Why domestic pressure is pushing the US to abandon Ukraine

Before coming to the point and answering the question as to whether the West is in the process of abandoning Ukraine or not, there is a need to delve into the general geostrategic thinking of the United States, the role of similar conflicts historically, and then the origins as to how and why the current Ukraine war was fought.

This geostrategic thinking is often found deeply embedded in the ideas of contestation of power and the influence of realism in geopolitics. Even though these ideas may be publicly communicated through constructivism – to soften the naked cynicism of realism as a barrier to engineering public consent because of the selfish pursuit of increased power, which is eased by framing the struggle in humanitarian terms.

The Ukraine conflict was an opportunistic gamble by the US to achieve its geopolitical goals of weakening and containing Russia as a challenger and creating a greater dependency of Europe on US energy supplies and military power projection.

However, the expected results have yet to materialise due to the asymmetry in Ukraine's hard power capabilities in an attritional war with Russia.

At the present stage, Ukraine has become a potential political liability leading to the 2024 US presidential elections and also the launch of Israel's war on Gaza.

For these reasons, the US is likely set to abandon Ukraine in the near future and before the November 2024 elections.

Geopolitics has played a significant role in the strategic thinking of global Anglo powers, and realism in particular, in terms of foreign and security policy thought around great power competition.

It was explicitly illustrated in the thinking of British academic Mackinder at the turn of the 20th century in creating the narrative of the 'heartland' (Eurasia and the continental powers) and the 'rimland' (maritime powers) as a competition for global dominance.

It was later developed by political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski and adapted to a US-centric perspective, which placed Ukraine as a key piece in leveraging the power and influence of the Eurasian heartland.

This is most definitely an opportunity to use Ukraine to increase US power and influence at the expense of Russia and even the European Union.

The geostrategic imperatives articulated by Brzezinski in 1997 and necessary to develop and maintain hegemony were: keep client states protected and obedient, keep vassal states dependent and obedient, and prevent any single power or block of powers from ever being able to challenge US hegemony.

The US is primarily a maritime and air power, not a land power (beyond the US mainland and the Americas), and all of these components and thinking are important in shaping and determining the response to opportunities and threats to spreading or maintaining its power and influence, historically and contemporarily.

During the Cold War, one of the emergent challengers to US hegemony occurred when the political regime of a client state was overthrown, in the case of Iran.

The ability to project sufficient land power capability and capacity with a facade of domestic political legitimacy would be extremely problematic.

Hence, the most practical option for the US was to employ a proxy local land power in their place.

The Iraq-Iran War raged from 1980 to 1988. The start of the war came one year after the Iranian Revolution overthrew the West-friendly Shah and continued until just before the First Gulf War between Iraq and the US-led coalition. During the conflict, the US and its allies supplied and supported Iraq to wage a war of attrition on Iran.

The indirect and yet overt support for Iraq has some similarities and differences with the current Ukraine War.

In the context of the transformation of the global order away from a unipolar order towards a multipolar one, the US has lost its absolute hegemony but still maintains a relative one for now.

This had created a dilemma: to either manage the decline or to challenge it. A RAND Report from 2019 and Biden's Foreign Policy article both allude to the policy of challenging the decline and re-establishing US global leadership.

Various US' investments' in Ukraine over the years, and especially after its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, were aimed at cultivating a more US-friendly and Russia-unfriendly environment. The result was to turn Ukraine into a geopolitical shatterbelt, which is a weak and/or divided country contested by two or more powers.

As noted by various theoreticians on the art of war, any military intervention is just politics by any other means.

The relative loss of power and influence to China in the Indo-Pacific, Iran in the Middle East and Russia in Europe has initiated a backlash by the US to isolate and contain the rise of other nations.

The US operates from a position of weakness owing to the various debilitating crises and shocks. For example, recurring economic crises, growing foreign debt, demoralisation in the US armed forces, declining international prestige and reputation, and social (cultural) and political splits have been widening in US society.

The logic and objective of motivation and opportunity of the Ukraine conflict was to confront Russia as a challenger state and to create dependency of the EU and its obedience as a vassal state.

This was already understood before the first shots were fired in anger – when the US launched a misinformation campaign aimed at reversing Moscow's relations and influence in Europe and weakening and containing Russia and Russian sources of power and influence.

However, a series of miscalculations have been made by opposing sides of the conflict.

Firstly, Russia's underestimation of the initial Ukrainian will to resist and fight its forces. This created much optimism in Washington, which simultaneously tried to paint Russia as being a military threat to all 'democracies' and yet disorganised and weak, even possibly on the verge of state collapse.

It is not the first or last time the West has made such overly optimistic and flawed projections in history. For example, the Allied logic for invading Gallipoli (Gelibolu in Turkish) Peninsula in 1915 contained such falsehoods.

Russia's weakness was seen as its economic strength and not its military power, which explains the presumed and hyped effects of economic warfare on Russia. The US-led bloc believed that 'economic pain' would bring Russia to her knees and change Moscow's strategic interests in Ukraine.

However, even a raft of economic sanctions have yet to have the desired and presumed effects on the Russian economy. Russia was not isolated in the international community, while the European Union's combined GDP fell (from five percent more than the US five years ago to some 50 per cent less now) and a loss of US$1.5 trillion because of the sanctions it imposed on Russia.

The various military 'wonder weapons' – such as TOW, HIMARS etc – failed to bring the promised Ukrainian military victory over Russia, and the failure of the much-hyped summer 2023 counter-offensive seemed to be the beginning of the end of unlimited support for a Ukrainian victory.

There has been a noticeable evolution and change in the Western mainstream media headlines from an 'inevitable' Ukrainian victory to that of a stalemate while ignoring recent Russian territorial gains.

Battles can be won or lost on the battlefield military, whereas the outcomes of wars are determined by politics.

Türkiye's attempt to politically end the war in April 2022 was sabotaged politically by the US – something that is being increasingly corroborated by key people – because of the belief in a military victory over Russia at that time.

That time has passed, and the West has become increasingly distant and elusive in their 'never-ending' support for Ukraine as the financial and, more importantly, the political cost of continuing the war mounts for the US and the European Union.

The most influential factor in the US abandoning its Ukrainian project, which was always an opportunistic gamble rather than a strategic imperative for them, is next year's presidential elections.

The Ukraine conflict is now a political liability for the Biden regime and the Democratic party as public opinion has started to swing noticeably against continued US involvement in such "endless wars".

An added complication has been Israel's brutal war on Palestinians and the unrestrained use of excessive force in ethnically cleansing besieged Gaza.

These two actions are further alienating the US-led West from the Global South and weakening Washington's credibility, world standing and influence.

There are now two wars to fight, both of which are out of the US's ability to determine the outcomes in their favour.

The politics, finance and logistics of these two simultaneous events – in addition to increased tensions with Iran in the Middle East and China in the Indo-Pacific – have created an imperial overstretch for the US empire, which has already been facing diminished capability and capacity to politically and militarily manage events.

Israel, unlike Ukraine, is a strategic issue for US mainstream establishment politics.

The increasing alienation of the Democrats' constituency leading to a critical election, and the alleged weaponisation of the legal and justice system to exclude rivals – namely former US president Donald Trump – a financially and politically weakened and divided Europe, combined with diminished hopes of victory in Ukraine shall change Washington's foreign and security policy significantly. As it has done in the past, the US shall abandon its client state to its own devices and rather soon.

The US may seek to delegate some minimal financial responsibility to the EU in its place, owing to the political risk attached to continuing to support Ukraine financially.

Ukraine is clearly a political liability now. Mainstream mass media narratives have changed, and Western mainstream politics is much colder to Ukraine and its leader Zelenskyy.

For all practical purposes, the US has pushed Ukraine to the deep end and is about to leave it there.