The Great Debate-Discussing the Merits of Continued US Military Involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War

Including links to my two recent video interviews articulating America's most vital national security interests in the conflict

During the past nine months, a great debate has raged between two widely-opposing foreign policy factions on the critically important issue as to whether the Biden administration should continue to cross Russia’s redlines by further escalating its blank check of military assistance to Ukraine to continue to aid its fight against the Russian invaders. On one hand stands virtually the entire political left in America in both parties including liberal internationalists along with the dominant neoconservative wing of the Republican Party which has championed the need to keep fighting the war until the last Ukrainian, thus maximizing the scale of death and destruction in the war in order to achieve their objective of weakening Russia both economically and militarily, no matter the cost to US national security and to Ukraine itself. Blind and unquestioned support for fighting the war in Ukraine in perpetuity, even to the detriment of the Ukrainian people, has become something of a cause célèbre in leftwing circles much like support for fighting the non-existent threat of man-made global climate change.

On the other hand are America First (‘Old Right’) conservatives, foreign policy realists, libertarians and a small faction of classical (‘Old Left’) liberals who have championed the humanitarian case to end the war as soon as possible with an immediate cease fire in order to end the suffering of Ukrainians and save as many lives as possible. America First conservatives like myself have been arguing that the pressing need to avert an unnecessary nuclear/Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) war with Russia, that could cost the lives not only of millions of Ukrainians, put potentially of hundreds of millions of Americans and other Europeans as well is more important than fighting a forever war against Russia which Ukraine has no hope of winning.

The reason that victory for Ukraine remains an impossibility is because Russia is the most powerful nuclear superpower in the world with an estimated 8,000 operational nuclear weapons, which is well over four times more than the U.S. possesses. In accordance with Russia’s “escalate to win” military doctrine, Russia will use its escalation dominance throughout the escalation spectrum from cyber, EMP, tactical nuclear and strategic nuclear weapons, particularly its overwhelming 25 to 1 theater nuclear supremacy to defeat the collective West and its proxies including Ukraine in order to avoid defeat in war. COL Douglas Macgregor, who like myself ended up on Ukraine’s black list has published a recent article underscoring the fact that Ukraine has no chance to defeat Russia and ultimate Russian victory in the war is inevitable. Furthermore, it is contrary to Ukraine’s national interest to prolong the war because the longer the war goes on the more of Ukraine Russia will end up annexing, potentially threatening Ukraine's very existence as an independent state.

While President Joe Biden has warned of the increasing danger of nuclear apocalypse, the irony of his policy of sending massive amounts of advanced missiles and weapons to help Ukraine defeat Russia is that the more successful Ukraine is on the battlefield, the greater the chances of Russian nuclear escalation. President Joe Biden and his Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, and his Director of Central Intelligence, William Burns, have all conceded this fact yet the Biden administration has refused to modify its policy of providing a blank check of military assistance to Ukraine, including hundreds of Special Operation troops in country, which is serving to maximize, rather than minimize, the chances of Russian nuclear escalation. By continuing this increasingly dangerous and risky endeavor, which I have denounced as a policy of national suicide, the Biden administration and his neoconservative cheerleaders in the Republican Party in Congress are serving to make the U.S. far less safe and secure.

On November 23rd, I had the opportunity to debate the merits of the war with a longtime advocate of military assistance to Ukraine, former Utah State Representative and two-time congressional candidate Chris Herrod on the “We Are the People” podcast hosted by America First former congressional candidate Jason Preston. Here is the link to the debate. In many if not most respects Chris has proven to be an America First conservative. However, on the issue of Ukraine he has taken a perspective which is closer to the neoconservative position on the war than the America First conservative position, which very understandable given his close family ties to Ukraine. During our discussion, Chris recognized the dangers of Russian nuclear escalation but stated that as a matter of principle he believed it was important that we not allow Russian aggression to stand and that we needed to continue military assistance to Ukraine unabated for as long as it takes to defeat Russia. He also stated that he supported the efforts of conservative Republicans to audit US foreign assistance to Ukraine and that he believed that further economic assistance to Ukraine was unnecessary. Much to his credit, he also stated he opposed the $40 billion in US aid sent to Ukraine back in May because there were no provisions to audit it. Only 27% of Republicans in Congress had the courage and foresight to oppose that bill.

Chris conceded that Ukraine had a sordid history of corruption but insisted it was much more democratic and much less corrupt than Russia, points that I disagreed with. As noted in a recent CBS report, only 30% of US military aid is reaching front-line Ukrainian troops while much if not most of the rest is being sold on the black market to enrich corrupt Ukrainian officials and billionaire oligarchs. In addition, it was recently revealed that at least tens of millions in US aid to Ukraine was utilized in a Democrat-Ukrainian money laundering scheme involving the now bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency company whose executives donated $75 million to help Democrat congressional candidates get elected enabling the Democrats to retain control of the US Senate. He stated that he opposed sending US troops to Ukraine. However, I pointed out that our Special Forces troops and CIA operations officers never left Ukraine and that we have only expanded our military and intelligence operative footprint there since the war began.

During our discussion, I noted that wars do not occur in a vacuum and that they typically involve some legitimate causes and provocations and that this war was no exception. I provided the historical context as to how the U.S. driven expansion of NATO provoked Russia to invade Ukraine over a period of fourteen years. A recently revealed memorandum written in 2009 by then US ambassador to Russia and current Director of Central Intelligence Robert Burns that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that if Ukraine were to join NATO, then Russia would retake the Crimea and the Donbass region which is exactly what happened following the US financed Maidan coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. Russia made several attempts to avoid this unnecessary war culminating with a draft mutual security agreement which Russia submitted to the US and NATO in December 2021 which heroic national security strategist Dr. Peter Pry, who tragically lost his life a few months ago following a year long battle with cancer, recommended the Biden administration accept. Renowned foreign policy realist Dr. John Mearsheimer has also expressed his support for the draft agreement while I supported some of its provisions as well in my article “Biden’s Opportunity for Peace in Eurasia”.

Despite the fact that Russia’s proposed peace agreement was mostly reasonable and generally consistent with US national security interests as Dr. Pry asserted, the Biden administration rejected it in its entirely on January 25th, including most importantly Russia’s demand that the US provide a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join NATO leading Putin to calculate he had no choice but to invade Ukraine to reverse its de-facto NATO membership. I pointed out that Russia’s offered mutual security agreement did not call for the US to give up an inch of NATO territory but merely called for a restoration of NATO’s pre-2016 status quo in which there were no US or Western NATO troops or military infrastructure on the territory of former Warsaw Pact member states or former Soviet republics.

I also underscored the irony that it has been NATO that has continued to precipitate the Russian military threat to NATO to justify its continued existence. Without NATO’s eastward expansion that began in 1999, which I strongly opposed at the time while I was working as an International Analyst in the Department of Defense, and subsequent massive US and EU military assistance to Ukraine, no one would view Russia as a threat to Europe and Western relations with Russia would have remained positive and productive as they were from 1991-1995 before the decision for NATO to expand eastward was taken by former President Bill Clinton.

Most importantly, there would be no threat of Russian nuclear escalation as there is today with even President Biden admitting that the threat of a nuclear apocalypse is higher today than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis sixty years ago and equally important Russia would not be closely allied militarily with Communist China today. I find it ironic that leftwing and neoconservative prognosticators who support ever increasing US military assistance to Ukraine essentially argue that in order to prevent further Russian aggression and the outbreak of a Third World War, we must fight proxy wars against Russia, thereby provoking Russian military and nuclear escalation leading to the outbreak of the very Third World War they claim to be trying to prevent. The truth is that Russia today is not an Evil Empire like it was from 1917-1991. It is an enemy only because America’s foolhardy and short-sighted foreign policy blunders have transformed it from a friend into an adversary. Accordingly, a return to more rational, stable and friendly relations with Russia could transform them back from an adversary to a US friend and strategic partner, potentially enabling us to effectively neutralize Russia’s military alliance with China and avert the outbreak of World War Three. I made a number of other important points which you can see in the linked debate video above.

On November 25th, I shared my latest expert military and geopolitical assessment of the war in Ukraine and the increasing chances of Russian nuclear escalation with Paul Mills on his “Off Grid Desert Farming” podcast in a wide-ranging and very informative interview that lasted over an hour. We also discussed the chances that Biden will end up stumbling the U.S. into an unnecessary and avoidable nuclear war with Communist China over Taiwan and my recently proposed grand strategy to prevent that from happening. I have long argued that Communist China has been the biggest winner of the war in Ukraine to date and I will explain the reasons why that is in my next article.

Back in May, renowned foreign policy realists Dr. John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt engaged in a spirited debate with former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who famously thanked the US on social media for blowing up Russia’s Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, and former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, over the question as to whether US failure to recognize Russia’s legitimate security interests was responsible for precipitating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Here is the link to their debate:

In Dr. Mearsheimer’s most recent interview, he warned that the West is playing Russian roulette by fighting a proxy war in Ukraine and concluded that the West was “screwed” as he saw no path out of our current escalation spiral given Russia’s willingness and determination to escalate all the way to the nuclear level to win the war in Ukraine. He also emphasized what I have been saying since the war began which is that the more battlefield victories Ukraine has the greater the chance of Russian nuclear escalation. Accordingly, a rational US leader would logically conclude that it is in opposition to US national security interests that Ukraine keep fighting the war in the hopes of winning more battles and that America’s national security interests demand we support an immediate cease fire agreement to end the immediate threat of nuclear war with Russia.

In this interview, Mearsheimer asks where are the clear-eyed foreign policy realist US leaders like former President John F. Kennedy who understand the importance of averting an unnecessary nuclear war today? Sadly, other than President Trump and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Mike Lee and members of the Congressional America First Caucus, there essentially aren't any. To his credit America First conservative Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is beating President Trump in many recent GOP presidential primary polls, stated in response to a recent issue questionnaire that he opposes US military aid to Ukraine and involvement in the war because US security interests aren’t threatened there. What this means is that both top Republican presidential contenders oppose US military aid to Ukraine and support a negotiated peace settlement to end the war likely along the lines of the one I proposed in my recent article “Biden Must Call for a Cease Fire to Save Ukraine from Being Overrun by Russia”. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who recently attempted to read America First conservatives who oppose Biden’s drive to start an unnecessary nuclear war with Russia, out of the Republican Party, will be the likely flag-bearer for America Last neoconservatives in the GOP presidential primary.

My only criticism of Mearsheimer is every interview he has given, when he is asked to provide a solution to the Ukraine war crisis he keeps saying there are no realistic solutions when in fact there are a number of promising solutions and strategies we could employ, all of which I have articulated since March in The National Interest. The only thing that is lacking is the political courage and strategic vision of the Biden administration to implement them. He concludes the interview on a decidedly pessimistic note declaring "we are screwed." The responsibility of national security strategists is to propose solutions for world problems which threaten to escalate to the nuclear level and in this he falls short. He also states that he doesn't see the US, Russia or Ukraine backing down. However, what he fails to realize is that the solution is for the US to suspend Ukrainian military aid in order to get them to accept Russia's proposal for a cease fire. It really is that simple.

Previously, Mearsheimer called for the US to ally with Russia against China which is something my dearly departed friend and mentor, Dr. Peter Pry, who served as our longtime Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, also supported in many interviews including this excellent one linked below in which he warned that the US and NATO was “playing with nuclear fire” by fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine:

The war in Ukraine has a number of historical precedents including the origins of both world wars particularly World War One. Great power alliances transformed two regional conflicts in Eastern Europe into World wars that killed over 100 million people. Now, history may be about to repeat itself as US membership in NATO and Biden's war in Ukraine threaten to transform another regional war in Eastern Europe into a Third World War. However, this time the human cost of such a war wouldn’t merely be 40 million people as was the case in World War One, but very possibly 400 million people. I fear Biden and his neoconservative allies are sleepwalking us into a nuclear war with Russia unless we do something so stop them.

© David T. Pyne 2022

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s book “Blackout Warfare.” He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.