Originally Posted by Chris

This isn’t new.

There’s what you might call an ‘escalation management’ faction in the White House, led by Nat Sec advisor Jake Sullivan, who are wonkish academic types that have all along been advising Biden that the world will end if Russia loses this war too badly. They have been slow-walking aid to Ukraine from the outset. The 2023 summer offensive failed because Ukraine was trained for manoeuvre operations that no Nato country would attempt without air superiority, except of course they weren’t provided air superiority fighters to go with it.

The US has provided tons of military aid useful for preventing Russia advancing but has only ever provided serious offensive firepower, such a long-range tactical missiles, (HIMARS and ATACMS) when they have been shown up by European allies who have been more willing to supply similarly lethal arms (principally, SCALP/Storm Shadow cruise missiles from France and the UK). Similarly, the US only began publically to change its position on the use of American missiles to attack positions within Russia when its European allies made a nonsense of their position by loudly declaring Ukraine should be able to do so.

It’s not that Sullivan et al want Russia to win this, so much as they are terrified of what happens if Russia loses. They have self-moderated themselves into not doing everything they can to help Ukraine because they don’t want to see Russia actually deploy tactical nuclear weapons (which Russia regularly threatens to do, but has shown absolutely no sign of actually doing) and, worse, they don’t want a defeated Russia suffer an uncontrolled fracture the way the USSR did in the early 1990s.