Ukraine War and Domino Theory

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/215-ukraine-war-and-domino-theory

US presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign speech that the US would not protect a NATO ally if it failed to spend at least 2% of its GDP on defense, claiming that this would make the NATO ally delinquent. In that case, he would let Russia do what it wished to do, including invading a European NATO ally (Gera 2024). Trump’s intention all along is not to convince NATO allies to increase defense spending but rather to have an excuse to pull the US out of NATO altogether. It is more than likely that many of Trump’s supporters are political isolationists, who do not mind if the US abandoned Europe and thereby raise the potential for a further Russian invasion in Europe if they succeed in taking all of Ukraine. Biden denounced Trump’s position and claimed that US support for NATO remains a “sacred obligation”.

It is all the more ironic that Vladimir Putin recently claimed to favor Biden over Trump as US president. Should he not be supportive of Trump given that he would pull the US out of NATO and thereby open the space for Russia to expand further west? It appears to be that Putin is more fearful of Trump than of Biden, which is why he chose to wait until the Biden presidency to launch the Ukraine invasion. Putin thinks that Biden is a more predictable leader. While Biden passed more military aid for Ukraine, making it difficult for the Russian army to break through, Putin believed Biden’s promise to not directly intervene to protect Ukraine from the Russian invasion. Biden stuck to that promise, and currently aid to Ukraine is held up anyway because the MAGA rebels in Congress control the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Putin views a Trump presidency with higher risk, because in one moment he announced the US retreat from NATO and in the next moment he could invade Russia. Trump is an unpredictable madman, and Putin views that with higher risk and he is clearly not suicidal. On the other hand, the Trump supporters believing that geopolitical stability, i.e. the absence of major global wars, would be accomplished by having a madman in the White House by deterring overly cautious Russians are misguided. Global security is better served with cautious, calculating leaders given that impulsive leaders put us a heartbeat away from nuclear holocaust.

Trump is the leader in the national election polls, and, therefore we have to assess the geopolitical consequences of his victory in the November elections. The US exits NATO and cuts off all aid to Ukraine. The Europeans are furiously increasing defense spending and the Baltic states and Poland erect border fortifications fearing a further invasion by Russia. The European support for Ukraine is ultimately driven by the domino theory, the fear that the Russians will invade them next, especially the former Soviet territories like the Baltics. A few days after Trump’s anti-NATO speech, Putin announced that he would prosecute the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, one of the staunchest advocates for increasing military and economic aid to Ukraine. It should be noted that the Estonian government goes in full confrontation mode having outlawed Russian language instruction in Estonian school, a big sore point for Putin’s regime.

Europe will become more insecure. There are still two factors in operation that can deter further Russian aggression and put doubt into the domino theory. Firstly, even without the US, UK and France are two alliance members that have nuclear weapons. Crossing into NATO territory could allow even a diminished NATO counter-strike capabilities with their nuclear arsenal. Secondly, even without US support it is not evident if the Russians currently have the capability to seize all of Ukraine.

The battlefront in Ukraine is currently favoring Russia. After western equipment infusions in the winter of 2022/2023 and a failed Ukrainian summer counteroffensive last year, the west has effectively used up all the equipment they are willing to part with. Military production orders have certainly increased but it takes several years to fulfill these elevated production orders. The US military has an easier time scaling up production given that the army itself operates ammunition plants, while the Europeans rely on private companies like BAE Systems, Thales or Rheinmetall. Private companies only make significant investments if they have secure funding from governments given that these are the only major buyers of military goods. The shortage of military equipment means that the Ukrainians are presently outgunned by the Russians, who are steadily feeding more of their national resources into their own military-industrial complex.

Western sanctions on Russia are supposed to throttle Russia’s access to inputs that go into military production, but these sanctions are clearly undermined because the western companies simply re-route their trade to Central Asian countries that re-export the goods to Russia. Furthermore, China is selling any hardware or equipment components that Russia may want and bilateral trade among the two countries is still high. No wonder, the Russian arms industry is capable of churning out more military gear and send it to the frontline.

It should be noted that the Russians are not very effective in deploying their forces. There are no real adjustments to tactic. They send their vehicles in a straight line column forward, waiting to be picked apart by Ukrainian artillery and FPV drones. Social media is filled with the burning and destroyed Russian tanks. The Russian strategy is simply to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenses with sheer mass. When there is a local breakthrough, the Russians rush even more forces in that zone hoping to capture as much territory as possible. Since the failed counteroffensive and running low on munition, Ukrainians have been concentrating on defense. The Russians have been concentrating on capturing the town of Avdiivka, the last major Ukrainian outpost in the suburbs of Donetsk city. Putin has set out the goal to capture the town in time for the Russian presidential elections next month that is already rigged for Putin to win.

The Ukrainian leadership has the opposite logic of holding the town of Avdiivka by all means to deny the victory to Russia and not give the Ukrainian people the feeling that they keep losing, thus undermining national morale. Or at least that is President Volodymyr Zelensky’s logic. His commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny had published op-eds claiming that Ukraine does not currently have the resources to win the war against Russia and that the Ukrainian resource inferiority can only be counteracted by the increased supply of superior western technologies. The Ukrainian Army is quite innovative and is now creating a formal drone army, which had hitherto been provided directly by grassroots Ukrainian citizens to the soldiers. Zaluzhny’s philosophy has also been to accept strategic withdrawals to more secure lines and fortifications and prevent the encirclement and loss of troops.

General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who led the Kharkiv counteroffensive in the fall of 2022 and organized the defense of Bakhmut in early 2023, holds a view closer to Zelensky: go on the offensive wherever possible and if you have to go on the defensive, then hold the towns by all means and withdraw only in the last minute. Syrskyi is much more open to Soviet-style military strategy than the younger Zaluzhny: be wasteful with losing your soldiers to reach your military objective. In the defense of Bakhmut, there were periods where Ukraine was losing as many soldiers as the Russians, which was an unsustainable strategy given the Russian manpower advantage. The Ukrainians lost Bakhmut after 9 months of grinding battles. It is not surprising that Zelensky recently decided to demote the very popular Zaluzhny and replace him with Syrsky as commander-in-chief.

It’s hard to say whether Zelensky is making a major strategic error in his decision to hold every inch of land. He knows that gaining back the land will be harder than holding it for as long as possible. Without additional military aid from the US, which continues to be held up by the US House of Representatives that is under the influence of Trump and his minions, the Ukrainians will have a hard time holding up against the continued Russian onslaught. Avdiivka is perhaps weeks away from falling, as the Russians are approaching the last major supply road. On the other hand, the only time the Russians advanced quickly was in the first two weeks of the war in 2022 when the Ukrainians were caught by surprise and didn’t have a general mobilization and solid defense fortifications outside the Donbas, where they held the front for eight years. The Russians have also burned up their most valuable and experienced tank and infantry units. Now they are feeding new inexperienced soldiers from the rural Russian provinces and even Nepalis, Cubans and Sierra Leonians into the frontline for costly frontal assaults. The Russian war economy is bringing significant assets into the war but these resources can be imperiled as the Ukrainians use cheap drones to destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet and the oil refineries and ports that generate most of the Russian foreign exchange.

Regardless of how many resources the Russians are pouring into Ukraine, only minor frontal advances are likely. Ukraine will continue resisting even without US support, but it will suffer more casualties. In the absence of decisive battle field success, Putin has the most incentives to seek a negotiated outcome to the war. Could MAGA in America continue to block Ukraine aid, thereby gradually pushing the Ukrainians back on the frontline and then force them to accede to negotiations and territorial concessions? These territorial concessions just buy both sides some time to rearm for the next iteration of the armed conflict. It would be destructive for Ukraine given that they have ever fewer resources to resist the Russians, so they have no incentives to negotiate.

Even with the US abandonment of Ukraine, the European allies have stepped up their military support and the EU recently passed a 50 billion euro financial aid package. Germany is the major European power that is shifting a portion of its industrial might to build more ammunition factories. The Nordic countries have added industrial weapons capacity as well.

But the unity of Europe is in question. The new pro-western Polish government supports Ukraine as before, but they have to back their domestic constituents, the Polish farmers, who block the Ukrainian trucks from bringing in Ukrainian grains that push down grain prices and drive the Polish farmers out of business. The former government under Mateusz Morawiecki explicitly supported the farmers, though it didn’t help them win the election, while the current government under Donald Tusk promised to resolve the farmer grievances but have not done much about it. Ukraine is already short of cash with a half-destroyed economy and the war is really expensive. By blocking the primary Ukrainian export commodity from entering foreign markets, the Poles are undermining their Ukrainian allies, even as the Poles continue to deliver military and financial aid.

Hungary is even worse for Ukraine. The Hungarian government under Viktor Orban wants to use its leverage in the EU council to extract concessions from the EU. The EU wants to punish Orban for rule of law violations and stealing EU funds for his cronies, while Orban wants to continue the status quo. He already delayed the Ukraine aid package by nearly two months with his veto, but in the beginning of February he finally caved because he was threatened with losing his veto right. But now Orban used his veto again over new Russia sanctions, presumably to protect Chinese companies that are selling to both the Europeans and the Russians.

Orban’s position favorable to Russia interestingly does not mean that he wants to return to the Russian empire. Orban’s political career in the 1980s began when he gave speeches against the Soviet army occupation of Hungary and for political freedom. By that point, Gorbachev already indicated no more harsh crackdown on independence movements in the Soviet satellite states, so Orban was clearly lucky to be born later than Imre Nagy, who led the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Orban likes EU membership for the subsidies it pays to his government. He also likes NATO membership, as he has no interest in a renewed Russian occupation. But he also thinks that he can accommodate Russia. He wants to purchase cheap Russian gas via the TurkStream pipeline and if Ukraine is taken over by Russia he is hoping to receive Transcarpathia (the Ukrainian province of Zakarpattia) with a large Hungarian minority as part of Hungary. Similarly, when the Hungarians allied with the Nazis in World War II, they received territory in Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, among others.

Thus, there are evident similarities between Orban, Trump and Putin: they are all authoritarian and corrupt in their political outlook and they think about national interest in a crude and narrow way, e.g. control over territory and resources. They detest the liberal international order, which is about the respect for national boundaries/ sovereignty, democratic governance and rule of law. Some countries of the Global South are backing Russia because they, in turn, detest the hypocrisy of the Global North, which historically imposed the worst kind of sovereign violation against the Global South via their colonial conquests, and now that white people close to home (there is a racial element to that resentment as well) in Ukraine have their sovereignty violated, the west now suddenly clamors for the respect of national sovereignty.

But I think this kind of resentment from the Global South is an expression of envy rather than opposition to liberal internationalist values. In other words, the people in the Global South if given the choice want to experience the positive effects of liberal internationalist values rather than renounce them altogether. Here, I am referring to the people of the Global South countries, not their leaders. The leaders may be corrupt authoritarians and it is in their interest to make a distracting case about the hypocrisy of the west or their supposed anti-family values surrounding a pro-abortion or pro-LGBT agenda. These liberal social values are, of course, influenced by the wealth that the rich countries have accumulated (by historically exploiting their colonies). The Global South leaders want their people to oppose the western imperialists and thereby support their own regimes, despite the low standard of living and lack of freedoms afforded to the population. For the people of the Global South, the desire to pursue liberal international values is exemplified by the tens of thousands of Venezuelans, Chinese, Indians and Russians streaming across the US-Mexican border into the US. Hence, the discourse on the US border crisis. The solution to reduce migration to the Global North would be about lessening the differences in wealth across nations. Then, it will also be feasible to spread more liberal political regimes in the way that Francis Fukuyama hoped for in the late-1980s. Whether that movement is feasible is very much in doubt at present.

Enacting liberal democracy in the west clearly has downside costs as well: the opposition of Viktor Orban and MAGA has been sufficient to throw off the level of support for Ukraine even if most countries and leaders are pro-Ukraine. Even the significant financial advantages of western economies against the much smaller Russians (including their North Korean, Iranian and Syrian allies) does not necessarily mean a Ukrainian military victory if it takes only a handful of political veto players to lower support for Ukraine. Putin’s only hope is that a long war is wearing out western support for Ukraine. That is very much a possibility.

Let me conclude with some further reflections on domino theory. The US has incorrectly applied the domino theory in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and failed to recognize it against Germany in both world wars. The fall of South Vietnam did not result in the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Thailand remained a staunch US ally, and further south Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia also stayed in the US camp. The Vietcong were popular in Vietnam because they were the anti-imperialist forces that had thrown out the French colonizers. When the Vietnamese communists tried to expand their influence into neighboring Cambodia they experienced much more pushback. The US wasted huge amount of resources and manpower in this decade-long US occupation of South Vietnam.

The US considered the Afghanistan War to be a legitimate struggle against Islamic terrorism that should not spread further and threaten so many American lives again after 9/11. But there was no further 9/11 and the US was stuck in another quagmire without knowing how to do nationbuilding. The Taliban dug into the Hindukush mountains and retook the government after the US retreat. But there is no evidence that Taliban’s reach would go beyond Afghanistan.

In contrast, the US was not interested to interfere in the European wars in the first half of the twentieth century. The late US entry in the European war dragged out the conflict because the Allies (without the US) and Axis powers were about equally strong. In the case of World War II, the German-led Axis had a temporary advantage having knocked out France and putting the British and the Soviets in the defensive. In hindsight, we know that Hitler should have been stopped earlier, perhaps after the annexation of Austria in 1938.

To what extent does Russia fit the domino theory? My take is that the Russian case is somewhere in between these two extremes. I have no doubt that Putin will want to occupy as much territory as possible and there is no fixed territorial limit, so if he is not stopped in Ukraine, the other non-NATO post-Soviet countries, i.e. Moldova and Georgia are certainly threatened. But NATO land is very different. If Trump won the presidency and gave assurances to Putin to leave NATO, NATO would fall back into a purely European alliance but it would still be formidable. An attack on the Baltic states would bring the Germans, French and British into this war and even in the absence of nuclear weapons, the Russians do not have the resources to defeat a united Europe. On the other hand, if war of expansion is the only way for Putin to gain legitimacy at home, then why take the risk by letting him take Ukraine?

The concern about domino theory would have to be applied elsewhere. Could China invade Taiwan? If the US does not back its supposed allies, then there would be fewer obstacles for China to do so. Geopolitical stability in Europe is already a thing of the past, e.g. will Azerbaijan invade Armenia? We should prevent adding more fuel to the fire by stopping the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The isolationists are wrong to presume that giving Putin what he wants will stop the war. It will just buy some more time for future Russian aggression.