Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker published a remarkably simple prescription for the war in Ukraine this week.

“Putin must be defeated.”

Wicker argues that Vladimir Putin understands only power and cannot be trusted to honor agreements.

But Americans should not pretend this war appeared out of nowhere.

There is a longer history that Wicker’s argument largely leaves out.

Russia had complained about NATO expansion for years before the invasion.

In 2008, NATO went considerably further.

At its Bucharest summit, the alliance formally declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.”

That is not a Russian interpretation of history. It is written in NATO’s own declaration.

So it is reasonable to ask whether American and European policy contributed to a security confrontation that eventually became a war.

A number of scholars, economists, and foreign policy experts have argued that years of NATO expansion were dangerously provocative, despite considerable disagreement with that interpretation in Western foreign policy circles.

But even respected thinkers firmly established within the Western foreign policy establishment have argued that diplomatic solutions may have been possible.

And their work raises legitimate questions about whether American policy also played a role in the escalation of the conflict over time.

Samuel Charap, a longtime Russia specialist at the RAND Corporation, and Sergey Radchenko, a Johns Hopkins historian who specializes in Russian and Soviet foreign policy, conducted a detailed examination of the early peace negotiations.

Their research, published by Foreign Affairs, found that the two governments engaged in serious negotiations and considered substantial concessions.

They did not find that a completed peace agreement was simply waiting to be signed.

But they did find that there was a real negotiating process that might have produced a diplomatic outcome.

That complicates any version of the war’s history that treats the West as having played no role in the years of escalation that preceded it.

That brings us back to Wicker.

His argument leaves little room for any of this history.

And Americans should ask him a simple question: If these new sanctions fail, what happens next?

At what point does the United States decide that wanting Russia to withdraw from Ukraine does not warrant an indefinite war with Russia?

After years of failing to force Russia to withdraw, the only question now is how and when this war ends.

Wicker largely ignores that question and instead makes Putin’s character central to his argument.

But whether Vladimir Putin is a bad man is not the question American foreign policy has to answer.

Washington has spent decades becoming very good at explaining why another adversary must be confronted.

But it has been considerably less successful at explaining what happens after the confrontation begins.

And what the risks are to the American people, including the increased risk of nuclear war.

So before Mississippi’s Republican leaders again demand that Putin be “defeated,” they should answer a much simpler question.

What does victory look like, and how exactly does America get there without a permanent, dangerous war?