The Long, Destructive Shadow of Obama’s Russia Doctrine

In an interview with Times Radio in May, Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s MI6, observed that “the policy that [U.S. President Barack] Obama followed in 2014, when there was this initial Russian invasion … the way that this was handled, with the benefit of hindsight, was probably a mistake.” Dearlove was right, but he missed a salient point: The decisions made in the Obama years aren’t just something to observe through the rearview mirror. Obama’s policies continue to exercise a major influence on the course of the Russia-Ukraine war and have resulted in the unnecessary loss of tens of thousands of civilian and military lives.

Today, Ukraine is in the early stages of what its leaders say is a major counteroffensive to recapture the roughly 20 percent of its territory occupied by Russia. The task of reconquest is far from simple. Not only has Russia’s military spent many months creating strong lines of defense and digging in, but Ukraine is also handicapped by the slow and belated provision of military aid. It still lacks significant air power and long-range missiles, two categories of weapons that would make reconquest less costly.

Ukraine has already endured an eight-year hybrid war that took 14,000 lives before Russia’s massive invasion in 2022 took even more—with tens of thousands and perhaps as many as several hundred thousand people killed on both sides. Russia at one point held as much as 27 percent of Ukrainian territory before its forces collapsed on several fronts. Yet Ukraine still lacks a wide array of necessary weapons to reclaim what Russia still occupies.

In truth, all these predicaments trace back to Obama’s Russia policy. Indeed, it can be argued that Obama’s approach to Russia and Ukraine continues to influence the situation fundamentally and detrimentally on the ground and in the U.S.-led allied response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s all-out war.

Without question, Putin bears full and total responsibility for his war on Ukraine and the suffering and death his forces have inflicted. But his attack on Ukraine in 2014, his growing imperial ambitions, and his subsequent decision to obliterate the Ukrainian state have their roots in the policies and actions of the United States and its allies during the Obama years.

Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations.

For most of Putin’s years in power, the United States and the West responded inadequately to Russia’s increasingly aggressive acts, from a series of assassinations in Western countries to the occupation of other countries’ sovereign territories. It began with then U.S.-President George W. Bush’s weak reaction to Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. When Obama came into office, he compounded Bush’s mistake. Instead of pivoting to punish Russia for its aggression, he tasked his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, with launching a “reset” in relations, wiping the slate clean of Russia’s misdeeds in Georgia. More significantly, Obama scrapped the Bush administration’s plans for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, a decision Putin personally cheered.

Nor did Obama adequately grasp the scale of the looming Russian threat. During the 2012 presidential election campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney declared that Russia “is, without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that [Obama] has more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling indeed.” In response, Obama mocked his rival: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

In 2014, after Russia had already annexed Crimea, shot down MH17, and sent Russian troops and security services into combat in Ukraine’s Donbas, Obama staunchly opposed sending arms to Ukraine. He responded to the Russian invasion of Crimea with only minor sanctions targeting Russian individuals, state banks, and a handful of companies. He rejected a leading U.S. role in diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s war, delegating responsibility to France and Germany. While it makes logical sense to expect European countries to take charge of security on their continent, these countries lack the United States’ geopolitical heft, and Putin has never accepted them as peers of or negotiating partners for Russia. What’s more, these two European countries were heavily dependent on trade with Russia and showed little interest in the security of Eastern European countries. Most damaging was Obama’s clear statement that Ukraine was not a U.S. strategic priority.

Speaking with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas, Obama emphasized the limits of his commitment to Ukraine. As Goldberg wrote: “Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.” Goldberg then cited Obama as saying, “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” In other words, a U.S. president all but acknowledged Ukraine as a Russian client state, telegraphing to the leader of an aggressive, revisionist power that the United States would stand down if Russia were to widen its war. Moreover, the doctrine of Russian escalation dominance—that the Kremlin would always be willing to exercise superior power to get its way in Ukraine, whereas the United States would not—became the governing principle of U.S. policy. This principle echoes to this day, holding back U.S. support for Ukraine.

During a recent interview with CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, Obama doubled down on his weak response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine in 2014. “We challenged Putin with the tools that we had at the time, given where Ukraine was,” Obama claimed. It’s true that in the early days after Russia’s shock invasion, Ukraine’s degraded armed forces were not ready to fight back to reclaim occupied territory. But Obama neglected to mention that within months, Ukraine had significantly rebuilt its armed forces, in large measure aided by the heroism of volunteer fighters who enlisted by the tens of thousands in a vast civic movement to protect their country. And that means that the most important tool Obama had at that time was to give these fighters lethal weapons, which he steadfastly refused to deploy for the rest of his presidency.

Criticism of Obama’s stance on Ukraine—or, for that matter, the stances of then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel or then-French President Francois Hollande—is not a matter of hindsight. Distinguished voices in the foreign-policy community and the U.S. Congress, including late Republican presidential candidate John McCain, called for broader sanctions and urged Obama to arm Ukraine from the outset of Russia’s 2014 aggression. Yet despite congressional resolutions calling for such aid, Obama opposed sending Ukraine weapons and invoked the doctrine of Russian escalation dominance. Instead, throughout the Obama years, U.S. aid was limited to hundreds of millions of dollars in non-lethal equipment and military training, the latter largely spent on U.S. personnel.

Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations. Although Donald Trump behaved badly toward Ukraine by trying to enlist Kyiv in his efforts to weaken presidential rival Joe Biden, he greenlighted the shipment of Javelin anti-tank weapons in 2017 and 2019. Nonetheless, years of fierce debate merely over sending Javelins stifled discussion of other weapons needed by Ukraine, including air and missile defense, battle tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles. These could have made Ukraine more secure before 2022, and some of them are still not in Ukraine’s arsenal today.

To his credit, Biden advocated arming Ukraine with defensive weapons when he was vice president under Obama. But when he became president himself, Biden brought many of the architects of Obama’s timid approach to Russia back into the government. As a result of their influence, from the moment in the fall of 2021 when the U.S. government knew Putin was planning to invade to the start of the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the United States lost a crucial window in which to provide Ukraine significant new weapons and the training to use them. Instead of much-needed howitzers, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems (such as HIMARS), and heavy ordnance, Washington doled out modest assistance enabling not much more than partisan resistance.

Even when the Biden administration became convinced Russia would wage war around October 2021, it still restricted aid to a meager $60 million worth of small arms and ammunition. Only in December 2021 did Biden finally approve a $200 million shipment of shoulder-fired missiles and other lethal and non-lethal aid. The package included 300 Javelin anti-tank missiles that arrived in January, mere weeks before Russian forces began their multifront assault. And still, there were no heavy weapons in sight.

To be sure, the Biden administration and its NATO allies have reassessed—and in some measure departed from—Obama’s idea of Russian escalation dominance. Yet the lingering influence of the doctrine has contributed to the long-standing denial of long-range missiles, and it has delayed the provision of combat aircraft to Ukraine.

Indeed, the doctrine of Russian escalation dominance persists in a more limited form to this day. Biden’s continued invocations of Putin’s potential willingness to use nuclear weapons is proof of its influence, as is the United States’ concern that Ukraine may take the war to Russian territory. There is no question that Washington should not ignore Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. But fear of Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons should never paralyze efforts to arm Ukraine adequately. Putin’s use of nuclear weapons is highly unlikely, especially now that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has explicitly warned Putin about using them in Ukraine. Second, it is for Ukrainians to determine for themselves their strategy of war and the risks they are prepared to take. As for Russia’s alleged nuclear escalation dominance, the United States has a familiar doctrine of its own to counter it: nuclear deterrence. If Biden no longer believes mutual deterrence protects us from nuclear escalation, he may as well submit to Putin now, let him restore the Russian Empire, and allow Moscow to project its power into the heart of Europe.

Regrettably, the abiding influence and long afterlife of Obama’s Russia doctrine will soon result in the further unnecessary loss of many thousands of Ukrainian lives. Had Ukraine been systematically armed by the West in the eight years after Russia launched its hybrid war in 2014, it is likely Ukrainians would have better held the line during Russia’s February 2022 invasion. It is even possible Ukraine could have dealt Russia an early decisive blow to its initial advances. Had a well-armed Ukraine fought back with full force, Russia’s massive territorial gains could have been avoided, and we might have been spared such Russian-perpetrated atrocities as Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol.

It is, of course, possible that no policy could have deterred Putin from taking Ukrainian lives, razing civilian homes, destroying civilian infrastructure, and seizing Ukrainian territory. But Putin’s rising imperial ambitions and the high costs Ukrainians are paying for them are at least in part the fruit of Obama administration policies that continue to exert a powerful influence to this very day.