Will Trump Choose Victory or Defeat in Ukraine?

By Robert Zubrin

Thursday, November 21, 2024

 

President-elect Donald Trump will soon face a fateful choice: victory or defeat in Ukraine?

 

There is a large faction within the Trump camp that has long been arguing the West needs to push for an end of the war immediately, regardless of whether such a ‘peace’ would be favorable to Russia, even to the point of possibly allowing it to conquer Ukraine. At various times during his presidential campaign, Trump himself made statements that align with such sentiments. But Trump will soon be president. His stance on Ukraine will be judged not by how well it plays at a campaign rally or on Fox News, but by how it works out in reality.

 

For this reason, Trump must decisively reject those around him who advocate what they misleadingly call peace. If he does not, what follows will be good neither for the world — nor for his presidency.

 

Were Trump to cut off American arms aid to Ukraine, the following consequences would likely ensue:

 

Russia would conquer Ukraine. This would remove the largest land army in Europe from the West’s order of battle, greatly strengthen Russia economically and technically, eliminate a strategic weakness along Russia’s southwest border that would otherwise constrain Putin’s aggressive plans, and advance Russian armies to the borders of NATO allies Poland and Romania.

 

Russia would seize the Baltic states. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stated his intention to restore the Russian empire, which included these countries, as well as Finland and much of Poland. But so long as Ukraine remains free, strong, and in the fight, swarming the Baltics would be an unattractive course of action. The West could counter such a swarming by giving the Ukrainian armed forces all the weapons they need to win. However, with Ukraine gone, NATO would have no effective counter move to a Russian seizure of the Baltics.

 

Putin knows that we are not going to nuclear war to save Estonia, and that NATO lacks the 500,000-man expeditionary force that would be needed to expel his troops from the Baltic states after he seizes them. So he would take them, with the fact that they are NATO members proving no deterrent whatsoever. On the contrary, their NATO membership would make them all the more enticing to take, as doing so would expose the impotence of that alliance.

 

Russia would carry out widespread massacres and mass deportations from Ukraine and the Baltic states. This would be done to crush resistances and effect ethnic cleansing to make those lands permanently Russian. Russia has already has done this before, removing the native Tatar population from Crimea and German population of Prussia. And it is doing this right now in Mariupol, where it is replacing Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Russians.

 

(Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, any more than Irish are English. Whether they speak Ukrainian, Russian, or Surzhyk, a mixture of the two languages, Ukrainians have an entirely different, far more western mentality than Russians, rooted in a different history and the fact that in czarist times, Ukrainian peasants farmed their plots independently, whereas Russian serfs worked their owner’s land as village collectives.)

 

In addition, however, by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Balts, Russia would also send millions of them fleeing as refugees into Western Europe, stoking the fortunes of an array of anti-immigrant parties aligned with Moscow.

 

With NATO humiliated, and a more accommodationist stance toward Russia becoming increasingly popular in many of its key members, the Atlantic alliance would disintegrate. Furthermore, with America discredited as an ally, smaller countries everywhere, notably including Taiwan, would feel pressure to accept domination by the China-Russia Axis. Meanwhile, medium-sized powers like South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Germany would rush to develop their own nuclear arsenals. This will make nuclear war far more likely.

 

For the past 80 years, there has not been a general war. This is because of the deterrent effect of the free world’s policy of collective security. A Russian victory in Ukraine would put that accomplishment at risk. And it raises the serious possibility that the golden age of the Pax Americana we have enjoyed, if not properly appreciated, since 1945 would end.

 

There is no need, however, to accept such a catastrophic outcome. With proper support, Ukraine can win the war.

 

The United States can put a decisive check on the expansionist ambitions of the Russian-China Axis by sending Ukraine all the arms it needs to completely repel the Russian invasion. Putting American technological virtuosity together with Ukrainian courage and grit can readily achieve victory. It is only the incredible fecklessness of the Biden administration in stalling weapon system approvals, spooning out arms deliveries at the slowest possible rate, and then denying permission to use them most effectively that has allowed to war to go on this long. Indeed, this week’s change in policy, allowing Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike just one small region inside Russia, is just more of the same, with the improvement delivering far too little and coming way too late.

 

Here is what needs to be done.

 

We need to give Ukraine the tools it needs to make itself secure from Russian air and missile bombardment. This is essential to allow Ukraine to build up its own defense-industrial base. Achieving this requires not only delivery of adequate amounts of air defense systems, like Patriots, but offensive systems including ATACM long-range missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft armed with both air-to-air and long-range air-to-ground missiles, such as our JASSMs, which can deliver 1,000-lb. warheads over a range of 230 miles.

 

To achieve security, the Ukrainians need not just to block Russia’s arrows; they must kill her archers. The United States has thousands of F-16s that we do not use for anything but target practice for more advanced fighters. We can easily afford to send Ukraine 200 of them. Over 4,600 F-16s have been produced since they first went into service in 1974, and they are used by 25 countries. As a result, there are tens of thousands of F-16 veteran pilots worldwide. Hundreds of international volunteer pilots and ground crewmen could immediately become available were Trump to lift President Biden’s order blocking Ukraine from recruiting them.

 

We also have some 340 A-10 ground-attack aircraft that the U.S. Air Force has been trying to divest itself of for years. Armed with powerful gatling guns designed to destroy Russian tanks, these could be initially deployed in rear areas to intercept and eliminate the slow-moving Shahed cruise missiles that Russia has been bombarding Ukraine with. But after the F-16s have neutralized Russia’s air defenses, the A-10s could be employed with great effect against Russia’s armed forces on the ground.

 

We need to help Ukraine win the drone war. Ukraine has revolutionized warfare by introducing the small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as a decisive miliary arm. While large military aircraft can take years or decades to develop, new types of UAVs can be introduced into combat within months or even weeks of their conception. This has placed a premium on innovation, and it is here that the ingenious and individualist Ukrainians have been able to outperform the much more numerous but less creative Russians.

 

But with our help, they can do much better still. Much of the technology that the Ukrainians have been working hard to invent under conditions of bombardment is stuff that we already have. The U.S. government needs to lift its International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) rules currently throttling the transfer of drone warfare technologies from American companies to the Ukrainians. This will enable Ukraine to produce advanced drones that cannot be stopped by Russian jamming or other countermeasures.

 

It costs about $2,000 to produce a good, small UAV in Ukraine, so with the right technology transfer and a couple of billion dollars in aid, Ukraine could produce a million such advanced UAVs. Alternatively, the Pentagon could cut a check to American companies and we could produce them here ourselves. This would cost about five times as much, but we would benefit from building up our own defense-industrial base in this now-critical area. Or better yet, we could and should do both.

 

With its own cities protected and millions of advanced UAVs in hand, Ukraine could strike trucks, trains, and supply depots in the Russian rear, making it impossible for the Russians to supply their frontline forces. Under those conditions, the Russians would have no choice but to withdraw.

 

Once Russia is repelled and shown to gain nothing by its aggressive adventure, China will think twice about messing with the United States.

 

Trump has a choice. He can take a brave stand, restore deterrence, save the peace, and save the West. Or he can choose to be even weaker than Joe Biden and let American credibility, and all that it secures, collapse on his watch.