Welcome to Email News: Ukraine’s Two Fronts

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January 31, 2024

Ukraine's Two Fronts

As it has since February 2022, Ukraine is fighting a war on two fronts: one against Russia's grinding assault, another to maintain Western support in the face of fatigue and political division.

On the battlefield, assessments have been disheartening but not wholly defeatist. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Stephen Biddle examines how Russia's army stopped Ukraine's momentum in 2023, stymieing a Ukrainian counteroffensive that had generated much hope in the Western commentariat. The simple version of Biddle's answer: Russia dug in, and in ground warfare, it's very difficult to overwhelm entrenched defenses. Western weapons deliveries were slow, Western training was offered in five short weeks, and the hoped-for upgrade to Ukraine's fighting ability wasn't enough.

Examining the state of play in depth in the newsletter Comment is Freed, the British historian and war scholar Lawrence Freedman writes that since Russia's full-scale invasion, Western predictions about this war have swung wildly, from Russia toppling Kyiv in mere weeks to Ukraine driving out the invaders. Such oscillation casts doubt on the value of predictions, broadly, in Freedman's view. He also notes a "fundamental asymmetry" in the information on which Ukraine-war predictions are based: We have lots of insight into Ukraine's side of things, but little into Russia's. There's much more grist for pessimism (or optimism) about Ukraine, while Russia remains a black box.

Ukraine's year ahead, Freedman writes, will be characterized by "building up capabilities for later offensives, emphasising local production, mobilisation of reserves, and training, while eating away at Russian capabilities," a strategy dubbed "active defense." Kyiv will also struggle for continued Western backing. As Anne Applebaum details in The Atlantic, congressional Republicans may be close to pulling the rug of US support out from under Kyiv, having linked continued Ukraine-war funding to a compromise on immigration-and-border policies—a compromise all the more elusive now that former President Donald Trump has lobbied against a tentative bipartisan deal.

If the US cuts support for Ukraine now, it will look like an unreliable and even a "silly" ally, Applebaum argues. "By abandoning Ukraine in a fit of political incompetence, Americans will consent to the deaths of more Ukrainians and the further destruction of the country. We will convince millions of Europeans that we are untrustworthy. We will send a message to Russia and China too, reinforcing their frequently stated belief that the U.S. is a degenerate, dying power. Less than a year ago, when (President Joe) Biden made his surprise trip to Kyiv, the U.S. projected confidence and unity as the leader of a functional alliance. Now, suddenly, we don't." At the Financial Times, columnist Martin Wolf shares Applebaum's assessment, writing: "In the end, of course, there must be a peace. But it must be peace with honour. That will only come if Russia realises that this time might will not be allowed to be right. The west has the resources to ensure this. The question, as (Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba) asked (at a dinner Wolf attended in Davos, Switzerland), is whether it believes enough in itself to show the will. If not, the price could prove to be beyond reckoning."

For Kyiv, a Rosier Outlook in the Black Sea

While the land war remains a difficult slog for Kyiv, observers have noted a better outlook at sea. Partly by using seaborne drones, Ukraine has managed to push back Russia's Black Sea naval fleet far enough to safeguard Ukrainian ports and establish a viable corridor for economically important Ukrainian grain exports by sea, as The Economist details.

"Now, not even the eastern coast of Crimea" is considered safe for Russian ships, "and Russia's most capable ships are sheltering in Novorossiysk, 600km away," the magazine writes. Its headline declares: "Russia is losing the battle for the Black Sea."

A Dangerous Dance With Iran

and Its Proxies

Does Iran want a wider war with the US and Israel? And even if not, can such a war be avoided?

Tensions are high after a weekend drone attack killed three US soldiers based in Jordan and injured more than 30, with US officials saying the attack was launched by an Iran-backed militia. As Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer tells Foreign Policy Editor in Chief Ravi Agrawal, the deaths of US soldiers crossed a "red line" for Biden. The state of conflict in the Middle East—which now includes the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza, an ongoing exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the US–UK air campaign against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, attacks on US forces by Iran-backed militias in Iraq, and more—unfortunately has not yet come close to its "peak," Bremmer suggests.

In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Fareed that the escalating conflict in the Middle East stems from Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, not from Iran. More to the point, an unnamed correspondent in Tehran reports for Al-Monitor that Iran is distancing itself from the more-recent militia attack that killed US soldiers. Iran funds and arms various allied militias around the Middle East, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen, but while those groups are often characterized as Iranian "proxies," the directness of the link is not entirely clear. Iran's Foreign Ministry has said those groups "do not take orders" from Tehran. At The Atlantic, Arash Azizi observes that these groups are difficult for Iran to control, given their ideological fervor. "Many in the Iranian establishment now worry that the militias might get Iran into a war it has long tried to avoid," Azizi writes.

For Iran, the unpredictability of these proxies has at times been beneficial, in that it keeps adversaries guessing, Azizi notes. Also at The Atlantic, Graeme Wood suggests the US has become too predictable in its own deterrence strategy. While the Trump-ordered US assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020 appeared reckless at the time, Wood writes, it too had its advantages in that it shook Tehran's ability to predict the scale of US responses to provocations. "Biden stocked his foreign-policy team with people who have worked tirelessly to avoid a direct confrontation with Iran, and to avoid this escalation," Wood writes. "Now these same escalation-averse policy minds are choosing from a menu of reasonable options for escalation … So far, only Republicans seem to want a strike inside Iran. But sometimes the menu of reasonable options is the problem, because Tehran knows what's on it. We are approaching a scenario that calls, strategically, for off-menu ordering, an act of retaliation that Iran had not contemplated. If you think this is a risky practice at a restaurant, try it in the Strait of Hormuz."

The Automation Debate Hasn't Changed Much Since the 1930s

Will AI replace all of our jobs? Or will it make us more productive—maybe even advancing humans into a post-work society of prosperity and endless leisure?

Since the 1930s, the debate about technology and employment has proceeded along similar lines, with observers weighing the downside of job automation against the upside of new possibilities, David Rotman notes at the MIT Technology Review. Rotman recalls the warning of economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in a 1930 essay that humans were "being afflicted with a new disease" of " technological unemployment," which Keynes explained as "unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." Things were changing a bit too fast for the economy to adjust, as Keynes assessed at the time.

Rotman also notes a loosely contemporary counterargument: In the December 1938 issue of the MIT Technology Review, then-MIT President Karl T. Compton wrote of "The Bogey of Technological Unemployment," identifying the upsides of increased productivity, better and cheaper products, and new enterprises. "If we look at industry as a whole, without inquiring into particular cases," Compton wrote, "we would conclude that technological unemployment is a myth, because statistics show no decrease in the fraction of our population gainfully employed during the last few generations in which machine production has been important. This is because technology has created so many new industries and has so greatly increased the market for many commodities by lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers." (That's cold comfort to a town whose mill has been shuttered, Compton wrote, so it's important to help affected workers. Compton also argued that the arrival of new technology, which could combine with labor in newly productive ways, demanded good management to fit labor and technology together to everyone's benefit.)

Addressing artificial intelligence in his present-day essay, Rotman returns to Compton's argument about management, writing: "In recent decades, companies have often used AI and advanced automation to slash jobs and cut costs. There's no economic rule that innovation will in fact favor augmentation and job creation over this type of automation. But we have a choice going forward: we can use technology to simply replace workers, or we can use it to expand their skills and capabilities, leading to economic growth and new jobs."

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