Can 'Realists' and 'Hawks' Agree? Half-measures and Compromises on the Road to Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

The debate on the failure of the efforts to avert the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is dominated by two narratives presented as mutually exclusive. On the one hand, 'hawks' chastise the West for failing to forcefully confront Russian adventurism earlier. On the other hand, 'realists' criticise the West's overreach in efforts to incorporate Ukraine into the Western structures. Both views implicitly contend that there was only one way to prevent the war. This paper argues that those positions are, in fact, not incompatible and failure to prevent war lies in the habitual mismatch between strategic goals and resources, implicitly recognised by both sides of the debate. Ambitious goals and meagre resources constituted a middle-of-the-road compromise, inadvertently increasing the risk of the war by encouraging Russia to take the opportunity to challenge the West's weakly backed ambitions. In an attempt to draw some tentative lessons, the paper concludes by exploring some hypotheses on why such mismatches between goals and resources occur and persist.