Accounting for the Lines We Would Not Cross in Ukraine | Opinion

The United States is taking new steps—steps it once said it would not take—to help Ukraine in the fight against Russia. Ukraine gets the Patriot anti-missile system and Ukrainian soldiers get a free trip to Oklahoma to train in how to use it.

This is a necessary and inevitable step, but before we take the next one it's important to take into account how we got here—and how far we are willing to go.

The West has hesitated at every step along the way to war, and for good reason. When Crimea was lost to Russia in 2014, the U.S. reaction was sanctions against Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. There was also some quiet military training and shipments of "defensive" weapons, including the now-lauded Javelin anti-tank missile system.

Why so little? An abundance of caution. Ukraine is a nice, incredibly corrupt place with certain Western/NATO ambitions, but it has also been the scene of turmoil and conflict between genuine pro- and anti-Russian factions. Before the pro-Western Maidan protests of 2014, the Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych became president as the result of what was internationally considered a fair election.

Yanukovych showed every sign of Russia-allied dictatorial ambition, and upon being driven from Kyiv, there were the usual signs of power run amok, including a personal zoo for the potential "Great Leader."

The leader that followed—chocolate baron and pro-Western "reformer," Petro Poroshenko—started the paperwork to get Ukraine into the European Union but was fired by the people in a 2019 election. He received just 25 percent of the vote, at least partly because corruption had hardly stopped.

In the past, the U.S. has picked some pretty poor allies. It's not surprising that the country hesitated to go all in on Ukraine.

Another reason the U.S. and the rest of the West hesitated to help Ukraine openly much before the Feb. 24 invasion by Russia, was worries about starting World War III.

Fair enough.

Still, when Russia invaded, the West was ready with more than just the traditional sanctions. Weapons systems and the training and ammunition to use them have flooded Ukraine and have been deployed with unbelievable success.

Well, success breeds success, as they say. The better Ukraine's armed forces have done—and the worse Russia has looked on the battlefield—the more sophisticated the weapons the U.S. and its allies have been willing to ship. This makes sense. There's no point in sending weapons to an army that's no longer able to field them.

But each package of weapons has been like turning up the gas on a frog in a pot on a stove: Javelins and some training; trucks to move stuff around; old-fashioned gunpowder-driven artillery with hundreds of thousands of shells; rocket artillery in the form of the now-famous HIMARS system; now the Patriot anti-missile system and training in Oklahoma; and the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.

Sending the Patriot system was a line we weren't willing to cross a couple of months ago, but the change is unsurprising because we weren't going to send the HIMARS system either, at one point.

Now the line is tanks.

We're not currently sending Ukraine tanks because of technical definitions of what a tank is, not because we're not sending tanks. The M2 fits the lay description of a tank. It's large, on treads, heavily armored, and has a big gun on it. In fact, it can even launch missiles. It carries seven soldiers up to the front lines. We're sending at least 50 of those. And the Germans are sending similar vehicles, and the French are sending mobile tank killers, the AMX-10RC.

We now say that we won't send the M1 Abrams main battle tank. Maybe the optics of these American machines rolling into the Donbas are just too much of a perceived provocation?

(Reports are that Britain is now pushing for tanks to be included in aid).

We've also said all along that we would not put U.S. boots on Ukrainian or Russian ground.

How long will that last if Ukraine starts suffering reverses?

No one really knows where Russia's red lines are, where World War III begins. Is it tanks? Is it boots?

Will we finally see global thermonuclear war?

Of course, there are other paths. If Ukraine starts to lose, the U.S. could add pressure for a settlement—though if they're winning, who knows if Russia will want to talk? There's also the possibility that Putin will fall, and the war will end with a Russian whimper.

Maybe.

Has the U.S. been wrong to follow this road all along? Is it the highway to hell?

I've argued before, and will again here, that there is evil in the world—or at least totalitarianism and ill-intent—and it must be fought. There is a childish notion that this is not our war, and just because we don't want to, we don't have to fight it.

Like other wars before, we didn't choose it. We didn't strike the first blow. But if Russia wins because we won't fight, they will not be satisfied with Ukraine. We will have set a precedent of inaction so dangerous as to further destabilize the world.

Look to Taiwan and the South China Sea. Look to the Arctic. Look to a world of shrinking resources and ever-growing heat.

Look to reality and understand that defending Ukraine is what we must do, even if we don't want to.

But do it with open eyes.

Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.