Barely a day had gone by from Ukraine’s successful request for German Leopard-2 tanks when the government in Kyiv called on Nato countries to yet again prove their solidarity by supplying it with US-made F-16 fighter jets. While military experts doubt these vehicles will significantly alter the situation on the battlefield, Kyiv touts them as important symbols of Western political resolve.
“War is a continuation of policy with other means,” wrote Clausewitz in 1832. A year into the Russo-Ukrainian War, what is that policy where Ukraine is concerned? Or America, Germany, and other Nato allies? Are Ukraine’s repeated calls for more support and the West’s accommodating response a case of leveraging “strategic publicity”, performative diplomacy, alliance solidarity, or something else entirely? After all, as much as the Ukrainians are fighting Russian forces and suffering massive casualties to protect the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state, today Nato is openly engaged in a proxy war that risks spiralling into a catastrophic conflict between the West and Russia.
Although foreign policy realism can help sketch, even predict, the general contours of the war and explain policy in Moscow and Kyiv, this mainstream realist position, as represented by the likes of John Mearsheimer, provides an incomplete account of the behaviour of most Western allies, especially the United States. To understand Western decision-making and the peculiar inter-alliance dynamics of Nato, we need a more radical realism that takes seriously the non-physical, psychological, and “ontological dimensions” of security — encompassing a state or an organisation’s need for overcoming uncertainty by establishing orderly narratives and identities about its sense of “self”.
Still, “structural” realist accounts — centred on systemic anarchy, physical security, the balance of power, and political dimensions of strategy — can help explain aspects of Ukraine’s strategic decision-making. In a recent study for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, which I co-authored, we investigated the structural reasons that drive Ukraine’s strategic calculus. We suggested that, as a “regional balancer”, Ukraine took a massive risk in defying the Russian redlines about Kyiv explicitly rejecting Nato overtures and stopping any military integration with the West. This was a maximalist gambit that presupposed Western military support and risked actively provoking Moscow to its own strategic disadvantage.
In choosing the riskier, zero-sum strategy aimed at thwarting the historical and geopolitical sphere of influence of a neighbouring regional and civilisational power, Ukraine was perhaps imprudent — but by no means irrational. As we wrote:
“Practically all of America’s security alliances today are asymmetrical arrangements between the United States and regional balancers — a class of smaller, more peripheral regional states seeking to balance against the dominant middle powers in their respective regions. As a great power, America possesses an inherent capacity to encroach on other regional security complexes (RSCs). In this context, it is reasonable for regional balancers to attempt to coax and exploit American power in the service of their particular regional security interests.”
Setting such a lofty objective, however, effectively meant that Kyiv could never succeed without active Nato intervention shifting the balance of power in its favour. By virtue of its decision, Ukraine, along with its closest partners in Poland and the Baltic nations, became the classic “trojan ally” — smaller countries whose desire for regional clout against the extant middle power (Russia) is predicated on their ability to persuade an external great power and its global military network (here, the US and, by extension, Nato) to step in militarily on their behalf. As we noted in our study, “this comes at great risk to the regional balancer and at great cost to the external great power”. For ultimately, the arrangement depends on “the threat of the use of force and military intervention” by that external great power, without which the regional balancer would fail.
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