According to former CIA analyst and Russia expert George Beebe, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has reached a deadlock and cannot be resolved through military action or increased American assistance.
“This isn’t a war that is going to be won on the battlefield.” “I believe it is very evident that the Russians are unable to seize Kiev or the majority of Ukrainian land. The fact that the Ukrainians won’t be able to push Russia off of all of Ukrainian territory is also, in my opinion, becoming more and more obvious. However, I think it’s quite irrational to anticipate that they will retake the entire Donbas region or the Crimea, which the Russians annexed back in 2014, with this fresh attack that everyone on the Ukrainian side is anticipating.
According to Beebe, who worked for more than 20 years as a diplomat and intelligence analyst, serving as the director of the CIA’s Russia analysis, the United States lacks a contingency strategy and needs to start considering creating a plan B to deescalate the situation.
Therefore, he continued, “what we need to be thinking about here is how we combine our support for Ukraine with a diplomatic approach that can provide a stable outcome for this war. I’m not certain we have a plan at the moment. And we need to consider carefully what that should be.
Beebe also discussed how China is stepping up to fill the hole left by the United States’ decline in power as the world’s foremost mediator and negotiator.
The extent to which that scenario has changed is extraordinary, he observed. And the United States is now in a position where we no longer have the diplomatic clout to bring about peace in many of these regions. Certainly, we have put a lot of effort into enhancing our military power and relying on force, but we haven’t combined that with the diplomatic acuity — the juggling, the compromising, the problem-solving — that can result in agreements and bring the needed order and stability to these regions. And that ability needs to be learned again. It’s quite obvious.
Furthermore, the Chinese are currently filling the diplomatic void left by the United States. because we have not given diplomatic statecraft the attention it deserves. Therefore, I believe that item in our toolset needs to be revived. Beebe explained how the U.S. and China’s relationship changed from being big trading partners to rival superpowers vying for supremacy and control in the world.
He claimed that Washington had a tendency to swing the pendulum too far. “We overcorrect for issues that have accumulated over time, and as a result, our strategy becomes unbalanced. And I believe the threat we currently face from China is that Americans are realizing that China poses a significant geostrategic challenge to us. And we have switched from viewing the Chinese as partners, especially as trading partners, to viewing them as enemies. And there’s something in between those two that I believe we should be focusing on, because just as it can be risky for the United States to treat China as a friend and thereby risk being exploited and sacrificing American national interests, it can also be risky to treat China as an obstinate foe with whom we must wage war and with whom what are quite serious disagreements cannot be managed diplomatically.
In order to cope with the Chinese challenge to American national interests, I believe we will need to pair a tougher policy with the Chinese, once more, with a diplomatic management plan that is backed up by strength but does not only rely on force. A senior Ukrainian official claimed on Friday that leaked information about NATO’s efforts to assist his nation in preventing a Russian invasion could be “disinformation,” just one day before Beebe made his remarks.
The inability of Russia to confront NATO head-on, should it come to that, according to Beebe, may lead to the battle reaching to the point of nuclear war. In Beebe’s words, “I think we have to realize that, number one, the Russians can’t cope with an expanded NATO on a conventional military basis. They lack the conventional military power of NATO. They will rely heavily on their nuclear arsenal. Therefore, a renuclearization of Europe is likely to occur, which will be very dangerous.
