Apparently, key members of the Western foreign-policy elite are mind readers: They claim to know exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s intentions are. Prominent officials and political commentators increasingly agree that his ambitions are limitless and that Ukraine is just his first target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has said<\/a>, \u201cPutin will not stop at Ukraine.\u201d Former CIA Director David Petraeus told<\/a> CNN\u2019s Christiane Amanpour, \u201cPutin won\u2019t stop there.\u201d Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned<\/a>, \u201cLithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova may be next,\u201d and U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Jane Hartley said<\/a> that \u201canybody who thinks that Russia may stop after this \u2026 is wrong.\u201d Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis is on the same page, having said<\/a>, \u201cRussia is not going to stop. \u2026 [Putin\u2019s] obviously got plans to go further.\u201d U.S. President Joe Biden issued the exact same warning<\/a> back in December 2023, and so did NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg<\/a>. Western officials aren\u2019t sure when<\/em> Russia is going to go after NATO, but a growing chorus seems to believe<\/a> a wider war is inevitable if Moscow is not decisively defeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Walter Lippmann warned, \u201cWhen all think alike, no one thinks very much.\u201d The plain fact is that none of these people know what Putin or Russia will do if the war in Ukraine ends with Russia in control of some of Ukraine\u2019s pre-2022 territory. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else, except maybe Putin himself (and he may not know for sure). It\u2019s possible that Putin does have vast ambitions and will try to follow a costly success in Ukraine with a new attack somewhere else. But it is also entirely possible that his ambitions do not extend beyond what Russia has won\u2014at enormous cost\u2014and that he has no need or desire to gamble for more. Putin recently declared<\/a> that Russia was not going to attack NATO, for example, though he also pointed out that F-16s or other aircraft being provided to Ukraine would be legitimate targets once they are deployed there (duh). No one should take Putin\u2019s assurances at face value, but neither should one automatically assume that everything he says is a lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, those Western experts issuing lurid warnings about Putin\u2019s future actions are trying to convince Western publics (and the U.S. Congress) to pony up more aid for Ukraine and more money for European defense. To be clear, I\u2019m also in favor of continuing aid for Ukraine, and I\u2019d like to see NATO\u2019s European members bolster deterrence by building up their conventional forces. What bothers me is the reflexive threat inflation that inspires such pronouncements, along with the tendency to treat these gloomy forecasts as if they were established truths, and to portray anyone who questions them as na\u00efve, a pro-Russian stooge, or both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The belief that Putin has unlimited ambitions rests, in part, on the familiar liberal claim that all autocrats are innately aggressive and difficult to deter. The logic is simple: \u201cAll dictators seek to expand; Putin is a dictator; ergo, Putin won\u2019t stop with Ukraine. QED.\u201d This syllogism is an article of faith among liberal elites, but there is little evidence to support it. To be sure, some dictators\u2014such as Napoleon or Adolf Hitler\u2014were dangerous serial aggressors, which is why any autocrat we happen to be at odds with today inevitably gets labeled as \u201canother Hitler.\u201d But other dictators were rather well-behaved on the international stage, however egregious their conduct at home might have been. Mao Zedong was a tyrant by anyone\u2019s definition, and his policies were responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen, but Mao\u2019s only war of conquest was the\u00a0seizure<\/a>\u00a0of Tibet in 1950. Otto von Bismarck\u2019s Prussia fought three separate wars in a span of eight years, but the unified Germany forged in 1871 was a resolutely status-quo power for the rest of the century. As Stanislav Andreski\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0many years ago, many military dictatorships are peacefully inclined because going to war would require them to arm their own citizens, and doing so might threaten their hold on power. The fact that Putin is a ruthless dictator who imprisons or murders his domestic rivals and engages in other despicable acts tells us almost nothing about whether he wants to conquer a bunch of Russia\u2019s neighbors or believes he would be able to do so. And one hardly needs to be a dictator to\u00a0launch<\/a>\u00a0an unprovoked, illegal, and highly destructive war; I can think of some prominent liberal democracies that have done so on several occasions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, Russia will be in no shape to launch new wars of aggression when the war in Ukraine is finally over. U.S. intelligence believes<\/a> Russia has lost more than 300,000 troops killed or wounded in Ukraine, along with thousands of armored vehicles<\/a> and dozens of ships and aircraft<\/a>. Putin has been reluctant to order additional troop mobilizations (though he may do so now that his \u201creelection\u201d is over), both because such measures will weaken the Russian economy further and risk fueling popular discontent. Western sanctions have not hurt the Russian economy as much as the United States and its allies hoped, but the long-term economic consequences for Russia are still going to be severe<\/a>. Fighting a long conventional war is costly, and starting another one whenever the current one ends would be even more foolhardy than Putin\u2019s original decision to launch what he believed would be an easy \u201cspecial military operation.\u201d Isn\u2019t it just as likely that Russia\u2019s difficulties in Ukraine will make Putin far more cautious in the future, even if his army eventually ekes out a Pyrrhic victory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, if the main reason that Putin decided to invade was to prevent Ukraine from moving into the West\u2019s orbit and someday joining NATO, then he might be satisfied if that possibility is foreclosed in a subsequent peace agreement. States often go to war out of fear rather than greed, and if Russia\u2019s security fears diminish, its incentive to go after other countries in Europe would presumably decline as well. NATO\u2019s members should not take this possibility for granted, of course, but it is as plausible as the assumption that Putin\u2019s aims have no limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some observers in the West maintain<\/a> that NATO enlargement was irrelevant, and insist<\/a> that Putin invaded because he believes Ukrainians and Russians share deep cultural and historical roots and must therefore be politically aligned if not formally united. In this view, NATO enlargement had nothing to do with his decision to start the war; it\u2019s just an example of good old-fashioned Russian cultural imperialism. If that is the case, however, it implies that Ukraine is sui generis in Putin\u2019s thinking, and his reasons for invading (and for thinking it would be easy) do not apply anywhere else. Interestingly, this conclusion is consistent with the point that then-Ambassador William Burns made back in 2008, when he warned<\/a> Washington that \u201cUkrainian entry into NATO [was] the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).\u201d Russia reluctantly tolerated earlier rounds of NATO enlargement, but Ukraine was in a very different category. Whatever one thinks of Putin\u2019s convoluted claims<\/a> about the \u201chistorical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,\u201d he doesn\u2019t see Finland or Sweden or Poland or anyone else in the same way. The status of Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states might provide a pretext for subsequent Russian interference, but would Putin risk a direct clash of arms with NATO over countries where most of the people are not Russian and firmly hostile to being reincorporated?<\/p>\n\n\n\n My point is that if you believe Putin invaded primarily because he thinks Russians and Ukrainians are \u201cone people,\u201d then you might reasonably conclude his ambitions are limited to that one unique case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lastly, the claim that Putin is an unappeasable serial aggressor who will launch new wars if he is not totally defeated impedes efforts to end the war and spare Ukraine further damage. If you believe that total defeat is the only thing that will prevent Putin from starting a new war, then you are in effect saying that the current fighting must continue until Ukraine regains all its territory\u2014full stop. I would love to see that happen, but that outcome seems increasingly unlikely, even if additional Western support is forthcoming. And by the way, have any of those cockeyed optimists<\/a> who wrongly predicted<\/a> that Ukraine\u2019s counteroffensive<\/a> last summer would succeed apologized for their error and explained why they were wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To repeat: I\u2019m not saying that I know what Putin will do\u2014I don\u2019t. Nor do I think we should simply assume that his intentions are benign or that he will reliably uphold the status quo in Europe once the war in Ukraine is over. What I\u2019m objecting to are all those influential voices who claim to know exactly what he will do and who are basing the continued pursuit of unrealistic objectives on mere guesswork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n