The NATO Dilemma for Ukraine: On February 25, 2022, one day after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, President Biden declared that “Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly — economically and strategically.  We will make sure of that.” When the war is over and its history written, Biden concluded, “Putin’s choice to make a totally unjustifiable war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.”

Three years later, with Biden off the world stage following his defeat in last year’s presidential election, Putin and Russia are poised to win the war against Ukraine, despite the massive support given by the U.S. and NATO, and will end in a much stronger position. 

How could this be? After the United States and Europe gave such extraordinary amounts of money and machines to Ukraine, after 40 nations assembled to support Ukraine against Russia, how could Ukraine have failed to win and how could Russia gotten stronger? Though there are a number of practical reasons, the core reason for this failure is as embarrassing as it is alarming: NATO bases its policies on a narrative while Russia based its policies on ground truth realities.

Lesson number 1 that NATO and the U.S. needs to learn is that wars don’t give a damn about your morality or values. In the minds of most European leaders and establishment figures in the United States, Ukraine was and remains in the moral right; in their rendering, Russia is evil and abhorrent. Russia, therefore, must lose and Ukraine must win, based solely on the mental construct that Russia = evil and Ukraine = good. Yet while European and American establishment figures and mainstream media live in that space, bombs, bullets, and bayonets could care less.

The weapons of war, the balance of power between opposing parties, and the ammunition are apolitical and amoral. They have no regard for anyone’s nationality, absence of concern about who owns what territory, or what any party to a conflict believes “ought” to be. When a bomb or missile or rocket detonates on target, it will explode and everything in the blast radius will be killed or destroyed. The side with the most air power, air defense, drones, rocket forces, ammunition, industrial capacity, and above all the most trained soldiers, will most often win a war between two sides. 

When comparing the two main protagonists in this war in late 2021 and early 2022, any rational military analyst would have immediately concluded that the balance of power was overwhelmingly in Russia’s favor. Preferences and emotions aside, the physical realities of the two sides should have led the United States and NATO to have recognized it was a losing prospect to set as an objective the defeat of the Russian Federation. 

Such a recognition should have led the alliance to council accommodation by Ukraine in the fall of 2021, taking NATO membership off the table, and instead pursuing economic integration with the EU and perhaps bilateral agreements with various European states to help Ukraine modernize its armed forces so it could defend itself.  Absent NATO membership, an unemotional NATO analysis would have revealed that Russia would likely never have invaded absent a promise of eventual NATO membership.

Keeping it real, even that analysis wouldn’t have guaranteed Russia wouldn’t have invaded. Yet that sober understanding of the hard power realities in the balance of power would have led the West to realize that encouraging Ukraine to continue fighting – and enabling it to continue doing so – would likely succeed only in increasing the cost of Ukraine of losing the war.

And that’s exactly what NATO produced: a predictably expensive and entirely avoidable loss for Ukraine.

The West, led by the United States, refused for over three years to merely acknowledge ground truth reality, and instead relentlessly pursed the militarily unattainable objective of seeing Russia lose or weakened, at the cost of the destruction of generations of Ukrainian men, the loss of huge swaths of her territory, and the devastation of scores of Ukrainian cities. 

Tragically, NATO leaders do not seem to have recognized their failures, and still cling to this day on the myth that the war isn’t lost, that with just a little more equipment and ammunition, somehow the Ukrainian side can succeed (though the Western leaders no longer bother to define what “succeed” means anymore). Yesterday in Kyiv, leaders from across Europe met in Kyiv to commemorate the three-year mark of the war by offering yet another batch of war support.

During the meetings in Kyiv, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the West had to keep supporting Ukraine because Canadians like him “believe deeply” that “it’s not just about Ukraine. It’s about the rules and the values and the principles of sovereignty, of independence, territorial integrity that protects every country in the world.” The Western nations vowed billions in additional war support – oblivious to the painful reality that no amount of support can change the course of the war; their support and encouragement to Zelensky to keep fighting will merely add to the butcher’s bill of the cost to Ukraine of losing.

They also seem oblivious to the fact that Trump is working hard on the diplomatic front to end the war, possibly “within weeks,” he said on Monday. It is troubling that only Trump seeks to recognize the basic realities on the ground and that the war can’t be won or defeat avoided. The only thing that can save Ukrainian lives and territory at this point is a speedy diplomatic end.

Yet it should alarm the citizen of every Western and NATO country that so few of their leaders still recognize the truths that should have been evident from well before the war started. Imagine if NATO leaders had just sucked down a little pride in late 2021 and taken membership off the table for Ukraine. In all likelihood, Russia would never have invaded, actively advocating in those last months for the implementation of the Minsk Accords. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives would have been spared and most of their territory would still be under Kyiv’s control.

Unfortunately, even today those leaders aren’t willing to acknowledge the plain truth that the war was lost in Ukraine. The danger is that these leaders are still in charge. What decisions will they make the next time war-and-peace decisions need to be made? Perhaps they will belatedly learn, but no one should expect markedly different outcomes based on the past three plus years of experience.

Many will find it hard to believe that the situation is as bleak as I paint here, and may argue that the media has painted an accurate picture of the struggle, and if only the U.S. and Europe had given more support earlier, the war could have been won. That was never true. 

About the Author: Daniel L. Davis 

Daniel L. Davis retired from the U.S. Army as a Lt. Col. after 21 years of active service and is now a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, writing a weekly column. He was deployed into combat zones four times in his career: Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Iraq in 2009, and Afghanistan twice (2005, 2011). Davis was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Valor at the Battle of 73 Easting in 1991 and awarded a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan in 2011. He is the author of The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America. Davis gained some national notoriety in 2012 when he returned from Afghanistan and published a report detailing how senior U.S. military and civilian leaders told the American public and Congress the war was going well while, in reality, it was headed to defeat. Events since confirmed his analysis was correct. Davis was also the recipient of the 2012 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-telling. Currently, you can find Lt Col. Daniel Davis on his YouTube channel, “Daniel Davis Deep Dive,” where he analyzes war, national security, politics, foreign policy, and breaking news with expert commentary.