Mick Hartley

The latest from Lawrence Freedman, on western miscalculations following on from Biden's early declaration that the US would never get involved in a war with Russia:

We miscalculated how much control of Ukraine mattered to Putin, and were therefore shocked when he gambled on being able to subjugate his neighbour in a matter of days. We miscalculated again when we assumed this would succeed quickly when the invasion failed to achieve its immediate objectives. The Russian campaign soon faced yet more setbacks, leading to a massive loss of life and equipment, and a need to devote ever more resources to the war effort.  Yet Putin did not buckle and from late last year was confident that he had regained the initiative.

The main reason for this is the painful Congressional dance surrounding military assistance to Ukraine, now finally concluded. But we must also consider to what extent Ukraine’s lack of vital capabilities, or at least the delay in getting them, which meant that it could not do more when it had the initiative, is due to Western countries allowing themselves to be intimidated by what are considered to be Putin’s extreme risk-taking propensities, including a readiness to contemplate nuclear escalation.

My argument in this lecture is that the West was influenced by a combination of Putin’s assumed recklessness shaped by a familiar strategic construct  – the escalation ladder – that can be seriously misleading.  In particular I’ll argue that it led policymakers to start with the most dreaded scenario – nuclear use – and then work backwards to ask how it might come about. A better approach would have been to start with the situation faced by Putin and the options available to him, of which nuclear use was but one and by far the least compelling….

Conclusion:

I am not arguing in this lecture for sanguinity about either nuclear risks or  Vladimir Putin’s mental state. I am arguing against allowing our analysis of one of the most difficult and fateful conflicts we have seen in Europe for almost 80 years to be overly influenced by our worst fears and simplistic theories about how they might be realised. Hard strategic assessments of the state of the war may lead to awkward conclusions but we have not helped ourselves, let alone Ukraine, by opting for an approach which has results in demands that Ukraine accept a bad peace and caution in providing it with the weapons it needs to achieve a better peace.