Hubris, Analogy, and The War in Ukraine

Foreign policy is like Las Vegas. If your bet pays off, you tend to bet more. Foreign policy is also like life in general. When confronting something new, people tend to fall back, consciously or unconsciously, on things they’ve seen before. The second dynamic is called analogical reasoning. The first is called hubris. Both make me worry about where US policy is headed on Ukraine.

But first, a word about our Zoom call this Friday. Our guest will be Noam Chomsky, who I don’t think needs any introduction. I’m torn about what to ask him. He’s made some controversial comments recently about Ukraine, so we’ll talk about his long-standing argument (laid out here in a 1988 debate with a young David Frum) that an individual’s primary responsibility is to resist the abuses of their government, not foreign governments. But I also want to talk about his life: His childhood in a Hebrew-speaking home, his early views of Zionism and his time living in Israel, his rise to fame as a critic of the Vietnam War, and his relationship with Edward Said. It’s a lot to cover.

When I spoke to him last year, he spoke in very personal terms about his youth and early adulthood, and how it shaped him as a leftist, an intellectual, and a Jew. But we only skimmed the surface. We’ll send along that prior conversation—and a link to the upcoming one this Friday—to anyone who becomes a paid subscriber.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Back to hubris, analogy, and Ukraine. Let’s start with hubris, which in American history often builds when America experiences success early in a war.

Think about what happened during Korea. Before North Korea invaded the South in June 1950, it wasn’t clear the United States would intervene militarily at all; Secretary of State Dean Acheson had previously implied the US would not. Once the invasion occurred, the Truman administration did decide to fight. But it outlined a limited goal: To restore the partition line that had existed before the invasion. America’s war, explained Acheson four days after the fighting began, “is solely for the purpose of restoring the Republic of Korea [South Korea] to its status prior to the invasion from the north.” Soon, however, America and its allies began to win. By mid-July, US and allied forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, had stopped Pyongyang’s progress and were pushing north toward the 38th parallel, which had divided the two Koreas before the war. With success, America’s appetite grew. As the historian James Matray has written, “MacArthur’s successful halting of the North Korea military advance had a decisive impact on the administration’s attitude toward crossing the thirty-eighth parallel. American leaders who had been reluctant to support forcible reunification now began to reconsider their position.” By September, Truman officials had altered the goal of the war. It was no longer merely to preserve South Korea. It was, in the words of one State Department official, to deliver a “defeat to the Soviet Union and to the Communist world” that will be of “momentous significance.” If you’ve been following recent Biden administration statements on Ukraine, that should sound familiar.

So US troops hurtled pass the 38th parallel in an effort to unify Korea under pro-American rule. As they neared North Korea’s border with China, Beijing entered the fight, erasing America’s gains and beginning a grinding struggle that lasted almost three more years, and ended in partition. Success had produced hubris, and hubris proved costly.

This dynamic has reoccurred more recently. America’s ease in overthrowing the Taliban in late 2001, for instance—which falsely convinced US policymakers that the war in Afghanistan was largely won—helped generate the overconfidence that led the US to go to war in Iraq 18 months later.

I fear something similar is now happening in Ukraine. When the war began in late February, the Biden administration appeared interested merely in preserving Ukraine as a sovereign nation. But because of the Ukrainian military’s remarkable skill and courage, and Russia’s remarkable incompetence, that goal was achieved fairly quickly. By the end of March, Moscow had abandoned its goal of capturing the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

So late last month, US officials began laying out what New York Times diplomatic correspondent David Sanger characterized as a “new strategic objective.” Asked on April 25 whether the US is “defining America’s goals for success any differently in Ukraine now than you were at the beginning of this war,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin essentially said yes. He told reporters that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” The next day, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Russia must not get away with the invasion “cost-free.” On April 28, Joe Biden explained that “investing in Ukraine’s freedom and security is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression” and thus “lessen the risk of future conflicts.” The syntax is revealing. Ukrainian freedom and security are merely the means. The larger goal is degrading Russian power.

In Washington, Ukraine’s success has also led many in Congress to demand that the Biden administration resist any diplomatic settlement that leaves Russia in possession of the Donbas and Crimea—the Ukrainian territories that Russia first seized in 2014. In a Foreign Relations Committee hearing last month, Senator Tom Cotton asked whether “the words ‘win’ and ‘victory’ been purged from the administration’s vocabulary when it comes to Ukraine?” Defense Secretary Austin insisted they have not been. Cotton then demanded to know whether “you or anyone else in the administration [are] discouraging President Zelenskyy or your counterparts from launching attacks that would involve taking back any part of the Donbas or the Crimea?” Austin again said no. Nonetheless, Cotton’s colleagues in both parties piled on. New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand asked whether “our current strategy is sufficient for Ukraine to win the war?” South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds declared that “it is really important that the American people understand that we want the Ukrainians to win” and “regain the territory that has been lost to Russia.” After Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi travelled to Kyiv earlier this month, she vowed that the US would support Ukraine “until victory is won.”

This shift isn’t only the result of hubris born from success. It’s also the product of analogy. Political scientists have long noted that past events create templates that structure how government officials see current ones. As the political scientist Yuen Khong explains in his book, Analogies at War, “Objects and events in the phenomenal world are almost never approached as if they were sui generic configurations but rather are assimilated into preexisting structures in the mind of the perceiver.”

In making sense of the war in Ukraine, two historical analogies crop up again and again in American discourse. The first is World War II, which remains the dominant American analogy whenever an enemy dictator attacks another country. Over the last two months, commentators have incessantly compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. The recent legislation authorizing Ukraine to use US weaponry is called “Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act,” an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to funnel weapons and supplies to Britain and other allies during World War II.

The second most common analogy is the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, in which Moscow attacked a neighbor and was stymied by a combination of nationalist resistance and American support. The US media has been filled in recent weeks with essays like “Could Ukraine be Putin’s Afghanistan?” and “In Putin’s Ukraine quagmire, echoes of Soviet failure in Afghanistan.”

What makes these analogies both tempting and dangerous is that, from America’s perspective, they ended in victory. The Nazis didn’t just retreat from the Soviet Union and the other countries they had invaded, they were defeated and replaced. (In the case of West Germany, by a democracy.) The famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama cited this analogy in March, when he predicted that “Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine.” He later compared the Russian army’s setbacks to the German defeat in Stalingrad, which began the retreat that ultimately led to Nazism’s demise. A recent column in the Hill noted that, like Hitler, “Putin reportedly also resides in a bunker. In all likelihood, that’s where he, too, will meet his end.” In the same vein, comparisons between Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s war Afghanistan invariably note that the latter, as one Washington Post article put it, “precipitated collapse at home.”

Could a Russian military collapse in Ukraine bring down Putin’s regime? Sure. But it seems unlikely. In World War II, the allies marched to Berlin and physically occupied Hitler’s Germany. No one is doing that to Putin’s Russia. And Afghanistan has far less cultural and political significance to Russians than does Ukraine. Which means that even if Russia’s military did crumble in the coming weeks, it’s likely Putin would respond by doubling down.

He sees a Ukraine that is geographically unified and politically and militarily integrated into the West as an existential threat. And so the closer Ukraine and its allies come to achieving that—the closer they come to victory—the more likely he is to escalate. Over the last two months, Russia has been vicious in attacks on Ukraine but cautious about attacking the West. “A lot of people in this town are asking why they haven’t retaliated yet,” Samuel Charap, a Russia analyst with the RAND Corporation, recently told the New York Times. One plausible answer is that Moscow hasn’t gotten desperate enough yet to take that risk.  

As Anatol Lieven has pointed out, there’s a lot Russia could do: from cyber-attacks against vital US or European infrastructure to attacks on Western officials and embassies in Kyiv to attacks on NATO supply lines on their way into Ukraine. Any of these actions would likely prompt a frightening cycle of escalation. There’s also the bone-chilling prospect that Russia could use a nuclear weapon, something Russian parliamentarians have suggested. Last month, CIA Director William Burns warned that, “Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setback they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons.”

The growing calls for “victory” don’t reckon with these realities at all. Yes, the US should aid Ukraine and sanction Russia with the aim of helping Volodymyr Zelenskyy get the best possible negotiated settlement. But that requires signaling that the US would actively support such a settlement and would lift sanctions on Russia as an inducement for Moscow to agree. It means seeing Ukraine’s survival as a goal in and of itself, not a means of weakening Russia for the great power struggle ahead. Making the weakening of Russia a goal of US policy is unnecessary because Russia has now clearly shown that it poses no serious conventional military threat to NATO countries. If the Kremlin can’t take Kharkiv, how can it take Warsaw? Making a weakened Russia America’s goal is also immoral because it requires indefinitely imposing sanctions that immiserate ordinary Russians who had no say in launching this war. Finally, it’s dangerous because the weaker and more isolated Russia becomes, the more likely it is to fall back on the only arrows left in its quiver: cyber and nuclear. As the International Crisis Group’s Olga Oliker recently observed, “a Russia that is very weak conventionally and has nothing to lean on except its nuclear weapons may not be the safest Russia for the rest of the world.”

Over the last two months, Ukraine’s resistance has stirred something beautiful in the United States: A deep admiration for people struggling heroically for self-determination and freedom. But it has also stirred something dangerous: A desire to crush an adversary and bolster American global hegemony without regard to the risks. The first response reminds me of 1989. The second reminds me of 2003. Let’s hope the Biden administration can tell the difference in the dangerous days ahead.

Other Stuff:

I wrote a New York Times column about why Biden is blowing his chance at reviving the Iran deal.

I talked to MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin about mass expulsions in the West Bank and the US media’s coverage of Israel-Palestine.

In Jewish Currents (subscribe), Arielle Angel writes about the collapse of Roe.

A fascinating New York Times piece from last fall about why countries that repeal abortion rights tend to be countries in democratic decline.

Why there is no “Jewish” position on abortion.

See you on Friday,

Peter