Russian brutality; NATO evaluating deploying 'trainers' to Ukraine; Tellis on America investing 'maintaining & expanding' the liberal order; Dow hits 40k in goldilocks economy
Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent:
NYT: As Russia Advances, NATO Considers Sending Trainers Into Ukraine
NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.
Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached a critical point, and its position on the battlefield in recent weeks has seriously worsened as Russia has accelerated its advances to take advantage of delays in shipments of American weapons. As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.
Ashley Tellis, Carnegie Endowment:
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has strikingly confirmed that the international community is now divided into three groups —what G. John Ikenberry has labelled “Three Worlds” — a rupture that has had a specific impact on how Washington and its international counterparts have confronted Moscow during this war.
The first group consists of the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia, all relatively developed and powerful states that are fully committed to opposing the Russian invasion and are currently involved in different ways to actively assist Ukraine’s war effort.
The second group consists of states that have geopolitical affinities with Russia and are generally opposed to the West because they perceive themselves as targets of hostile Western policies—more specifically, hostile U.S.-led Western policies—on a range of issues from strategic competition to human rights. This group includes China and Iran,…[o]ther members in this group include the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Belarus, Eritrea, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The third group consists of a large and diverse number of states that are functionally “nonaligned” and whose behavior is marked by a calculus that spans active opportunism to passive neutralism.
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Given that the Ukraine war has now clarified the extent and the depth of these cleavages, the United States should neither be surprised nor deterred by them. Rather, it should resolutely pursue its own interests in the circumstances. Above all, this means that Washington should not desist from continuing to invest in the maintenance and expansion of the liberal international order. Doing so is not optional, nor is it, as is sometimes believed in the United States, a gratuitous act of charity. On the contrary, it is fundamentally necessary to preserve the global order that protects U.S. interests and enhances its prosperity — both of which bolster America’s continued hegemony.
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Guarding the liberal international order thus brings both direct and indirect benefits to U.S. hegemony. If nothing else, the fact that it keeps half, or more than half, of the world’s material resources “on side” makes it a remarkably good investment for a hegemonic power. To the degree that this order also provides collective goods for the global system writ large and thereby strengthens the international acceptance of U.S. power — something Antonio Gramsci understood to be the most important ingredient for weakening resistance in the face of striking power asymmetries — Washington’s investments are doubly useful. Consequently, the now frequent allegations in the United States about their superfluousness, dispensability, irrelevance, or unacceptability miss the significant benefits they bring in terms of the pacification they promote, the prosperity they engender, and the resources they offer for the advancement of American interests.
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Where protecting the liberal order is concerned, the most important task facing the United States today is ensuring the defeat of Russian aggression in Ukraine. This will require leading by example as it has already done: providing Kyiv with the military and financial assistance necessary to ensure that it can recover its lost territories and by so doing signal the West’s resistance to any efforts at changing international borders through force.
