The author writes:

• "On Ukraine, Biden’s team did a good job orchestrating the trans-Atlantic response to Russia’s invasion, beginning with the adroit and politically effective use of intelligence in the run-up to the war."
• "But Americans shouldn’t lose sight of the United States’ mishandling of the larger situation, a series of mistakes that began under former U.S. President Bill Clinton and continued under every subsequent leader. It’s become toxically controversial to raise this issue, ... but it is hard not to see Putin’s invasion as a classic preventive war: an illegal invasion undertaken to derail the accelerating U.S. effort to arm Ukraine and bring it into the Western orbit."
• "When Putin mobilized his army and made it clear he’d invade if his concerns were not met, the administration’s repeated refusal to even consider ending NATO’s 'open door policy' guaranteed that war would come. ... [T]he West’s failure to acknowledge Russian concerns or anticipate how Moscow might respond was an extraordinary strategic miscalculation."
• "Ukraine’s heroic resistance and billions of dollars of Western military assistance have not prevented Russia from seizing a considerable portion of Ukrainian territory. Sanctions will weaken Russia over time but probably won’t dislodge Putin from the Kremlin or convince him to withdraw. The result will not be a decisive Western triumph but a protracted stalemate."
• "If the worldview on which your strategy is based is flawed—for example, if you ignore the tendency for states to balance threats, believe that economic interdependence as well as robust institutions make conflict impossible or ignore the power of nationalism—your priorities will be out of whack and any initiatives you do take are likely to backfire."
• "Is there any reason for hope? Certainly. Americans may take some comfort in the fact that some of their principal adversaries are making big mistakes too: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t working out as he had hoped ... but counting on Moscow or Beijing to make more mistakes than Washington is hardly a promising long-term approach."

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Ronald Gutridge shared in the public domain.