Eurasia Press & News
To prevent further damage to the rules-based international order, the United States and its allies will need a comprehensive strategy of containment that aims to deter Russia militarily, raises the cost to Russia for its destabilizing behavior, and increasingly decouples Russia from the international community, politically and economically, until Moscow has earned the right to be considered a partner once more.
Containment today is similar to the containment policy enunciated by George Kennan and adopted in the early years of the Cold War. The idea is to stop Russian expansionism, exert forceful counter-pressure on Russian efforts to extend its influence, weaken the Russian regime economically, and conduct an aggressive information campaign to undermine domestic support—the ultimate goal being to encourage the emergence of forces that could liberalize the regime and end the geopolitical competition, as occurred in ending the first Cold War in the 1980s and 1990s.
Containment today benefits from the fact that the Russians are much weaker militarily after the Ukraine war and more isolated politically, although today’s Russia benefits from its close alignment with China and the fact that many nations beyond the democratic West are sitting on the fence.
Containment today also means taking a patient, long-term approach to the promotion of internal change in Russia. While it may be a generation before such change happens, we should be prepared to act quickly when the Russian people themselves demand leaders who are ready to return to the path of cooperation and integration that Putin has abandoned.
Military strength and Alliance cohesion are the foundation of an effective containment policy. We need a NATO- and EU-coordinated strategy to push back against all forms of Russian expansionism, in Ukraine and beyond, and to strengthen our resilience against conventional and hybrid warfare.
In the short term, we need to commit unambiguously to the goal of Ukrainian victory. We should help Ukraine capitalize on its successful counter-offensives by boosting and accelerating the supply of heavy weapons, long-range strike systems, and air and missile defense that can inflict further defeats on Russia in the weeks and months ahead, while increasing economic and humanitarian assistance at the same time.
For Ukraine to prevail, we need to speed up the weapons delivery process and restart production of the most urgently needed systems such as High Mobility Rocket Artillery Systems (HIMARS) and advanced drones, both to secure new gains for the Ukrainians and to replenish depleted allied stocks.
We need to calibrate what weapons we provide to avoid escalation, but we should not let ourselves be intimidated or self-deterred by Russian saber-rattling. Putin is more interested than we are in avoiding a direct clash with NATO, conventional or nuclear, and he understands that any use of nuclear weapons, even a “demonstration” strike, would open Pandora’s box and fundamentally change the nature of the war.
Right now, it is the Russians who are doing the escalating, with their barbaric missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure and terrorization of the Ukrainian people.
In my view, it is time to reconsider our self-imposed range limits and provide systems that enable Ukraine to deny the Russians a sanctuary for launching their infrastructure attacks. If the Russians can strike with impunity from Crimea or across the Russian border, they will continue to escalate, at horrific human cost. Enabling Kyiv to target those systems is not escalation, but legitimate self-defense.
