What could be better than peace to end a long-running war? An end to suffering and destruction, a time to take stock and repair the shattered landscape, a time to grieve for the fallen but also to find new hope.
It’s an easy sale. Unless that is, it’s a bad peace and delivers on none of its promises because one of the combatants has no intention of stopping.
As my CEPA colleagues Irina Borodan and Andrei Soldatov point out, Putin’s aggression is not merely about Ukraine. It never was. It is about the remaking of Europe in a Russia-friendly image.
A quick “peace” between Russia and Ukraine will not address Russia’s escalating shadow war against Europe’s democracies. And this murky but societal-level conflict will come at a price (think of major European airports repeatedly closed by drones). This cost has been underestimated if it has been assessed at all.
Lose Ukraine, and Western Europe loses its protection against renewed and more targeted Russian aggression. That is why support for Ukraine leading to a Russian defeat is not only a moral obligation, but also a sound financial path forward.
A Russian-Ukrainian “peace” deal would not bring peace, but it would leave NATO with decades of elevated defense costs at a level of 4%–5% of GDP, and that would have significant long-term economic implications.
Putin will not last forever, but without regime change, he will pick a successor who will continue his historical mission of imperialist conquest and oppression.
This would not be a return to a Cold War, which would be relatively predictable and well-ordered, but would instead be a lukewarm war. Today’s conflict with drones, social media, sabotage attacks, and outsourcing to criminal networks, migration streams, and other means is a profoundly different threat.
The Cold War created a hard barrier, the Iron Curtain, between NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact, and the situation was far more controlled than a new direct sub-threshold war with Russia. Even if the USSR then aided terrorism, such as Baader-Meinhof in West Germany and the IRA in Northern Ireland, it had a limited and regional impact. Modern shadow warfare reaches much more deeply into complex societies reliant on vulnerable infrastructure.
If NATO members are to prepare, they must anticipate the huge cost and decades of struggle with a well-resourced enemy whose primary purpose now appears to be self-preservation at home and the export of chaos abroad.
If the Putin regime still stands 25 years from now, the cost to NATO would at least be an additional 2% of national wealth annually to meet the threat.
This is what economists term an opportunity cost — NATO states forced to pay for (mostly unproductive) defense outlays are forgoing the chance to make other choices. The money could instead have been used for tax relief, education, investments, or other worthy causes.
NATO’s members currently account for more than 40% of the world’s GDP. The additional 2% spent on defense would be in the ballpark of at least $520bn annually, or more than $13 trillion over 25 years.
To give a sense of scale, global corporate investment in artificial intelligence (AI) was about $250bn last year.
NATO and its members are meanwhile in economic, technological, and research-driven competition with China. The level of direct competition with China may vary across NATO countries, but the $13 trillion poured into resisting Russia would be money diverted away from keeping up with China. It would be money removed from member states’ economies and represents a waste of capital rather than an investment for the future.
Underestimating the long-term consequences of 20, 30, or 40 years of heightened defense spending at 5% of GDP is a significant misstep and puts the current rate of expenditure in context (all Western aid to Ukraine so far totals around $450bn — that’s less than one year of additional NATO-wide expenditure for a lukewarm war).
The upfront cost to ensure that Russia is defeated in Ukraine, with a potential regime change in Russia, is marginal in comparison.
The alternative would leave China the winner by allowing it to grow its forces, influence, and technological superiority. Even as NATO burns trillions of dollars upholding deterrence along a conflict line from Kirkenes to the Caucasus against a Kremlin regime that was saved by the bell as it was close to down and out.
Jan Kallberg, Ph.D., LL.M., is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a George Washington University faculty member. Follow him at cyberdefense.com and @Cyberdefensecom.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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