“The Impracticality of Pragmatism” by Janar Takis
Attribution: The ACO wishes to thank Janar Takis for contributing his illuminating article.
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If you think wars are won by substituting strength with weakness or action with inaction, you may be well suited to lead NATO.
Consider comments by Mark Rutte after Russian jets violated Estonian airspace. Shooting them down, he argued, would show weakness. The “stronger,” more “proportionate” response, he argued, was to gently guide them out.
For those of us who understand the threat Russia poses, including myself writing from Estonia, this approach is aggravating. It seems cowardly. Yet dismissing it as incompetence would be a mistake. NATO’s leaders are highly experienced and credentialed. The real problem is the philosophy guiding them.
That philosophy is pragmatism.
By pragmatism, I do not mean the healthy habit of being practical. To be practical is to act in ways that actually achieve one’s goals, which requires adherence to principles—fundamental truths that integrate our knowledge and guide long-range, rational decision-making. Pragmatism, in contrast, rejects principles in favor of short-term calculations. It assumes that crises can be navigated by choosing the “safe” option day by day without confronting the wider context or the nature of the enemy. It elevates the immediate fear of the moment above the logic of the long term.
For decades NATO policy toward Russia has followed this approach.
In the 1990s, Russia was treated not as a rising dictatorship but as a partner to be managed. In the 2000s, NATO responded cautiously to wars in Chechnya and Georgia. In the 2010s, Europe increased dependence on Russian gas, believing economic ties would foster stability. In the 2020s, pragmatism remains the operating system of Western policy.
NATO leaders have prided themselves on cautiously weighing every risk and avoiding every escalation. Olaf Scholz spoke constantly of Besonnenheit, or level-headed restraint. The Biden administration explicitly framed its policy as “escalation management”—a balancing act designed to support Ukraine just enough without “provoking” Russia.
Four years into the war, we can judge this strategy by its results. NATO’s pragmatism has not contained the war. It has expanded it.
In 2022, the “pragmatic” decision was to delay supplying tanks such as Leopards and Abrams, supposedly to avoid provoking Putin. Yet this focus on his immediate reaction ignored the consequences of Western inaction. Russia used the delay to construct the massive Surovikin defensive line of trenches and minefields. By the time tanks arrived, they were far less useful. Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive stalled and the war dragged on with enormous casualties.
The same hesitation repeated itself in the skies. For years, the United States restricted ATACMS missiles and Germany refused to provide Taurus systems capable of striking Russian territory. The justification was always the same: avoid escalation that might lead to a wider war.
The result? With Russia masterfully exploiting our fear of not being “proportionate,” their aircraft could launch massive bombs from bases just across the border with little risk. Ukraine absorbed billions in infrastructure damage while NATO congratulated itself for restraint.
Meanwhile, the prolonged war gave Russia time to strengthen its position. Moscow retooled its economy for total war and had time to court Iran for drones, North Korea for artillery and men, and China for machine tools and microchips. NATO’s caution did not prevent escalation. It enabled a broader authoritarian alignment stretching from Europe to the Pacific.
But what about the nuclear threat? Did restraint avoid World War III?
In practice, NATO has already crossed nearly every single one of Putin’s “red lines.” Western countries have sent HIMARS, modern tanks, and F-16s. Ukraine even conducted operations inside Russia’s Kursk region in 2024. Nuclear weapons were never used.
Why? Because Putin, despite his rhetoric, is an insecure autocrat who understands deterrence. Leaders like him do not launch suicidal wars when confronted with strength. But they do push forward when they perceive weakness.
For four years, Western leaders feared a hypothetical escalation and delayed decisive action. In doing so they helped create a far more dangerous situation: a hardened Russia supported by authoritarian allies.
This outcome was not inevitable. A principled strategy would have recognized the nature of the regime from the beginning. Dictatorial aggression cannot be “managed.” It must be defeated. If you ignore a growing threat to feel comfortable today, you are only compounding the price you will have to pay tomorrow. In war, there is no prize for dragging out a conflict. If NATO had opened its armories and provided decisive capabilities in 2022—when Russia was chaotic and broken—the war would long be over.
Instead the philosophy of pragmatism has guided Western policy to the edge of a far larger conflict. The safe option, it turns out, was the most dangerous one of all.
