National Populism at War

One of the surprising aspects of the Ukraine War is that it came as a surprise. After the devastation that Russia wreaked in Chechnya, after the invasion of Georgia, after the occupation of Crimea—and the list goes on: after Russia’s complicity in the destruction of Aleppo and the violence of the Wagner Group deployments especially in Africa, and, most obviously, after Putin’s explicit declaration of his intent, the West could nevertheless watch Russia prepare for the invasion and still believe that it would not happen. Before the invasion would have been the time to arm Ukraine. Instead the West succumbed to a Chamberlain-like logic of self-delusion: if we do nothing, the aggressor will dissipate. The wishful thinking of liberalism is a scourge. It remains to be seen whether the brutality of Russian violence will change that mindset in the foreign policy elite. Optimism is not warranted.

Yet the war has brought another surprise: the stupendous failing of the intelligence communities both in Moscow and Washington. It has become commonplace to gloat that Russia was caught off guard by the power of the Ukrainian resistance. Putin miscalculated because he was misinformed about the capacity of Ukraine to fight back. Yet reportedly the U.S. analysts shared the identical expectation that Kyiv would surrender in three short days. We have just witnessed a corroboration of the convergence theory according to which America and its Russian adversary can grow alike, now in terms of the unreliability of the intelligence services.

This parallel intelligence failure likely depended on very different assumptions that nonetheless led to the identical wrong conclusion that Ukraine would fold quickly. For Putinist ideology, the Ukrainians are really Russians and therefore would welcome the invasion, while—somewhat contradictorily—Moscow simultaneously discounted the Ukrainian regime as congenitally flawed, corrupt, and ineffective. Moscow’s superiority was supposed to trounce Kyiv’s degeneracy. It was, in a word, Russian arrogance toward Ukraine nationhood that generated the strategic blunder.

One can only hope that similar ethnic prejudices played little role on the U.S. side, where, however, other misjudgments prevailed. American analysts were presumably mesmerized by the myth of Russian military strength that interacted with a dismissal of the potential for a national resistance in Ukraine. That latter point is the key. The prospect of a nation insisting on its integrity—on its right to exist—does not fit into the analytic categories of the professional analysts. Of course, this was just one more failure of the American intelligence community—remember its verdicts on Saddam’s weapons or Iran’s nuclear program. However the contrast between the Russian and the American views is important: while Russia looked down on Ukraine in particular, the U.S. view diminishes the capacity for any national will, assuming that only numbers count, never a patriotic passion for self-determination.

The Ukraine War, so far, puts on display the internal weakness of Putinist Russia, but more importantly it has been about Ukrainian strength. The events demonstrate the vitality of Ukrainian nationhood through a national mobilization that has additionally benefited from the rhetorical skills and character of an exceptionally effective leader. The Ukrainian capacity to withstand aggression in defense of its independence and sovereignty testifies to the virtue of nationhood everywhere. The Ukrainians are not just fighting for territory; they are fighting against Putin’s program to eliminate them. In addition, however, as much as Ukrainian patriotism may yet defeat Putin’s imperialism, Ukraine’s struggle also has an implication for the West: it disproves the European and liberal American declaration of the obsolescence of nations. Nations matter and will not go quietly into a night of either imperial subordination or international governance. The Ukrainian resistance is, in other words, a populist war against an arrogant aggressor by way of an appeal to the primacy of national loyalty as a fundamental principle in human affairs. It affirms the importance of national sovereignty.

Given the primacy of the Ukrainian will to survive, the American and larger Western response deserves critical scrutiny. Public support for Ukraine is considerable everywhere, evidence that more is at stake than a faraway territorial dispute. Much has been made of how NATO has expressed its solidarity. Clearly the delivery of armaments to Ukraine remains vital, but what is equally clear is the repeated limitation on the extent of Western support: the refusal of a no-fly zone, even for western Ukraine; the prohibition on transferring Polish airplanes; the refusal to establish an airlift and so forth. Of course we do not know what covert support may be being supplied, but it is stunning to watch how American leadership has been going out of its way to reassure Moscow as to what it will not do.

The rationale for broadcasting this hesitancy involves the claim that any greater Western involvement would risk a direct war with Russia. Yet that argument with regard to Ukraine would also apply if, for example, Russia were to attack the Baltics. Will NATO ever risk war with Russia? The point is not that NATO should undertake an offensive strategy at this point, but that it should not be reassuring Moscow that it will impose limitations on its own future actions. Why guarantee to the aggressor that it need not fear an escalated response? This is the policy of premature concessions that the Obama administration refined, believing that if we wave a white flag, the other side will surrender. In the end, this self-constraining posture by the West does have the benefit that it clarifies to the Ukrainians that they are on their own. Their freedom depends on their fighting for themselves. That is the existential lesson of this contest.

It is useful to consider this dynamic through comparisons with U.S. bilateral relations with other countries. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are, like Ukraine, partners—to varying degrees—with the United States, in the context of a global competition with adversaries. Saudi Arabia is on the front line with Iran, while NATO ally Turkey faces Russia and has been a stalwart supporter of Ukraine. Yet just as Washington has refused Ukraine the full support it has requested, so too has it damaged long-standing relations with Saudi Arabia by refusing to back it against Iran-supported attacks by the Houthis. Similarly Washington has a poor record with regard to providing missile defense for Turkey. No doubt, the United States has significant and undeniable human rights concerns with both these partners, but the pressure we put on Riyadh and Ankara can also backfire: witness Saudi Arabia’s refusal to respond to President Biden’s appeals to increase oil production. With his country under attack, President Zelensky is hardly in the position to scold Washington (although he has been blunt in criticizing the way the West has dragged its feet in making good on promised arms shipments). To the extent that our competition with Russia, an adversary with a large nuclear arsenal, takes place via partners acting as proxies, the United States has to manage those relations more effectively. Our national interest is not served by alienating our partners.

Yet no matter how the United States manages those relations, the lesson for Ukraine is that the war for its national independence is its own moment of truth. No one will enforce the Budapest agreement, which made promises to Kyiv in return for its giving up its Cold War Soviet nuclear weapons, under pressure from Washington. In addition, NATO has made it clear that it will not engage directly in repelling the Russian aggression. In this multipolar world, security guarantees do not go very far. That is a lesson that will reverberate elsewhere: in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, and through the Gulf as much as in Japan and India, and likely even within NATO members on the eastern flank of the alliance. Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla has put the question in a pointed way in a tweet of March 5: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may open Iran’s appetite for invading a Gulf state, so the scenario of the invasion of Kuwait will be repeated. The question is what will be the position of America, which contented itself with sanctions without sending its soldiers to defend a democratic European state. Will it defend a Gulf state, and is it possible to bet on America after today?” We can bet that Washington would deplore such an invasion; the question is whether it would act.

Nations that do not prepare to defend themselves risk decline. Given American hesitations in repelling aggression, partner states will draw the logical conclusions and begin to hedge their bets, find new benefactors, and build their own arsenals, including in some cases nuclear weapons. The world inevitably becomes more volatile. In a different way, Ukraine also provides an object lesson for Iran and North Korea, confirming their refusal to give up on nuclear weaponry; they have no reason to repeat Ukraine’s mistake of dismantling its nuclear capacity. In this era of deglobalization and as promises of peace via American hegemony lose their credibility, the reasonable response for any nation is to provide for its own security and to cultivate its own patriotic will.