Finding People to Blame
The West needs excuses for its betrayal of Ukraine. These are beginning to emerge
On 21 January, Robert Wilkie, a former Veterans’ Affairs Secretary from the first Trump administration who is now involved with the transition for the second, spoke to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme about defence matters for the new administration. In a fairly wide ranging interview he talked of Ukraine and how, in the view of the American people it hadn’t “done enough … to fully protect your country.” He went onto say “you can’t ask those friends on the continent or the United States to do more than you are willing to do.” [Listen to the audio below.]
Wilkie is talking about something that has become an increasing refrain in Western capitals - that Ukraine’s military difficulties are not down to a lack of western support but down to Ukraine’s failure to mobilise its population into the military. In particular, so the argument goes, the decision not to mobilise those under 25 has meant that the most physically adept members of society aren’t going to war, leaving the Ukrainian armed forces increasingly reliant on out of shape, middle-aged men who are sent as cannon fodder into the battlefields in the East. If Ukraine had been willing to send its best into battle, so this argument goes, it could have defeated Russia, or at least it would have shown that it was willing to give everything to the fight.
Wilkie, who has a background as a vocal supporter of the Confederacy and once referred to the Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a “martyr” and “an exceptional man in an exceptional age”, might easily be dismissed. But he also said in the Radio 4 interview that people in Starmer’s government shared his view on Ukraine’s recruitment. As much as I’d like to ignore someone like Wilkie, his claim about the British government appears likely - I have heard Western officials, including in a UK context, repeat a very similar line. The argument has become that Ukraine’s challenge with mobilisation is the reason for its military setbacks, not any lack of support on the part of the West. It’s not that countries like Britain are looking to stop supplying Ukraine with weapons, they’re just looking for reasons to blame them for losing a war against Russia.
During the War on Terror, Republicans specialised in a certain type of cowardice in which they liked to launch wars that other people would fight (mostly people they held in disdain). Known as chickenhawks the classic exemplar might have been John Bolton, who’d never come across a country he didn’t want to invade, but when asked about his own efforts to evade service in Vietnam, wrote: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy… I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.” Now that Bolton has had his close protection detail removed by Trump even though he has been the target of assassination plots by the Iranians he is (rightly of course) coming in for some sympathy. Some might describe Trump himself as a chickenhawk: having been a high-school athlete he developed unexpected “bone spurs” that prevented him from Vietnam service. But I would say that Trump isn’t much of a hawk: one of his very few consistent policies is a desire to get the United States out of wars and for there to be fewer wars that involve US resources. Yes, he is threatening Canada, Panama and Greenland, but I would be amazed if he deploys military force on any major scale in any of these theatres. Trump isn’t a chickenhawk, he’s just a chicken.
Wilkie, who has not served in any theatre of war that I can identify, is definitely a chickenhawk, as are the British and other western officials who think that Ukraine should condemn its youth to oblivion in trench warfare against Russia. His statement that Ukraine is asking us “to do more than [they] are willing to do,” is actually an insult. I’d be interested to know what he or any of the western officials preparing their excuses are willing to do? There is no risk, for example, of British soldiers ever finding themselves in the situation that the Ukrainian military does, for the simple reason that NATO fights its wars in a different way. It establishes air superiority before launching fast moving combined-arms assaults. Because the West refused to support Ukraine with the air power or armour necessary for it to fight in this way, it has been condemned to a drone-assisted trench war of attrition with the Russians that is incredibly costly in terms of casualties, whether you are attacking or defending. The marginal gain of having a slightly younger and fitter army in that type of warfare is minimal.
The dark fantasies of western officials like Wilkie might involve a replay of the Western Front, with the flower of Ukrainian youth being cut down in the trenches. But President Zelenskyy’s decision, at some personal political cost, to preserve the generation that will be needed to rebuild their country, seems entirely correct. With Trump keen to force a ceasefire (one that inevitably favours Russia - don’t be gulled by his harsh words for Putin - the ceasefire means that Russia gets to keep a vast chunk of Ukraine, thereby destroying it), the blame game has begun. As someone said to me when I was last in Ukraine: “we wouldn’t have a mobilisation problem if you had given us the tools to win this war.”