Such a loosely defined Ukraine policy represents in a microcosm what an October 2015 RAND report indicates is the prevailing problem for U.S. national-security policy today: the pronounced imbalance between resources and requirements. The United States must either be prepared to increase what it is willing to spend in terms of funds, personnel and attention, or it must be willing to scale back its ambitions and to redefine what it considers to be acceptable outcomes.

Currently, there is no sign that the American foreign-policy establishment is any readier to contemplate hard choices and entertain unpleasant tradeoffs in the coming years. The paradigm of low-cost, no-casualty intervention is a bipartisan construction that will endure with only minor modifications after 2017 in the absence of a truly existential threat to U.S. security. A new approach in 2016? Don’t believe a word of it.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a contributing editor at the National Interest and coauthor of U.S. Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy (Georgetown, 2015). The views expressed here are his own.

Image: The White House/Pete Souza