Play your cards right

The attack shocked military and political leaders in Washington and NATO capitals. Ukraine hadn’t shared its plans with any of its backers. While Ukrainian troops and civilians celebrated, Russians went online to criticize the Kremlin and the military.

Meanwhile, on the front lines in Ukraine’s Donbas region, Moscow’s armed forces have been gaining ground steadily. Over the past month, they’ve advanced within a few kilometers of the key transportation hub of Pokrovsk. And on the battlegrounds, Kyiv remains short on manpower, often outnumbered and outgunned.

A lot seems to have changed, very quickly. What does it mean for the war?

Robert Hamilton is the head of research with the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program and a retired U.S. Army colonel. Hamilton says Ukraine’s push into Russia was a high-stakes gamble—a move that meant pulling top troops from the existing front lines just as the Kremlin’s forces were gaining momentum there. Moscow pressed the offensive around Pokrovsk instead of shoring up defenses at Kursk, and that’s left the Ukrainians with a prime bargaining chip in any future negotiations to end the war—if they can hold their ground. What’s more, Hamilton says, they’ve transformed storylines about the conflict—and not just in Ukraine and the West. President Vladimir Putin has long sold the war to the Russian public as an inevitable win and minimal hassle. Now, that story has started to crumble—while Ukraine’s allies have started to see its chances in a new light …

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• “The Russians were flailing for a week. That’s when Ukraine took a lot of PoWs. It took Moscow a long time to come up with a coherent command structure and a coherent defense effort in Kursk—and you could say they still don’t have one. At the same time, Pokrovsk is a key transportation hub in Ukraine—and Putin wants it.”
• “The Ukrainians are willing to give up a kilometer or two of their territory around Pokrovsk every day—as long as they can preserve the coherence of their lines. Military commanders are almost certainly preparing more lines behind the front lines, so they can retreat to prepared positions in good terrain. As long as Ukraine can preserve the integrity of its lines as its troops are pushed back to and through Pokrovsk, its loss won’t be a critical defeat.”
• “Here’s a fascinating thing about the Kursk operation: According to Russian nuclear doctrine, it allowed for a Russian nuclear response because it was a direct attack on Russia’s territorial integrity. I think one reason Ukraine did this was to expose Russia’s nuclear bluster and say to the West, The Kremlin could have responded with nuclear weapons, but they haven’t. So maybe you should reexamine all the other times they’ve threatened to use nuclear weapons—and then reexamine your weapons restrictions on us.”

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‘The Contest Over National Security’

Last week, Sullivan made the point to the Financial Times that the U.S. isn’t the only country linking economic policy with national security. “The role of national security in trade and investment policy and strategy is rising everywhere,” he said.

Meanwhile, the American administration is preparing to impose 25 percent tariffs on Chinese cargo cranes, citing the risk of the Chinese government using them to spy on American harbor operations. President Joe Biden has also promised to put some $20 billion into bringing crane manufacturing back to the States. And the 2022 Chips and Science Act is subsidizing American and allied countries’ semiconductor-chip industries to the tune of $39 billion.

But these moves haven’t angered only Beijing. As the Financial Times reports, Tokyo is unhappy with Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion takeover of U.S. Steel—opposition Biden has motivated on national-security grounds.

From one perspective, the question may be why national security now increasingly includes economic security—but from another, it might be why it wouldn’t have before?

The answer to which, according to Peter Roady in his new book, The Contest Over National Security: FDR, Conservatives, and the Struggle to Claim the Most Powerful Phrase in American Politics, is: It did—for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the 1930s, Roady writes, President Roosevelt made the case that national security encompassed protection not only from foreign threats but from economic want, as well. Roosevelt’s understanding of national security never won out; his successors developed a much more limited national-security state, putting military strength above all else. But while Biden hasn’t entirely revived Roosevelt’s vision, he’s speaking Roosevelt’s language.

—Gustav Jönsson

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