Repetitive arguments and decision making in the Ukraine war
Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) in International Law, Harvard University
Reviewing the articles on the Ukraine war published here and in The Trenchant Observer over the last 14 months, three things stand out.
First, the West has made significant progress in supplying munitions to Ukraine, and in settling on realistic goals that might define “ victory” in the war.1
Second, many of the achievements mentioned in the preceding paragraph have come too slowly, so slowly that Ukraine now appears to be in considerable peril.
The third thing that stands out is the recurrent nature of the issues and decisions the West has faced since the beginning of the war.
This characteristic of the war and of decision making in the West leads to articles here that may sound repetitive. And the articles are repetitive, particularly as regards issues where there has been little forward movement, or none. Some of the issues highlighted over the last year, such as the need to ramp up the war production of munitions or pushing the nations in the “Global South” to condemn the Russian invasion and to join the sanctions regimes curtailing trade with Russia, have shown few advances for the West, while the forewarned and predicted consequences have come to pass or are coming to pass.
The repetitive nature of the arguments results largely from a lack of fresh thinking on the part of President Joe Biden and his administration, and from a basic refusal to face the ultimate stakes in the war and to explain them to the American people. As we have written, in America “Merrily we roll along”.2
While Volodymyr Zelensky recalls the figure of Winston Churchill, Joe Biden does not recall the figure of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took huge risks with the Lend-Lease program before the U.S. entered World War II, and then pulled out all the stops to unleash America’s industrial capacity in providing emergency war production, which played a critical role in the Allied victory.
In the United States, Biden has not yet explained in direct and simple terms that the United States and the West are essentially at war with Russia, and that this war may go on for many years. At the same time his administration’s harsh and emotional attitude toward China does not advance the objectives of the U.S. and the West in the Ukraine war.
We should be tough and hard with China, where necessary, but also search out areas of potential collaboration and problem-solving. Something like the cold-eyed Containment that characterized U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Yet there was also a positive aspect to relations with the Soviet Union even during the Cold War. JFK proposed negotiating arms control treaties with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1963, following the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
One has the sense that the Biden administrationn has no well thought-out strategy for dealing with Russia and China.
Because of the repetitive nature of the issues and challenges facing the U.S. and the West in the Ukraine war, I think that a careful selection of the best of these articles—from here and The Trenchant Observer—could make a significant contribution to foreign policy debates regarding the Ukraine War, Russia, and China.
The issues are simply too multi-faceted and complicated to be encompassed in a single article. Moreover, when we write about war production, for example, it should be useful to see the historical trajectory and decision points that have lad to the present precarious situation.
To assist the author in meeting the challenge of putting together an ideal selection of articles for inclusion in the book, I would ask each of you who would like to join this collective effort to review the list of articles published here in Trenchant Observations (which appears at the end of each article), and to send me your suggestions for articles to include in the book.
Similarly, for any readers who are deeply interested, I invite you to also review the articles published in The Trenchant Observer (www.trenchantobserver.com) in 2021 and especially from January 2022 through May 2022 (when the Trenchant Observations newsletter began publication). You can see a list of these articles, in chronological order, by selecting a month in the drop-down menu at the top in the center of any article page on The Trenchant Observer website.
Please send your suggestions and any comments to me at my new email, jrowles93@gmail.com, and/or if you want other readers to be able to see them, in the Comment section at the end of any article in Trenchant Observations.
I think all readers will benefit from reviewing the lists of articles, and possibly you may remember or review one or more that you then would like to recommend.
See, e.g., “UPDATED--THE WAR TO SAVE THE UNITED NATIONS CHARTER, AND UKRAINE: General Assembly Resolution A/ES-11/L.7 (February 23, 2023). Text of Resolution, with links to video of G.A and S.C. debates,” Trenchant Observations, March 7, 2023.
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See also “Why I care about the war in Ukraine,” Trenchant Observations, June 26, 2023,
“Sleepwalking in the garden of fascism: ‘Merrily we roll along!’" The Trenchant Observer, June 2, 2021.