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The Virtue of Ruling Out Bad Policy Options

When the U.S. isn't willing or able to do certain things overseas, it gives nothing away to acknowledge as much.

Nikolas Gvosdev faults U.S. policymakers for refusing to rule out policy options that will never be used:

This tendency is also visible in U.S. policy toward the Ukraine crisis. No American politician wants to be seen as an “appeaser” in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. The fledgling coalition government in Ukraine has been interested in receiving much more financial help from the West, including both military aid and a guaranteed path to membership in NATO.

Neither significant economic and military aid nor NATO prospects are in the cards. Yet U.S. politicians, especially Vice President Joe Biden during his recent visit to Kiev, are unwilling to level with the Ukrainians, at least in public, about what precisely they can expect from the West.

As Gvosdev explains, it is wrong for our policymakers to create the impression that some policy options haven’t been ruled when they have already been rejected in practice. This misleads the would-be client, and it allows the administration to avoid having to defend the actions that it actually intends to take. There is no point in maintaining ambiguity when some policy options make no sense. If aid for Ukraine is going to be minimal, which it likely will be, it does no one any favors to keep pretending that Ukraine might one day be able to expect large amounts of money or weapons from the U.S. Since Ukraine is never going to be admitted into NATO, the U.S. should make clear that membership is out of the question. Supposedly keeping those options “on the table” when they aren’t going to happen gives false encouragement to Kiev, and does nothing to change Russian behavior for the better.

Saying that “all options are on the table” is something that our politicians do in order to seem “tough” and “serious” when talking about a foreign policy issue, but it really just confirms that they haven’t given much serious thought to the implications and consequences of some of those options. If they had, they would have already realized that some of the options are terrible for the U.S. and shouldn’t be considered. When the U.S. isn’t willing or able to do certain things overseas, it gives nothing away to acknowledge as much.

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