On January 25, the Rand Corporation issued a short-ish study of the conflict in Ukraine, titled \u201cAvoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.\u201d<\/a> The Rand Corporation was initially founded as a think-tank that would provide \u201cResearch & Development\u201d (R-and-D) advice to the U.S. military and it still remains strongly, though not wholly, focused on military analysis. Thus, this latest study made some waves, especially since its non-hawkish tenor stood in contrast to that of a lengthy (354-page) report<\/a> that a gaggle of Rand experts released in 2019 that had identified \u201cProviding lethal aid to Ukraine\u201d as a potentially high-benefit way of \u201cOverextending and Unbalancing Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n More about the internal Rand politics of this latest study on Ukraine, later in this essay. For now, let me explain why the study has attracted such attention here in DC. That\u2019s primarily because the authors, political scientists Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe, boldly asserted that on occasion the interests of the United States are distinct from those of the government of Ukraine.<\/em> Who would have thought that!!! But for a U.S. political elite that has been drenched in anti-Russianism for the past seven years, and in pro-Ukrainian boosterism ever since last February 24, this is a deeply shocking assertion.<\/p>\n The principal domain in which Charap and Priebe judge that U.S. interests may diverge from those of Ukraine is the matter of whether the United States shares (and whether it should share) the Ukrainians\u2019 desired goal of regaining all the Ukrainian terrain currently under Russian control.<\/em><\/p>\n Their study is a quick and easy read and builds on considerable work that each of the co-authors has done on the Ukraine conflict both before and since last February 24. In the study, they examine what they describe as \u201cfive key dimensions that define alternative war trajectories\u201d for Ukraine, defined thus:<\/p>\n The first two of those topics are non-controversial among most members of the political elite here in the United States. Almost no-one here wants to see either a trip over the threshold of nuclear-weapons use or a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. It is in the latter three domains that Charap & Priebe are aiming to crank a little wider open the \u201cOverton window\u201d of the discourse that\u2019s considered acceptable within the ranks of elite opinion-formers in Washington and New York.<\/p>\n Rand is well-known for its use of Powerpoint-friendly, very basic graphics, and this publication is no exception. So let me just use the block tables that Charap and Priebe use to sum up their main arguments on the issues of territorial control and the length of the war. I guess the tables should all be labeled \u00a9 Rand Corporation. Also, click on any one of them to enlarge it. Here they are: <\/p>\n That is classic cost-benefit analysis! Notice that in both these dimensions of the war, C&P identify no \u201cHighly significant benefits\u201d to the United States for the scenario in question, while they do identify one or more types of \u201cHighly significant costs.\u201d <\/p>\n Also note in Table 3 that they seem to have bought into the trope that \u201cRussia has already been significantly weakened by the war,\u201d using that to argue that \u201cthe United States would only see moderate benefits from further weakening its adversary.\u201d My view, by contrast, is that while Russia has indeed suffered non-trivial losses from the war, those have reached nowhere close to being debilitating. But if we look at a broad, multi-dimensional definition of the global balance between the United States and Russia, then we see that the United States has also suffered losses as a result of the conflict that are significant and continuing, and that may well grow in impact over time. These costs include (but are not limited to) the following:<\/p>\n Their section on the \u201cForm [or modality] of war termination\u201d is a welcome, but very unsophisticated, attempt to address the basic political issue involved in any armed conflict. A little mechanistically they note that wars can be ended either through the \u201cabsolute victory\u201d of one or the other warring party, or by negotiating either a final peace settlement or a battle-zone-wide armistice. Regarding the possibility of an absolute victory\u2014which they note is defined in social-science literature as, \u201cpermanently removing the (interstate) threat posed by its adversary\u201d\u2014they write that Russia has probably given up its initial goal of effecting regime change in Kyiv and also, equally realistically, that an absolute Ukrainian victory is unlikely. <\/em>Puncturing the fever dreams of warmongers in Kyiv or in NATO, C& P state tersely (p.13) that, \u201cit is fanciful to imagine that Ukraine could destroy Russia\u2019s ability to wage war.\u201d <\/p>\n Then, turning to the two different, more or less distinct forms of negotiated settlement, they note (p.15) that, \u201cother things being equal, U.S. interests are better served by a political settlement that might bring a more durable peace than an armistice.\u201d And they very smartly add, \u201cAdditionally, a political settlement could be a first step toward addressing broader regional issues and reducing the chance of a Russia-NATO crisis in the future.<\/em> \u201c<\/p>\n But they conclude this section thus:<\/p>\n However, the level of hostility as of December 2022 between Russia and Ukraine, and between Russia and the West, make[s] a political settlement seem much less probable than an armistice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Their study then has a section on \u201cImpediments to Ending the Conflict\u201d that addresses a very important question but provides a generally unsatisfactory set of answers. They attribute war-prolongation, in this case and in general, almost solely to an information problem<\/em>: namely, that the decisionmakers on either side are uncertain about the potential benefits of peace or the potential cost of continuing the war. That is, certainly, nearly always one factor in conflict prolongation. But I spent the first years of my career as a journalist and analyst living in, reporting on, and very closely documenting the initial six years of Lebanon\u2019s lengthy civil war. From that experience, and from the numerous studies I\u2019ve made of a variety of conflicts and conflict-termination efforts since then, I have to conclude that there are two other very important drivers of conflict prolongation. One I would define roughly as \u201cthe passions of war\u201d\u2013 passions that are certainly strong enough (and probably most especially so within a democracy) to substantially obliterate any rational analysis of costs, benefits, and the advantages of exploring each and every possible avenue for peace. The other would be the concrete economic and other interests of sectors of society that benefit hugely from the prolongation of war. These would be primarily the profiteers in the military-industrial complex, but also include cynical politicians, journalists (whose careers can be catapulted very high, as mine was, by the opportunity to \u201ccover\u201d a war), and other opinion-formers. C&P\u2019s study makes no mention of either of those two important factors.<\/p>\n One other frustrating shortcoming of their paper is that it completely ignores the potential contributions to war-terminating diplomacy that can be played by a wide variety of actors other than the United States.<\/em> I guess these authors got their professional formation during an era when it was the United States that was the principal driver of all the big shifts in international diplomacy\u2014sometimes with the support of the United Nations, as in some stages of the wars of the Yugoslavia breakup and in Afghanistan; and often-times without, as in the cases of Kosovo, the invasion of Iraq, and numerous other US-led invasions or regime-change operations around the world? And that was also an era in which the United States was the sole or principal actor on the diplomatic stage on such issues as Arab-Israeli peacemaking\u2026 <\/p>\n But this time around, as I noted in this assessment<\/a> that I penned on February 24 itself, the global order is no longer one over which Washington exercises unilateral dominance<\/em> And in these circumstances it is absolutely both possible and desirable for smart analysts in the United States and other NATO countries to be exploring what role the leaders of other (most likely non-NATO) G-20 countries might be able to play in mediating an armistice in Ukraine that could work for all the parties involved\u2014and beyond that, could work for a world community that has suffered greatly and in many different ways from the outbreak and continuation of the conflict.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2026 Well, C&P\u2019s study has many analytical shortcomings. But still, it is a welcome addition to a \u201cmainstream discourse\u201d here in the United States that has seen think-tank leaders, most (but thank G-d not all) politicians, and all the high pooh-bahs of the punditocracy lining up to cheerlead for the war against Russia. And as noted above, this study is particularly welcome since it is being issued just four years after the massive study<\/a> that James Dobbins et al <\/em>wrote, that identified providing lethal aid to Ukraine as a potentially \u201cproductive\u201d way for the United States to \u201coverextend and weaken\u201d Russia. The big Dobbins study was titled \u201cExtending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground\u201d. It was a pretty comprehensive-looking, full-spectrum examination of the many ways, both military and non-military, in which U.S. could overextend and weaken Russia.<\/p>\n Nowhere in this 354-page book do the authors explain why<\/em> they judge that weakening Russia is a desirable goal of U.S. policy. In their Preface, they describes their report in these terms:<\/p>\n This report documents research and analysis conducted as part of the RAND Corporation research project Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, sponsored by the Army Quadrennial Defense Review Office<\/strong>, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff G-8, Headquarters, Department of the Army. The purpose of the project was to examine a range of possible means to extend Russia. By this, we mean nonviolent measures that could stress Russia\u2019s military or economy or the regime\u2019s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we posit\u2026 are conceived of as measures that would lead Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and\/or international prestige and influence.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n They also never explain why \u201cextending lethal aid to Ukraine\u201d\u2014or indeed, many of the other policies they end up endorsing\u2014should be described as \u201cnonviolent measures.\u201d But let me let that go for now, and content myself with providing one key page from the much briefer (12 pages, full-color) \u201cdigest<\/a>\u201d of the big study that Rand also released at the same time. <\/p>\n\n
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