What Is Realistic in Ukraine?

During my weekend walks, I often look for a house that flies a Ukrainian flag on the front porch. When I first started walking through that neighborhood, it served as a landmark to make sure I was going the right way.

But after a while, the flag disappeared. It was replaced by flags for various sports teams, including most recently the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. This doesn’t signal, well, flagging support for Kiev, however. There are periodic refreshes of the flags and banners outside, with the Ukrainian colors returning intermittently. 

The people flying these flags are surely well-meaning, undoubtedly shocked by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. But it is an illustration of the fundamental problem with the U.S. role in this war: What is on display here is less a military alliance than the progressive concept of allyship. 

Few Americans want to fight Russia directly to defend Ukraine. Even the biggest Ukraine hawks emphasize the lack of American boots on the ground, because they know endorsing a wider war would doom the whole project politically. 

“No American troops, no cash, no blank checks,” is how Nikki Haley, the most hawkish major candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, described her position. “Give Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend its sovereignty and defeat Vladimir Putin.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat with “end gun violence” in his X bio, has described the Ukraine war as a virtually cost-free way to inflict damage on Putin’s Russia for our own benefit. 

“If you look around the world, our biggest economic enemy is China. Our biggest geopolitical enemy is Russia,” Swalwell told CNN. “And in the matter of three years, without losing a single U.S. soldier, we have decimated [Russia’s] military and their economy. It’s been the greatest return on investment for any military expenditure ever, and as far as the return on investment for soldiers’ lives, it’s infinity.”

Leaving aside for a moment whether this is an accurate description of geopolitical reality more generally, Ukrainian casualties are rather conspicuously left out of the equation. The people in Swalwell’s district who are flying Ukrainian flags believe Ukrainian lives matter, even if the congressman himself apparently doesn’t.

The unwillingness to commit American lives to Ukraine is no moral failing. The Cold War was won by American leaders who understood both the nature of Soviet communism and the need to be judicious, if firm, in fighting it. The end of that struggle was supposed to reduce, not enhance, the risk of nuclear war.

One Ukraine analogy that appeared to annoy Vice President J.D. Vance even more than the tense Oval Office meeting with Voldymyr Zelensky was when a writer invoked George H.W. Bush’s proclamation after Iraq invaded Kuwait—“This will not stand”—as a model for dealing with the current conflict with Russia. But the Persian Gulf War lasted barely six months, with the ground campaign running about 100 hours (though some thought it should have been longer), with 154 American combat deaths. Does anyone really think this would be a comparable situation? And doesn’t the Gulf War’s legacy look more complicated almost 35 years later?

Yet the implied promises of being willing to do more than we are or should be, such as the repeated dangling of NATO membership over Ukraine, is less defensible. And now the war in Ukraine is looking lost, with manpower problems that cannot be fixed solely by new shipments of arms. These attitudes aren’t limited to the United States. A YouGov poll found that majorities throughout Western Europe believe Ukraine isn’t getting enough support in the war against Russia, but nowhere close to a majority wants to increase their own country’s level of support.

These are the sort of polls that find broad support for cutting federal spending but opposition to cutting programs of any meaningful size or supporting term limits for other people’s members of Congress while reliably reelecting your own.

It is now possible that diplomacy can deliver better results for Ukraine than a prolonged war. A negotiated, if imperfect, settlement would not constitute abandonment if the fruits of war are more lost territory and death. If it can be done, let us hope our own domestic political divisions don’t get in the way.