Why Security Guarantees Matter
- Karl Johansson
- för 8 timmar sedan
- 3 min läsning
Why do security guarantees for Ukraine matter?
The war in Ukraine is broadly misunderstood in the West in the sense that territory is not the primary war aim for Russia. Western media frames Russia’s slow battlefield progress as a sign of the inherent weakness in Russia’s armed forces, and the fact that Ukraine still holds on to a significant chunk of the Donbass as a victory for Ukraine. However, war is famously politics by other means, and the political question which Kyiv and Moscow is trying to settle by other means is whether Ukraine is in the Russian sphere of influence or not. Being part of the Russian world is not contingent on being a de jure or de facto part of the Russian federation, but on to what influence Russia can wield. Losing on the battlefield does not matter if Russia ends up with significant influence over post-war Ukraine. Unless something drastically changes, Ukraine has more or less lost already.
The reason I say that is not to be edgy or fatalistic, but because the West has been categorically unwilling to offer security guarantees for Ukraine. As long as Russia can credibly threaten Kyiv with non-nuclear military force it wields wide-ranging influence over Ukraine, and unless an outside party takes Ukraine under its wing Russia will easily be able to credibly threaten Ukraine.
There are good reasons why the West generally and the US specifically does not want to offer Ukraine security guarantees; this is not a case of being cruel or dumb. Offering security guarantees would risk dragging the West into a costly conflict where it has little to win and there is a risk of nuclear escalation. In addition, there is a serious imbalance of determination between the parties. Making sure there is not a strong and hostile Ukraine on its border is an existential imperative for Russia, but it does not matter much for the US, UK, or France who controls the Donbass. This manifests as a sort of reverse Cuban missile crisis where Russia has so much more to lose from letting Ukraine join NATO than the US has to gain that the West has to back down.
Indeed, this has already happened. Even when support for Ukraine was at its peak when Biden was the American president Ukraine was never invited to NATO, only given fig leaf promises about how it might be able to join someday. Those promises were obviously never intended to be kept, which means that Ukraine is more or less doomed to fall under Russia’s influence. On a moral level, this is unacceptable, a shame and a betrayal. On a pragmatic level, it was a necessity to keep tensions between rival Great Powers in check.
The ugly truth of international relations is that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. As things stand it looks like Russia can prevent Ukraine from getting Western security guarantees, so Ukraine will have to suffer being part of the Russian near abroad.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about recruitment here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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