He treated the conflict as a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien

Alex Wong / Getty

NOVEMBER 30, 2024

Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but also throwing away a remarkable chance to improve America’s global standing and democratic powers’ position in the world.

In defending themselves far more effectively than expected, the Ukrainians showed a capacity to deal Russian President Vladimir Putin a major military defeat, but again and again, Biden and his experts have constrained Ukraine’s ability to fight until it was too late. Just recently, only after his party lost the presidential election, Biden finally gave Ukraine the tightly limited ability to use American weapons on military targets in a small part of Russia. The president’s decision comes after 33 months of war, during which Russia has launched long-range attacks anywhere in Ukraine it wanted, in many cases using Iranian-made weaponry.

Biden has promised the Ukrainians that he will stand by them “for as long as it takes”—but he has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to.

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Nearly three years in, the conflict is becoming ever more grotesque, and the number of war crimes keeps rising. The conflict has also become more global in nature, as Russia, by economic and military necessity, deepens its alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea. When Putin was gathering his invasion force in late 2021 and early 2022, the United States had good intelligence and tried to warn Ukraine about Russia’s plans. A far harder call was what would happen when an invasion began, and in that respect, the Biden administration didn’t understand what it was looking at. U.S. officials assumed that if Putin went ahead with his plans, Ukraine would stand no chance and the Russians would prevail in short order. Stung by the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan just months earlier, Biden reacted to the new crisis with self-pity: According to the journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, War, the president complained, “Jesus Christ! Now I’ve got to deal with Russia swallowing Ukraine?”

In fact, the United States had greatly overestimated Russian might. Instead of unleashing shock and awe, Putin’s military was a shoddy instrument. It had ample firepower but was also hindered by corruption, uneven morale, command-and-control shortcomings, and logistical problems. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians showed themselves to be far more resilient, adaptable, and willing to fight than the Biden administration had understood. At that point, the U.S. could have capitalized immensely on the Ukrainians’ spirited resistance and on Russian weakness.

I struggle to think of another time when unexpected events offered a U.S. president more favorable conditions to remake the geopolitical landscape. For years, American strategists have discussed reorienting U.S. military forces away from Europe, where they serve primarily to guard democratic nations against Moscow’s military aggression, and toward the Indo-Pacific region in order to deter a fast-growing China. If the U.S. had helped Ukraine win in 2022—which is to say, liberate its own internationally recognized territory—and then join NATO, it would also have protected the security of countries to Ukraine’s west. The presence of a militarily powerful Ukraine in NATO would have moved the balance of forces within Europe decisively in favor of democratic nations and restored global confidence in American leadership, which the Afghanistan debacle had undermined. The United States could then have drawn down its military footprint in Europe and focused its energies on Asia. The world would have been much safer and stabler.

However bold the president’s promises to stand by the Ukrainians, though, his administration seemed cowed by Russian threats that Putin would use nuclear weapons if the U.S. assisted Kyiv too much. Moreover, an ingrained fixation on seeking stability in Russia seemed to make the White House nervous about doing anything that would threaten Putin’s rule too much or yield chaos in Russia. In a Foreign Affairs essay last fall, Sullivan boasted multiple times that the Biden administration was helping Ukraine defend itself. The problem is that defensive tactics alone will never be sufficient to allow Ukrainians to defeat an invasion by a much larger power.

Even so, Biden and his aides pursued a Goldilocks strategy, hoping to help Ukraine fight without provoking Putin too much. They provided very limited types of military equipment to Ukraine and even then made sure to restrict what Ukraine could do with it. At first, the Biden administration seemed terrified to give Ukraine anything that could hit more than 30 miles or so from the front lines—so the U.S. supplied only short-range weaponry. It certainly didn’t want Ukraine to be able to target Russian military assets in Crimea, which is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine and has been illegally occupied by Russia since 2014.

Anne Applebaum: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine

So for the rest of 2022, when Russia’s initial invasion faltered and then went into reverse, Ukraine was deprived of any ability to hit Russian targets far in the rear, even if those targets were within Ukraine’s own territory. And the battlefield results that followed were predictable. Although Ukraine made some deep advances in the fall, the Russians were always able to recover, having a broad sanctuary where they could regroup and supply their forces.

That was the start of the Biden administration forcing Ukraine to fight in a way that the United States would never contemplate for itself. When Kyiv sought longer-range weapons systems in 2022 and early 2023, the Biden administration at first refused, citing Putin’s supposed willingness to use nuclear weapons. The possibility of nuclear escalation was regularly repeated when Ukrainians sought access to other Western weapons systems, including ATACMS missiles, Abrams main battle tanks, F-16 fighters, and more.

When the U.S. eventually got over its reservations and provided the requested systems, albeit in limited numbers, Putin always backed down. The standard Russian strategy was to downplay the arrival of the new equipment and go out of its way to assure the Russian public that it would make no difference in the war. And in fact, those Western weapons had significantly less impact than they would have if the U.S. had transferred them earlier and in greater quantity.

An inability to learn became a major, repeated failure of the Biden administration’s overall strategy toward Ukraine. Extreme caution about provoking Putin was perhaps understandable in early 2022. American defense planners had for years played numerous wargames that resulted in nuclear weapons being used if some imagined Russian redline was crossed. Both Woodward and The New York Times have reported that, as Ukraine was taking back territory in the fall of 2022, the Biden administration believed—based on intelligence that likely will never become public—that there was a 50 percent chance that Putin would use nuclear bombs. Even so, the administration should have adjusted its thinking after Russia’s military weakness and its tendency to bluff on nuclear matters became clear.

Russia has adjusted its tactics and is trying to win. It has used Iranian drones, retrofitted with thermobaric weapons, to burn Ukrainian civilians alive; it’s in the process of deploying 10,000 North Korean troops to do its fighting, while sacrificing its own soldiers at a rate reaching 45,000 injuries and deaths a month. (The British government estimates total Russian casualties at about 700,000.) The Biden administration, meanwhile, is tying itself in knots deciding whether to allow Ukraine to attack military targets of great strategic value with weapons designed to do just that.

In practice, the Biden administration has treated the Ukraine conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won. The administration doesn’t seem to understand that Russia can be beaten.

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For all of their caution, Biden and his foreign-policy experts have been caught unaware more than once—by the chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and even more strikingly by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. The latter event occurred a week after Sullivan pronounced the Middle East “quieter today than it has been in two decades.” (He used similar language in the print version of his Foreign Affairs essay, which was revised before publication online.)

Unfortunately, the administration seems to have been just as surprised by Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian aggression—and lacked the wisdom and imagination to take advantage of the situation for Ukraine’s benefit and America’s.

The war has now gone on so long that Biden won’t figure in its ending. Ukrainians can still fight on with Europe’s help. Perhaps President-Elect Donald Trump will confound his allies and detractors alike by standing with Ukraine instead of indulging Putin. What’s clear is that Biden missed the moment. The administration has dithered, looking more and more powerless as Ukraine has suffered and as an emergent anti-Western alliance that includes Iran, North Korea, and China has come to Russia’s aid. Biden could have helped create a better, more secure world than the one that existed in February 2022. Instead, he’s ushered in a much more dangerous one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillips Payson O’Brien is a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. He is the author of The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler—How War Made Them, and How They Made War.

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