchair warriors in Washington bemoaned the absence of a “decent interval” despite the indecency of their complaint: more war would only have cost more American and Afghan lives.
Failing to accept losses, the United States has also, and no less damagingly, failed to accept its own wins. In 1991, under George HW Bush, the United States decisively achieved its primary aim of ejecting Iraq’s forces from Kuwait. Having proved able to reverse Iraqi aggression, the United States could have pulled back from the Persian Gulf, knowing it could return if Saddam Hussein attempted another invasion. Instead, Washington dreamed bigger. Bush called on Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands” and force Saddam from power. He thus defied America simply by surviving, and Americans concluded that their mission remained unaccomplished. The United States proceeded to “contain” Iraq through routine bombings and the first-ever open-ended deployment of tens of thousands of soldiers in the region. After 9/11, the next Bush administration decided to finish the country’s unfinished business in Baghdad, to disastrous effect. The United States squandered its original achievement in the quest for total triumph.
These precedents matter in equal measure for the war in Ukraine today. The conflict is neither a clear-cut defeat nor a feel-good victory, but an in-between outcome that contains profound elements of each. Ukraine has achieved astonishing successes that must be retained. It has also suffered immense losses that will not be redeemed. Ending the war requires coming to terms with both sides of that mixed verdict.
On the one hand, like the US-backed governments in Saigon and Kabul, the government in Kyiv will not achieve a total battlefield victory, and it is fantastical to believe that Ukraine could do so. Even the Biden administration, despite sometimes framing the stakes of the conflict in absolutist terms, never really expected Ukraine to liberate all its territory by force. The best that can be achieved is a compromise settlement that gives Ukraine a viable chance at peace and security while allowing Russia to reap strategic and territorial gains. If this feels like a dirty deal, like some measure of appeasement, that’s because it is. But if there is no better alternative, it will be a dirty deal worth making.
On the other hand, the United States and Ukraine are struggling to internalize the enormous achievement they have already attained. Nearly four years after Russia expected to overrun its opponent in four days, Ukraine still stands. The vast majority of its people and its land remain intact. Russia, meanwhile, has suffered mightily for its botched invasion, enduring upwards of 600,000 casualties – roughly ten times the number of Soviet casualties suffered over a decade in Afghanistan – for what look to be modest gains. Ukraine has proved, as few believed before 2022, that it can impose severe costs on its enemy. If it can rebuild and retain a strong military with Western help, it stands a fair chance of deterring another war once this one ends.
That is a win worth taking. It may not, it is true, satisfy those in Washington or Kyiv who seek to escape all insecurity through Nato membership or a similar pledge from Ukraine’s allies to take up arms automatically in its cause. But total security is not available for Ukraine, or any country. Even if Nato admitted Ukraine, as it will not do, the alliance would provide no genuine guarantee of safety. Whatever they may pledge on paper, countries that have declined to fight for Ukraine to date are unlikely to go to war for it in the future. The last four years have shown both the lengths and the limits to which Ukraine’s partners will go.
Fortunately, Ukraine does not require a geopolitical deus ex machina to survive. It needs itself, and the external support it can realistically receive. Still less does the United States, an ocean away, need a miracle to occur in Ukraine. Misplaced moralism is no reason to risk all that has been accomplished to date.
