OPINION:
The United States is dangerously close to ceding the Pacific and global economic leadership to China by not providing Ukraine with adequate long-term security commitments and weapons to dislodge the Russian army.
The pauperism of NATO policy is on full display in the run-up to the July Vilnius Summit.
On the agenda are Ukrainian membership, an issue sidestepped by the United States, Germany and others even after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk.
With membership comes Article 5 protection. Ukrainian admission now would compel NATO to put troops on the ground, and that’s politically untenable for most NATO leaders.
After a cessation of hostilities, the Eastern Europeans favor a detailed road map for Ukrainian membership.
The United States and Germany favor softer security guarantees like those the United States affords Israel. Those could include access to more advanced weapons and continued financial assistance to acquire what’s necessary to deter another Russian invasion.
The latter is hardly enough.
Ukraine is not Israel. Its civilian economic infrastructure has been devastated, and it sits next to Russia with more than three times the population and its 20th-century imperial designs.
An end to hostilities without Article 5 guarantees and U.S. and other NATO troops positioned in Ukraine, as they are in other Eastern European states, is an invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin or a successor to regroup and try again — perhaps with radically different kinetic tactics.
It’s doubtful the United States would ultimately provide Ukraine with all the technology that Israel can access, because that would permit Kyiv to strike inside Russia and enjoy technological superiority to compensate for its size disadvantage.
Such steps would provoke Mr. Putin in a manner that President Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are not inclined to do. That’s why Ukraine’s military is inadequately equipped now.
A suggested compromise would elevate the NATO-Ukraine Commission, established in 1997, to a NATO-Ukraine Council to foster a higher level of engagement and military integration. That would not be much better than a fig leaf.
After hostilities end, either NATO puts troops in Ukraine and provides Kyiv with cutting-edge weapons that put the fear of God into Russia’s generals, or enhanced security commitments are made that are akin to the promises a thrice-cheating spouse makes in marriage counseling.
The odds are quite strong that Mr. Putin’s army can bog down the Ukrainian counteroffensive, since the Russian forces had all winter to build tough defensive positions and outnumber Kyiv’s forces. Ukraine lacks sophisticated aircraft and long-range missiles to strike Russian sanctuaries in Crimea, supply lines and infrastructure to further destabilize Mr. Putin’s regime.
The general thrust of recent advances in military technology favors defensive over offensive operations in land warfare.
In a stalemate, Russia would hold considerable occupied territory, face little accountability for heinous war crimes, and leave Western allies burdened with financing an endless proxy war.
Then any negotiated solution would then leave Mr. Putin, or a similar successor, in power. That’s a fool’s errand.
The NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 failed because the political culture in Russia is incapable of honoring any permanent demarcation between NATO and Moscow’s sphere of influence that puts the Baltic states, Ukraine, and other parts of Southeastern Europe with the West.
Despite the enormous cost of Russian treasures and lives, Mr. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping can use control of domestic media and the internet to paint a stalemate with some territorial gains as victory to domestic audiences.
None of this would deter China.
Mr. Xi has staked the legitimacy of his regime on asserting Beijing’s questionable territorial claims in Taiwan — the island was colonized by Japan in the 19th century and only ruled by mainland China from 1945 to 1949.
Taiwan is the linchpin of the island chain running from Japan through the Philippines and Malaysia and an irreplaceable component in the global advanced-semiconductor supply chain.
Losing Taiwan would severely compromise the security of Japan and other Pacific allies and make China the preeminent power in the Indo-Pacific. It would give Beijing a chokehold on state-of-the-art chipmaking capacity, leaving Western economies at their whims.
It would then be China applying export embargoes to retard the technological development and weapons production of the United States and Europe, not the reverse.
War game analysis indicates the United States, assisted by Japan and other allies, could repel a Chinese attack but only with a great loss of ships — including one or more aircraft carriers — as well as airplanes and troops.
With the United States continually bogged down by Russia in Europe, the pace of Chinese military spending would ultimately change those odds.
If we can’t deliver a knockout punch to Mr. Putin and Russia’s perverted political culture now, China is left on track to deliver the fatal blow in the Pacific and take control of the global economy.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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