Leaked documents reveal US troops are already in Ukraine to fight Washington’s War to End Authoritarianism

(Originally published April 12 in “What in the World“) A leaked Pentagon document reveals that U.S. troops have already been deployed in Ukraine, along with those of other key allies.

The document is only one of many ostensibly top-secret bombshells published on Twitter and other social media networks this month. They include revelations that the U.S. has been spying on South Korea and other allies and that the German army is woefully underequipped. Also among the leaks is an appraisal that Ukrainian air defenses are depleted to the point that they risk allowing the Russian air force to take control of the skies just as Ukraine forges ahead with an extraordinarily well-telegraphed spring counteroffensive that the Pentagon worries is doomed from the start.

The March 23 document lists several countries that have inserted special forces into Ukraine, including France with 15, Latvia with 17, the Netherlands with one, United Kingdom with 50, and the United States with 14. British and Korean officials have said the leaked documents had been altered to include inaccuracies and may be part of a misinformation effort. The Pentagon is meanwhile frantically searching for whoever leaked all this inaccurate misinformation.

The presence of U.S. forces in Ukraine violates a pledge U.S. President Joe Biden’s promise not to send U.S. forces into Ukraine, but follows reports last May that the White House was considering sending special forces to Kyiv to protect the U.S. embassy there.

Putting troops into the conflict is an escalation that could prompt Russian President Vladimir Putin to accuse the U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of entering the conflict directly and thereby justifying wider attacks against NATO.

But the troops can also serve as a potent tool for maintaining public support for the war, which after dragging on for more than a year has shown signs of waning. As this newsletter observed last May, to keep Americans sufficiently outraged to justify continued investment in expelling Russia, the White House will need a Netflix-worthy cliffhanger, i.e., some outrageous plot twist like a U.S.S. Maine or Gulf of Tonkin incident.

So far, it hasn’t needed one: Biden has gradually removed his earliest restrictions on aid to Ukraine. Last May, Biden caved on allowing shipments of M177 howitzers to Ukraine. By the end of the month, Biden had also reversed his refusal to supply Ukraine with M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, a reversal so significant that Biden took the trouble of explaining his decision to The Times. In December, Biden promised Ukraine a Patriot missile battery after Ukraine showed that, even without long-range American weapons, it had the capability to organize attacks inside Russia. In January, Biden followed the UK by relenting on sending battle tanks, a move that cleared the way for Germany to do the same. All that’s left are attack drones and long-range Atacms missiles.

Clearly, the Russian downing of a U.S. drone over the Black Sea didn’t sufficiently outrage Americans. If Putin won’t provide something more dramatic, the U.S. need only put Americans in harm’s way. A special forces deployment in Kyiv would do just that. As Russian artillery continue to pound cities in eastern Ukraine, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv is well within striking distance.

Even if U.S. forces are tasked only with guarding the embassy, anyone who’s lived near a U.S. embassy knows that the resident Marines and other military personnel regularly venture beyond the embassy to exercise, shop and otherwise live their lives. Anyone who thinks U.S. personnel in Kyiv will confine themselves to the relative safety of the embassy is deluded. And once one American is shot or killed in a missile strike, restraint will be in short supply.

NATO members continue to prepare for the worst. Romania, a staging ground for supplies into Ukraine and host to a permanent U.S. troop presence, says it hopes to buy F-35 fighter jets to bolster its defenses.

But the center of this conflict may not be Europe at all, Singapore’s Permanent Foreign Secretary Bilahari Kausikan argues in a new article in Foreign Affairs, but rather China. Kausikan writes that the U.S. strategy in Ukraine is, as this newsletter has posited, merely a proxy war meant to mire Russia down and sap its ability to wage war elsewhere. After all, Kausikan writes with echoes of Henry Kissinger, Ukraine is of little real strategic importance to the U.S.

Instead, Washington’s larger goal in Ukraine is to demonstrate to Beijing the level of American commitment to its allies against any aggression, i.e., Taiwan. “Although it was certainly not planned that way,” Kausikan writes, “the war has made Ukraine an unwitting proxy in U.S.-Chinese rivalry, perhaps the first proxy of the current phase of great-power competition and conflict.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Kausikan is so optimistic. He has little choice. Singapore sits uncomfortably betwixt China and the U.S.: its people linked to China by ethnicity and language, its defense dependent on the U.S. security umbrella, its economy dependent on trade and investment with China. Singapore sits between a proverbial rock and a hard place.

So Kausikan hopefully theorizes that the economic linkages of trade and investment between China and the U.S. mean their rivalry won’t devolve into a Cold War like that between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. After all, he points out, in 2022 bilateral trade between the two nations amounted to a “staggering” $690 billion.

The same argument has long underpinned hopes that China would never resort to force to reunify Taiwan: there was simply too much money at stake. And from tiny Singapore, China-U.S. bilateral trade may seem like a relationship too valuable to squander. But a single year of trade between the world’s two largest economies pales in size to how much the U.S. budgets for defense—$858 billion for 2023 alone. Put in that perspective, it’s much clearer where U.S. priorities lie.

Kausikan argues that China has too much economic leverage for Washington to decouple from it. “Like it or not, China and the United States must accept the risks and vulnerabilities of remaining connected to each other. China and the United States will compete and do so robustly, but they will compete within the single system of which they are both vital parts.” China, after all, poses no existential threat to the U.S. and doesn’t seek to upturn the U.S.-led international order, Kausikan argues.

And while this newsletter has argued the same about China’s ambitions vis-a-vis the U.S., it also seems clear that Beijing realizes it cannot increase its influence without actively reducing Washington’s. In March, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a U.S. Senate committee that Beijing has concluded that any increase in its own influence will have to come at the expense of America’s.

That’s not because Beijing pines for America’s destruction, but because it has correctly read the tea leaves in Washington. Anti-China hawks in Washington are determined to decouple with China, however much Kausikan hopes that might not be feasible. And while China may pose no real threat to the U.S. itself, Kausikan brushes aside the fact that in foreign policy, U.S. diplomats tend to think of American prestige abroad as an extension of American security at home.

Kausikan seems to believe, on the contrary, that the U.S. has somehow cast off the ideological blinders that led it into quagmires in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The news that the U.S. has already put special forces into Ukraine ought to dispel that notion. Just because the U.S. has no real strategic interests in Ukraine doesn’t mean ideology won’t see its proxy war there morph into a direct conflict with Russia—indeed, this newsletter has been arguing since before the invasion that that was precisely what has been unfolding.

Washington still has an unwavering tendency to fear any threat to American influence or hegemony as a threat against “freedom” that poses a direct peril to America itself. Sure, it’s wrong. Sure, it’s hypocritical. But history is rife with examples of where the U.S. has selectively applied this ideological double-standard of democracy and sacrificed American lives to defend it. Indeed, the U.S. keeps pursuing this strategy of military intervention on ideological grounds despite evidence of diminishing returns.

So, Kausikan is absolutely right that Washington needn’t gear up for a fight to the death against China. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it won’t.