The lessons from Ukraine that no one wants to learn
Within 24 hours of the tense Oval Office exchange between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was ready to put “boots on the ground” in Ukraine. Such a sharp reversal of policy is shocking enough, but Starmer’s words speak to a more profound truth about this conflict — and war in general.
Despite NATO supplying Kyiv with sophisticated lethal military equipment for the last 18 months, it took more than a decade of Russian occupation and hundreds of thousands of casualties to reach this point. Moreover, it seems that if the Western world wants to repel imperialists, it may need to send its own soldiers to do so. American strategy has long recognized this inconvenient truth.
Every major war in which the U.S. participated between 1945 and 2001 was in defense of another nation’s territorial integrity, and none of those nations were NATO members. When North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel to invade their southern neighbor in June 1950, President Harry Truman sent the Eighth Army to push them back.
Despite Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire for total victory in Korea, the Truman administration believed such a war might trigger a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, which had just tested its first atomic bomb. In turn, limiting Washington’s goals to repelling the attack seemed logical — and it worked.
When North Vietnam threatened South Vietnam in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson sent divisions there to contain the North Vietnamese Army, degrade the Vietcong and reaffirm national borders. Nearly 60,000 Americans died pursuing these unrealized objectives.
When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein tried to annex Kuwait in 1990, President George H.W. Bush had the U.S. military decimate the Iraqi Army, thus securing America’s leading role in a post-Soviet world. Like in Korea, this was a limited war in which the U.S. did not seek to topple Saddam’s regime militarily but rather deny him his territorial objectives.
In contrast, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the U.S. and NATO not only failed to intervene directly, but also spent years debating whether they should even furnish Ukraine with the weapons it needed to defend itself. President Barack Obama’s administration feared escalation and the potential reversal of diplomatic inroads it was paving with Moscow. The “Russian reset,” which began in 2009 by canceling President George W. Bush’s plan for a missile shield in Eastern Europe, aimed to improve U.S.-Russia relations.
Ukraine received a $53 million aid package from the U.S. in September 2014 that included body armor and night-vision goggles, but no weapons. A June 2015 poll showed that only 41 percent of Europeans supported sending arms to Ukraine, and 30 percent opposed even lending economic aid. President Donald Trump’s first administration authorized shipping Javelin antitank missiles in 2017, but by that time the annexation of a strategic landmass the size of Massachusetts had come and gone with little resistance from the Western world.
President Vladimir Putin got the message. When Russia invaded Ukraine yet again in 2022, this time aiming for the capital, the Biden administration slow-walked critical aid for years while prohibiting Ukraine from striking inside Russia’s borders to avoid escalation. Ukraine fired its first U.S.-provided ballistic missiles into Russia in late November 2024, 33 months after the invasion — a period three times longer than the U.S. military spent conducting major operations in Europe during World War II.
Such incrementalism led to operational stagnation and overlooked what some analysts consider the “real crux” of Ukraine’s war effort: a lack of manpower. Even a Korea-type policy of denial that pushes Russian forces back to its 2022 borders appears increasingly unlikely without a significant surge in ground forces, something Kyiv itself has been reluctant to entertain. And herein lies the problem.
Whether or not Russia and Ukraine reach a negotiated settlement in the coming months, the refusal to send weapons or troops to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity from the very start reflects a seismic shift in U.S. foreign policy since 1945 — a shift felt across party lines that predates the ongoing shakeup under the Trump administration.
The hardest lesson to learn from the war in Ukraine is that there is still no substitute for allies who show up when the fighting begins. Russian nuclear deterrence made that once-clear choice politically untenable for NATO’s leaders, who must now choose between three unappealing options against a dug-in Russian army: negotiate a fragile peace; maintain the status quo and wish for the best; or stare down Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling in Ukraine.
Hopes of outlasting Russia in a land war through weapons shipments, sanctions and public relations campaigns emerged in part from Ukraine’s impressive combat performance. This belief, however, might also be attributed to the alluring myth that the “butcher’s bill” for a major war in Europe could simply be redirected to someone else’s table. Perhaps this is the first illusion to die as Europe and America revisit their assumptions about deterrence and defense in the 21st century.
Maj. Michael P. Ferguson, U.S. Army, is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coauthor of “The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age.” His views as expressed here do not necessarily reflect official policies or positions of the Army or the Department of Defense.
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