#Putin’s moves threaten America — not just Ukraine

As Vladimir Putin’s gangster regime moves to recognize the two “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk, it raises the stakes in a conflict that many fear might lead to a cataclysmic land war in Eastern Europe. At this moment, it is important for the West not to blink and offer Putin, out of fear, an “off-ramp” that would likely involve the destruction of Ukrainian statehood.

I am not holding my breath. After weeks of Russian escalation, the Biden administration on Sunday accepted, “in principle,” the idea of a summit with Putin, suggested by France’s President Emmanuel Macron. The summit is a moot point after the Kremlin’s latest brazen move, but the very idea and its timing were a clear illustration that a bullying behavior was being rewarded, not deterred, by the West.

Influential voices on the left and right, from Sen. Josh Hawley to former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, would like America to simply forget about Ukraine and move on. Hawley sees the US support for Ukraine as a distraction from the far more pressing challenge of China’s rise and a “legacy of a bygone era.”

Yet there are strong reasons for Americans to take the Kremlin’s ongoing war against Ukraine seriously, even if the threat remains below the threshold of a full-scale invasion. That is not primarily because Ukraine is at the front line of a global conflict between authoritarianism and democracy (although it is) but simply because instability in Europe — which has historically tended to emerge along a line running from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea — threatens America’s vital interests, including its ability to confront China.

A dysfunctional, Putin-dominated Ukraine alongside a Belarus that has been brought under explicit control of the Kremlin is a direct threat to our treaty allies, which are already targets of Russian hybrid warfare, including cyberattacks and manufactured “refugee” crises.

Acquiescing to a further land grab of Ukraine’s regions of Luhansk and Donetsk means that European borders can be changed by force. That, in turn, implies that they will be changed by force, since wider Eastern Europe suffers from no shortage of border disputes and past grievances.

Unless the United States is planning to abandon their European allies altogether, granting Putin his coveted sphere of influence is a recipe for endless conflicts in which this or future administrations will have no choice but to intervene — dragging thus limited military resources into the European theater and away from the Indo-Pacific.

The regime in Beijing has additional reasons to watch the US response. Given the ambiguity of America’s relationship with Taiwan, the decisiveness of our reaction to the Russian campaign to gain control over Ukraine will send a strong signal to Xi Jinping about his own prospects of facing an effective pushback in his quest to “reunify” China.

A stronger US reaction to the Kremlin is neither pointless saber-rattling nor warmongering. No one — not even the Ukrainian leadership — is suggesting that US troops come to the defense of the country’s borders. The United States and its European allies, however, have tools that can increase the costs of an incursion to Putin and clique.

First and foremost, the West should continue to help Ukraine defend itself. The recent increases in US military aid are commendable, but they scarcely make up for the lack of earlier investment, particularly during Obama’s years. The United States and its partners must also be ready to underwrite the stability of Ukraine’s economy, which is being stress-tested by the expectations of conflict and political instability, undoing the achievements of bold economic reforms undertaken in recent years.

Second, the West can hurt the regime at its most vulnerable not only through crippling sanctions but also by scrutinizing the role of our financial centers as safe havens for money stolen by Putin’s cronies. It is a failure of imagination to believe, as the administration and European governments seem to, that a discrete trigger in the form of a massive Russian invasion is necessary to justify amplifying the economic pain to Russia’s regime. The reality is that the Kremlin has been escalating for weeks, most recently by its move to recognize the breakaway “republics,” while paying no price and in fact while being lavished with international attention.

Putin is not some farsighted strategist taking carefully calculated risks. He is simply a bully with an acute sense of his opponent’s weaknesses. Unless the United States and our European allies respond to Putin’s latest move with overwhelming strength, all of the West’s adversaries, not just Putin, will emerge from this crisis bolder and more aggressive.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Twitter: @DaliborRohac