The High Cost of Appeasement: How Two Decades of Failed Deterrence Led to Ukraine and What It Means for Future Conflicts

The war in Ukraine didn’t begin in February 2022. It was the inevitable culmination of more than two decades of Western appeasement that emboldened Vladimir Putin to believe he could redraw Europe’s borders by force. As the world grapples with rising authoritarianism from China to Iran, the lessons from our failures in deterring Putin have never been more urgent.

A Pattern of Aggression, A Pattern of Inaction

Since 1999, Putin has systematically tested Western resolve with increasingly brazen acts of aggression, each time receiving little more than rhetorical condemnation. The pattern is disturbingly consistent: Putin claims self-defense, accepts massive casualties, and destroys cities that resist—a playbook he first developed in Chechnya and has refined ever since.

In Chechnya (1999-2009), Putin’s forces killed an estimated 14,000 Russian troops and 50,000 Chechen fighters and civilians while demolishing Grozny. Presidents Clinton and Bush continued meeting with Putin throughout these wars, offering little beyond “finger wagging” as punishment.

The 2008 invasion of Georgia followed the same script. After NATO pledged to bring Georgia into the alliance, Putin launched a “peace enforcement operation” that ethnically cleansed 200,000 civilians and effectively annexed Georgia’s northern provinces. President Bush criticized the invasion but took no meaningful action.

In 2014, Putin seized Crimea and launched the Russo-Ukrainian War in the Donbas. The Obama Administration imposed limited sanctions that Russia “adroitly evaded.” When Putin intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015, brutally destroying Aleppo in a manner reminiscent of Grozny, the West again stood by as humanitarian groups tallied civilian deaths and accused Moscow of war crimes.

Each time, Putin achieved his geopolitical objectives. Each time, the West’s response convinced him that the risk-reward calculus favored further aggression.

The Missed Warning Signs of 2021

While the Biden Administration hosted its Summit for Democracy in December 2021, proclaiming a commitment to “defending against authoritarianism,” Putin was already preparing his largest military gamble yet. The warning signs were unmistakable for those willing to see them.

In June 2021, Russian naval forces conducted exercises off Hawaii, practicing “destroying the aircraft carrier strike group of the mock enemy” and delivering simulated cruise missile strikes against “critically important” military infrastructure. Russian bombers came within 20-30 nautical miles of the Hawaiian coast. The Pentagon’s response was baffling silence—a reflection of what one analyst called “the atrophy of U.S. nuclear warfighting and crisis management skills.”

That July, Putin published a new Russian military doctrine that declared permanent conflict with the West over values and way of life. The document portrayed Russia as morally superior to a “decaying West” that couldn’t even distinguish between men and women. Simultaneously, Putin released his historical essay on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” declaring that “the concept of ‘Ukraine is not Russia’ was no longer an option” and that there was “a need for the ‘anti-Russia’ concept which we will never accept.”

During the Sea Breeze 2021 exercise in the Black Sea, Russia conducted an extensive information warfare campaign, including cyber attacks on Ukrainian military websites and provocative intercepts of Western naval vessels. Russian forces fired warning shots at HMS Defender, with Putin later boasting that “even if we would have sunk that ship, this would not have provoked a world war, because the other side knows they cannot win such a war.”

Perhaps most tellingly, at the October 2021 Valdai Discussion Club, Putin explicitly outlined his grievances about NATO expansion and declared that Ukraine’s drift toward the West posed “a serious threat to the Russian state” that might be “fraught with Ukraine losing its statehood.”

The Fatal Miscalculation

Despite these clear signals, the Biden Administration proceeded to embrace Ukraine more closely than ever before. In September 2021, President Biden met with Ukrainian President Zelensky and announced $60 million in new security assistance. The November 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership went even further, explicitly supporting Ukraine’s “right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.”

This was a catastrophic miscalculation. As historian Robert Service noted, the Charter was “the last straw” that triggered Putin’s invasion preparations. The Biden Administration was essentially offering Ukraine encouragement about NATO membership while having no intention of actually admitting Ukraine to the alliance or defending it with NATO forces.

The timing was particularly disastrous. The administration was simultaneously conducting its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan—a “blitzkrieg withdrawal” that Putin interpreted as evidence of American weakness and declining resolve. The message to Putin was clear: an America defeated by the Taliban was unlikely to take on a nuclear-armed Russia over a non-allied country.

Lessons for Deterring Future Authoritarians

The Ukraine crisis offers critical lessons for deterring authoritarian powers worldwide, particularly as China contemplates Taiwan and Iran expands its regional influence.

First, credibility is everything. Authoritarian leaders carefully study Western responses to their probing actions. Every weak response to aggression is interpreted as permission for escalation. When the West failed to impose meaningful costs for Putin’s actions in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria, it signaled that military force could achieve geopolitical objectives without prohibitive consequences.

Second, economic sanctions alone are insufficient. Putin had years to prepare Russia’s economy for Western sanctions, achieving greater economic independence and learning to circumvent financial restrictions. Authoritarian regimes view sanctions as a cost of doing business, not a deterrent to aggression.

Third, nuclear weapons fundamentally alter the deterrence equation. Nuclear-armed authoritarian powers can escalate conflicts while constraining Western responses through implicit or explicit nuclear threats. This creates what strategists call “escalation dominance”—the ability to control the pace and intensity of conflict.

Fourth, information warfare is now integral to military operations. Putin’s systematic disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, and manipulation of refugee flows demonstrate how modern authoritarians combine traditional military force with hybrid warfare tactics to destabilize democratic societies.

Fifth, alliance commitments must be credible and clearly defined. The Biden Administration’s mixed signals about Ukraine—encouraging NATO aspirations while having no intention of defending Ukraine militarily—created the worst of both worlds: provoking Russian action without providing credible deterrence.

The China Challenge

These lessons are immediately relevant to the growing challenge from China. Beijing is watching carefully how the West responds to Russian aggression, drawing conclusions about American resolve and alliance credibility. Chinese leaders are particularly attentive to:

• Whether NATO unity holds under sustained pressure
• How effectively Western economies can absorb the costs of confronting authoritarian powers
• Whether the United States maintains the military capacity and political will for sustained great power competition
• How alliance commitments to vulnerable partners like Taiwan are defined and defended

If Putin’s invasion succeeds in fragmenting Western unity or demonstrating that authoritarian powers can achieve territorial gains through military force, it will embolden Chinese ambitions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

A New Framework for Deterrence

Deterring 21st-century authoritarian powers requires moving beyond the Cold War playbook. Instead of relying primarily on economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, democratic nations need what one analyst calls a “hedgehog strategy”—helping vulnerable partners develop sufficient defensive capabilities to make aggression costly and uncertain.

This means providing allies and partners with advanced air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, cyber defense capabilities, and intelligence sharing arrangements that make territorial conquest prohibitively expensive. It also requires developing new forms of economic interdependence that create immediate costs for aggression, rather than the delayed and often ineffective sanctions imposed after conflicts begin.

Most importantly, it requires clarity about what the democratic world will and will not defend. Ambiguous commitments invite miscalculation by both adversaries and partners. If democratic nations cannot credibly commit to defending a partner’s sovereignty, they should not encourage that partner to take provocative actions that invite retaliation.

The Stakes Ahead

The war in Ukraine represents a turning point in the post-Cold War international order. Putin’s gamble is not merely about Ukrainian territory—it’s about whether authoritarian powers can use military force to overturn the rules-based international system that has prevailed since 1945.

If Putin succeeds in breaking Ukraine’s resistance and fracturing Western unity, other authoritarian leaders will draw obvious conclusions. China will be emboldened to move against Taiwan. Iran will accelerate its regional expansion. Smaller powers will conclude that aligning with authoritarian regimes offers better protection than relying on democratic allies.

The cost of deterrence is always high, but the cost of failed deterrence is catastrophic. Twenty-three years of appeasing Putin led directly to the largest war in Europe since 1945. The international community cannot afford to repeat these mistakes with other rising authoritarian powers.

The question now is whether democratic nations have learned from their failures in time to prevent the next catastrophe. The answer will determine whether the 21st century belongs to democratic values or authoritarian power.