Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo
A Ukrainian serviceman fires an NLAW anti-tank weapon during an exercise in the Joint Forces Operation, in the Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, February 15, 2022.
A month ago, on March 22, I wrote a piece titled “Magical Thinking About Putin’s Invasion.” I criticized Western policy for giving Ukraine’s President Zelensky just enough weaponry to stave off imminent defeat but not enough to prevail. I wrote:
The West, out of fear of wider war, has allowed Putin to define what counts as a NATO war with Russia. Thus, the Biden administration has gotten into hair-splitting exercises, in which supplying the West’s most sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons does not count as a war with Russia, but supplying planes does.
This is dangerous sophistry. It has led to a proxy war between NATO and Russia, in which the West is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, but in a limited way that doesn’t allow Ukraine to prevail or even to survive. …
Despite Ukraine’s battlefield successes, NATO’s strategy has been behind the curve at every stage of Putin’s escalation. The West has provided Ukraine with just enough defensive weaponry to prevent an outright Russian military victory, but not enough to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe.
Well, every word is even truer today.
After the piece ran, some of my colleagues and readers wondered if I had turned into some kind of warmonger, courting World War III. Now another month has gone by, millions of Ukrainians have fled, thousands more Ukrainian troops and civilians are dead or injured, Putin has reduced the city of Mariupol to rubble, and his troops are about to seize what’s left of it.
Meanwhile, weaponry that seemed like too much of a provocation just a month ago—howitzers, antiaircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones, helicopters—is being rushed to Ukraine. And the hair-splitting continues. (Why drones and helicopters and not planes?)
Putin, predictably, issues ambiguous threats that keep the West from giving Zelensky the help he needs. Putin’s latest pronouncement warned that Western provision of the “most sensitive” weapons systems could produce “unpredictable consequences.” He is playing the West for fools, and succeeding.
NATO policy was behind the curve a month ago, and it is still behind the curve. NATO is in a proxy war with Russia, and we should stop kidding ourselves and give Zelensky what he needs.
I know, national-security experts a lot better informed than I, with access to the most sensitive intelligence, precisely calibrate these questions. Except that the calibrations about what weapons would risk wider war mutate from week to week (why would howitzers risk World War III in March but not in April?), and Putin is still winning. Except that all of my adult life, which spans the disasters in Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine, the best and the brightest kept getting it wrong.
Send Zelensky planes.
