The Future of the War in Ukraine, With Kori Schake

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the future Of the war in Ukraine. 

With me to discuss where the fighting in Ukraine is likely headed is Kori Schake. Kori is senior fellow and director of foreign defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She has also served in several positions in the U.S. government, including as a member of the staff of the National Security Council and deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, both during the presidency of George W. Bush. Kori has written widely on international relations and has five books to her name, the most recent being America Vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved? She's also the author of the "Case for Conservative Internationalism: How to Reverse the Inward Turn of Republican Foreign Policy," which is in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. Kori, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox.

SCHAKE:
It is such a pleasure, my friend. Thanks for having me.

LINDSAY:
Okay, let's jump right into it, Kori. Six months ago, there were high hopes that a Ukrainian counteroffensive would break through Russian lines and turn the course of the war, but just last month, Ukraine's top general described the fighting as a stalemate. By some measures, Russia actually gained more territory in Ukraine this year than it lost. How do you assess where the fighting stands has become near the close of the second year of the war?

SCHAKE:
Well, I was among those who was hopeful that Ukraine would have more success against Russia. But I'm ashamed of the anonymous voices in the Pentagon and elsewhere who are disappointed in Ukraine when they say that Ukraine should have accomplished more because the time we left, the six months of slow dispersal of weapons to Ukraine, gave the Russians time to dig in three layers of defenses. Clearing minefields is a terrible military task, and the Ukrainians are doing it methodically and in ways that evince admiration from military folks, I know.

So I don't think we should lose hope that Ukraine will eventually succeed at this. I also don't think we should be critical that their offensive hasn't done as much as we hoped or as much as we thought we could do in those circumstances because I think that's a very bad look for a country that has no soldiers at risk. What I think is happening is that fighting has bogged down on the ground, but what we have seen are big Ukrainian advances in being able to put Russian forces in Crimea at risk and Russian logistics to and from Crimea at risk. The Black Sea is once again largely open. I think that's a big achievement and not just for Ukraine but for countries that rely on lower-cost grain exports from Ukraine.

The thing, I think, that has made the most difference is the long-range precise weaponry that the UK, France, and the United States have given Ukraine. And what would make the biggest difference going forward is the United States removing the restrictions we have placed on Ukrainian use of our long-range precision weaponry so that they can target Russian forces inside of Russia. Because right now, Ukraine is having to fight with Russia as a sanctuary from which Russia carries out attacks. And as our own experience on the Syrian-Iraqi border on the Pakistani-Afghan border makes clear, when your adversary in a war has a sanctuary, it's very difficult to succeed against it.

LINDSAY:
Kori, help me understand why it is that the Biden administration has put those restrictions on how the Ukrainians can use the material they're getting from the United States.

SCHAKE:
So the Biden administration's overwhelming concern about the war in Ukraine, and it's a completely justifiable concern, is about preventing escalation, either vertical escalation that is Russia crossing the nuclear threshold and employing nuclear forces against Ukraine, or horizontal escalation, expanding the war to try and draw in NATO allies or to try and draw in the United States.

They are justified in that concern, but I think they give too much weight to it. They are treating Russia as though it's the strong power, and we are the ones who should be worried. And I think that's encouraging recklessness on the part of the Russians instead of making much clearer that Russia will lose the war definitively and quickly if the United States or its NATO allies actually become directly engaged.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you how you think about that, Kori, because obviously there is a problem here of going a bridge too far, so to speak. How do you know when you've gone far but not too far?

SCHAKE:
Well, of course, as you know as well as I, Jim, that's the artistry of deterrence, and you don't know until you've gone too far. So it's not an easy calculation to make, and I'm not particularly condemnatory that the Biden administration has it wrong.

But in my judgment, they are acting like we are the ones who should be concerned about being drawn into this conflict when, if we were to be drawn into it, there's no doubt we and Ukraine would win it. And I think the behavior that Russia has evinced in the last nearly two years since their invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that they too are deterred and that conflict stabilization between the U.S. and Russia is actually probably sturdier than the Biden administration's giving it credit for.

LINDSAY:
You sound more optimistic than many of the people I speak to about the future of the war in Ukraine. So I'd like to have you assess where you think they have gone wrong. And let me state what I take to be the pessimist case or the less optimistic case. And it is that Russia has doubled the number of troops it has in Ukraine compared to when the invasion began. The Russian economy is now in a war footing. Russia has three times the population of Ukraine. The Russian economy has not been hurt by sanctions as much as people in Washington and Europe thought would be the case. And we're not seeing signs of the Russian public rising up against this war. To the contrary, there seems to be some fair amount of public support in Russia for the war. 

And this argument then says, because of all of that, looking at the long-term trends, what Ukraine should do right now is pivot. It should change its military strategy from an offensive one looking to reclaim territory to a defensive one that is focused on holding on to territory. What is that line of argument missing?

SCHAKE:
I think it's missing several things. First, Russia has taken in casualties, 80 percent of the force it sent into Ukraine. And it's true that hasn't appeared to change the leadership's commitment to the war or the public's disinterest in the war. But we don't actually really know the nature of decision-making and authoritarian governments, and we don't actually forecast with any fidelity attitudes of the public in authoritarian societies. So I'm not sure we should use those as indicators.

I think we thought these spiffy new economic sanctions that we and the fifty-six or so other countries supporting Ukraine's fight for its independence, those sanctions we launched, we acted like those were going to be flying sharks with lasers and Russia's economy would collapse. But the nature of open adaptive systems like economies is that they find alternative means. And we haven't actually enforced the oil exports under the price cap nearly universally. So we are allowing some countries to cheat with eyes wide open on that. Also, the Russian central bankers and others have been quite adroit, and China is allowing skirting of commercial sanctions, North Korea's assisting in the war effort.

So there are lots of workarounds, but I don't think we should lose confidence that the Russian economy is suffering from this. Leon Aron has a very good piece in the Atlantic describing how things, in his judgment, look to be changing inside Russia, and I find his case persuasive. The thing I worry most about is the population size, as you suggest because I worry Ukraine's going to run out of soldiers and that Russia is just going to bleed them dry. But I'm slightly more hopeful because Ukraine has not yet conscripted eighteen to twenty-seven-year-olds, which-

LINDSAY:
Why is that Kori, given that-

SCHAKE:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
... Ukraine is in an existential fight?

SCHAKE:
Isn't that curious? I had the same question, and I've been asking around about that, Jim. And they made a political and social and economic choice that, as a society in transition, they needed the economic and educational contributions of Ukraine's youth more than they needed their contributions on the battlefield so far.

While initially I had the same reaction you did, this is an existential fight, and it doesn't sound like they're existentially committed to it, I've come to have a different perspective on it, which is that that is Ukraine's strategic reserve. But they are trying not to foreclose the economic future of the country while they preserve its independence.

LINDSAY:
Kori, I want to go back to your point that the West, and particularly the United States, have not enforced the sanctions, particularly the sanctions on oil, as aggressively as they could. Does that reflect a lack of will to make the sanctions work, or are some countries getting a pass for geopolitical considerations?

SCHAKE:
I think more the latter than the former, right. India's getting a pass, Greece and other EU countries clandestinely provided shipping sold ships that could then be on flat. Elisabeth Braw has done very good research on this. There's a report about to come out from Chris Miller and some colleagues looking at the economics of the energy market under sanctions that I'm looking forward to learning from.

But I think, overall, in order to have the broadest participation, the U.S. and the other countries committed to Ukraine's victory have had soft enforcement against a number of countries that they otherwise could not have gotten to participate because of the domestic economic burdens that posed. And for a lot of developing countries, they're not wrong that we care about Ukraine's independence and peace and security, and we haven't cared as much about other countries.

LINDSAY:
And I imagine the case of India, the geopolitical calculation is that the United States very much wants Delhi's help in standing up to China and doesn't want to jeopardize that by pushing the Indians too hard on importing oil from Russia.

SCHAKE:
Yeah, I definitely think that's a part of the calculus.

LINDSAY:
Okay. One of the things we haven't talked about to this point is the term "Ukraine fatigue." I'm seeing that show up in more and more discussions about Ukraine, and this is the phenomenon in the West of people losing the will or interest in supporting Kyiv. As we're speaking, Republican lawmakers are balking at providing Kyiv with more military aid. A visit by President Zelenskyy to Washington last week did not seem to move the needle. Why is that?

SCHAKE:
Well, I think there are a number of answers to that, and let me take them one by one. The first one, it is exasperating to hear people in the safe and prosperous West talk about their weariness of support for Ukraine, right. It's like that fabulous Onion article, "America's College Professors Tire of Iraq War." So the blithe diminution of interest in Ukraine security by those of us living in the safe and prosperous West is self-indulgent first and foremost. But second of all, it undersells how much difference it will make, not just to the European security order, but to countries that rely on American security guarantees throughout the world.

If we, having professed by the resident of the United States to do whatever it takes as long as it takes for Ukraine to win this war, for us after having expended only 5 percent of last year's defense spending and zero American casualties, if we can't bear this very light burden, it's going to look like a adversary will only have to wait a little bit and the United States will grow bored, distracted, or weary and cannot be relied on to carry out its commitments. And that is going to make the international order a lot more unstable, a lot more favorable to predators, and a lot more costly and dangerous, eventually, for the United States to preserve its own security. 

So that's the first piece. The second piece is, what in the world are Republicans in Congress doing? They look to be squandering Republicans hard-earned reputation for being serious about national security policy. I think there are both legitimate and illegitimate Republican positions. The illegitimate positions are the nihilists, Matt Gaetz, and others whose districts benefit because almost 70 percent of U.S. assistance to Ukraine is actually spent in the United States.

LINDSAY:
I suspect most Americans don't know that.

SCHAKE:
Yeah, I think most Americans don't know that. But we are providing weapons to Ukraine that American businesses then replenish in American arsenals at a higher level of capability. So we are trading up with the weapons we are supplying to Ukraine. In addition, the Biden administration keeps talking about a foreign policy for the middle class. There are a few better jobs in this country than the good union work of working to build the American defense industry. So I think the nihilists are a real problem, but they're a very small minority of Republican elected officials. 

The overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress in both the House and Senate support continuation of aid to Ukraine. They do have some things they're concerned about the level of our national debt, the asylum policies, and the southern border security. They want to know where Ukraine fits in the president's priorities. But most of what I judge to be going on in Congress right now among Republicans is this is really important to the president. And since Republicans only control one of the two houses of Congress, they're playing hardball to force the president to engage on issues he otherwise wouldn't, in particular on border security. So they know it's important, they know he needs it, they know he needs it soon, and they're just driving the cost up to him.

LINDSAY:
But the challenge there, Kori, obviously, is that the changes Republicans are asking on border policy are objectionable to many Democrats. And you may run into the risks that Republican lawmakers ask for a deal that Biden can't get Democrats to sign onto.

SCHAKE:
Absolutely. And welcome to politics in the American republic.

LINDSAY:
Chicken 101, as they say.

SCHAKE:
Elizabeth Saunders has a terrific piece about to come out in Foreign Affairs about whether politics ever stopped at the water's edge.

LINDSAY:
It never did. We can dispense with that conversation. Go all the way back to the 1790s you can-

SCHAKE:
Absolutely right.

LINDSAY:
... read about the battle over the Jay Treaty, and you'll see that this has been an endemic problem in American history.

SCHAKE:
Absolutely right. But I take your serious point, which is Republicans are doing actual damage to Ukraine's war effort by exacting this domestic political price from the president. It will make Russians more confident that as long as they persevere, we will eventually let our domestic politics overwhelm our strategic interests in Ukraine's victory. It disheartens Ukrainians. They're worried that they are going to run out of air defenses and they will lose their capital to Russian attacks. So it's bad that Republicans are drawing this out this way.

LINDSAY:
So what is your assessment, Kori, of Ukraine fatigue in Europe? I've heard a number of Republican lawmakers criticize the Europeans for not doing enough that the United States is providing too much of the Western support for Ukraine.

SCHAKE:
I think that's an unfair criticism. I've worked on European security my whole professional career, and Europeans have never borne as much of the burden as we would like them to, but-

LINDSAY:
A longstanding American complaint.

SCHAKE:
Absolutely. And justifiable as well. But, on assistance to Ukraine, it's true that the United States is providing the predominance of the weapons to Ukraine. But we're not providing the predominance of assistance to Ukraine because the countries of the European Union, in particular, have taken in Ukrainian refugees in enormous numbers; are allowing them to work; have just in the last couple of weeks, set Ukraine on the path to European Union membership. That's provoked a backlash among truckers and among farmers who are current beneficiaries of EU structural funds that in the future are going to go to Ukraine. So Europeans are making sacrifices that Americans are not, and they have also committed to long-term assistance to Ukraine. So Europeans are doing more than we are giving them credit for.

LINDSAY:
So you see the decision by the EU to open membership talks with Ukraine as significant, as opposed to just kicking the can down the road.

SCHAKE:
I do think it's significant, and especially coming in a week when, as you rightly pointed out, President Zelenskyy came to Washington and did not have the soft power to get Republicans to vote for continued aid to Ukraine. So, at a time, that has to be disheartening for Ukrainians and for the leadership of the country under siege. Europe sending that signal, I think, is emotionally significant. It's economically significant. And the fact that they were able to hold unity despite the pro-Russian sentiments of several European Union countries I do think it's significant.

LINDSAY:
I was surprised that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán dropped his opposition to opening the membership talks because up until the eve of the] decision, he was saying publicly that Hungary's position was... it was a mistake to talk about having Ukraine join the EU.

SCHAKE:
Yes. Viktor Orbán is a far cry from the democracy activist he was forty years ago. But it does look like the European Union is successfully using money to buy compliance with policies they're looking for. So I mean, I guess the fact that Hungary can, at least, be bought, if it won't stay bought, makes them easier to deal with.

LINDSAY:
It can be rented.

SCHAKE:
Yeah. Exactly right. Because the EU was holding up quite a large tranche of funding that Hungary, a developing country, needed because of Viktor Orbán's undemocratic and illiberal governance.

LINDSAY:
So as talk of Western Ukrainian fatigue has piqued up Kori, there has been talk about how the West should push Kyiv to open negotiations with Russia. How do you assess the wisdom and chances for such negotiations?

SCHAKE:
Well, I think free societies always need to be in favor of negotiation because it's part of keeping our publics convinced that we are not rushing into war or sustaining wars. So openness to negotiations is a good thing. It's a virtue and probably a necessity in free societies. But I don't see any prospect of negotiations bearing fruit with Russia.

And the encouragement by so many voices in the West for Ukraine to commence negotiations will only persuade Vladimir Putin and that people around him that they are succeeding. So I don't think it's likely that Russia will engage seriously on any compromises. Moreover, I am not convinced that Volodymyr Zelenskyy or any other political leader in Ukraine could remain in power if consenting to leaving Ukrainians and Ukrainian territory under Russian control.

LINDSAY:
So Kori, where does that leave us? We have a war that is not making much progress one way or the other at the current moment on the battlefield. Yet the prospects for negotiated settlement, in your view, aren't there. What do you expect to happen as we move into 2024?

SCHAKE:
It has become fashionable to say that military force can't solve problems, and it's just not true. This problem is going to be solved by force of arms. Somebody's going to win, and somebody's going to lose because that's the only thing that's going to make for a stable equilibrium. And negotiation as the Minsk agreements negotiations is just going to buy the Russians time to rebuild a fighting force to take another go at this.

LINDSAY:
So a ceasefire just becomes a pause.

SCHAKE:
Yeah, it just becomes a pause. And unless we are confident that that pause will permit us to better arm Ukrainians for the next round, I don't see how it's in our own security interest to agree to it. I think the right answer is to figure out what it's going to take for Ukraine to win and to provide it to them so that they can retake all of their internationally recognized territory and reclaim all of the Ukrainians who are now under Russian control and subject to Russian war crimes.

LINDSAY:
So how would you respond to arguments from critics of Western support for Ukraine that this war is simply going to lead to a lot more killing, unnecessary killing, and that, at the end of the day, the United States really has no interest? That if Russia were to conquer all of Ukraine, the Russians would stop there. They would've no interest in attacking or pressuring a NATO member, and that the United States should pitch its foreign policy based on that recognition of events.

SCHAKE:
So I have three objections to it. The first objection is telling the people who are doing the fighting and dying that it's not in their interest to continue is an arrogance I think we should restrain ourselves from. The second objection I have to that is that it may well be true that Russia would stop at the conquest of Ukraine and that they wouldn't be so drunk with success that they move on and try and conquer a NATO country.

But the president of the United States repeatedly has said, "We will do as much as it takes for as long as it takes for Ukraine to regain its territory and sustain its independence." To collapse that commitment will be to call into question all other American commitments and to tempt adversaries, whether irredentist claims in Asia or in Europe or anywhere else. 

And I have always loved George Shultz's description of diplomacy as gardening. You can either pull weeds when they're small or you can deal with them when they have sunk deep roots, and it's possible to take that argument too far. But I don't think we're anywhere near the line where it's so problematic for the United States to assist Ukraine that it's diminishing our own security. Ukraine's failure will diminish our security. Ukraine's success will strengthen it. And I guess one criticism you didn't bring up, Jim, that I hear very often and want to give a strong kick to...

LINDSAY:
Go for it.

SCHAKE:
... is the notion that we shouldn't be drawing down American stockpiles in order to assist Ukraine because we might need those weapons. And it is true that the United States needs weapons, but even before we started providing assistance to Ukraine, we would run out of our own high-precision weapons in a couple of weeks of fighting. And so this is rounding error on the replenishment of American stockpiles that we need to be making. And over the course of the last twenty years, have allowed to atrophy. 

So Ukraine is to American readiness as Britain was in the years before the U.S. joined World War II. They are showing us what we will need if we actually are forced to fight to defend our interests, and we should take that signal seriously and use the gift of time that their sacrifices are giving us to make ourselves ready for what may be needed of us.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Kori Schake, senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Kori, thank you for joining me.

SCHAKE:
It was a pleasure.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and the transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org.

As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.