When Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Ukraine this week with the Secretary of State, he may have said the quiet part out loud.
American and NATO assistance to Ukraine has bolstered their military and helped them defend themselves from a Russian military invasion. Austin's comments spoke to something beyond defense.
"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," Austin said during a press conference. "So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability."
Austin's comments make clear that America's strategic goal in the region is not just to defend Ukraine, or to uphold the Westphalian system, but rather to weaken and degrade the Russian military, if not the Russian state itself, to the point that it is unable to conduct these types of operations into the foreseeable future.
International norms are shifting beneath our feet, and the British Defence Secretary's comments were even more blatant in revealing that we now live in a different world, with different rules.
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"Part of defending itself in this type of invasion is obviously where Ukraine will go after the supply lines of the Russian army because, without fuel and food and ammunition, the Russian army grinds to a halt and can no longer continue its invasion," Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told BBC.
British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey went further, saying that it was entirely legitimate for the Ukrainians to hit logistical targets within Russia itself. "Ukraine needs to strike into its opponent’s depth to attack its logistics lines, its fuel supplies, its ammunition depots, and that’s part of it," he stated during an interview.
In the 1980s the CIA supported the Afghan mujahideen after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Supplying them with advanced weaponry, the Afghans fought back the Russian invasion and repelled them. Losing the war in Afghanistan is often cited as one reason for the collapse of the USSR. However, that covert action campaign was never extended into Russia itself.
That American and British defense secretaries are saying the quiet part out loud signals that the west is now attempting to rewrite the rules governing global order.
Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR. Want to get more connected to the stories and resources Connecting Vets has to offer? Click here to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
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