The Ukraine war is in a new phase. Biden must rethink the US position
Scrambling to avoid a government shutdown, the US Congress last week refused to approve a new $6bn aid package for Ukraine. Nearly half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives also voted to strip Ukraine money from a must-pass military spending bill. The Republican revolt comes as Ukraine’s counteroffensive, launched this summer, has garnered lackluster results. Russia has actually gained more territory in this calendar year than Ukraine has, despite the immense quantity of advanced weaponry that the US and Europe have supplied to Ukrainian forces.
Together, these two developments mark a new phase of the war that calls for new thinking. The political support of Ukraine’s largest international backer, the US, is no longer assured in the near term, let alone if Donald Trump returns to power in next year’s election.
For Joe Biden, it is a time for choosing. His administration and its allies will be tempted to double down on the approach they have taken of late: cast the war in near-existential terms, vow to arm Kyiv “as long as it takes” and castigate opponents as extremists indifferent to Ukraine’s plight and reckless with American national security. (Indeed, some leading House Democrats were quick to deride what they dubbed the “pro-Putin caucus” and “Putin’s little helpers”.)
But this approach has reached its limits. In the absence of progress on the battlefield – Ukraine’s army has not made a breakthrough since last autumn – ever more strident demands for ever more aid, doled out indefinitely and regardless of circumstances, make the war look potentially endless and fruitless. The problem isn’t that arguments for helping Ukraine have lacked passion or that skeptics have been treated too kindly. It is that the current aims may be unachievable, as Biden’s “as long as it takes” mantra practically admits. And if the mission will not be accomplished, then the case for restricting aid starts to resemble the logic that led Biden himself to order the US military to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021: it can be better to accept painful losses than to suffer greater losses.
Thankfully, Ukraine is not Afghanistan. Kyiv’s war effort remains viable, far more so than the western-backed Kabul government’s was. Yet to sustain the support of Americans, Biden needs to put forward a better strategy, starting with more defined and attainable goals that inspire confidence.
First and foremost, he can no longer effectively defer to whatever territorial aims the government of Ukraine adopts. Kyiv currently seeks to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders, an unlikely prospect that would include retaking Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014, houses a key naval base, and may hold enough importance for Vladimir Putin to employ nuclear weapons in a lastditch defense. Biden should make clear that the US will continue to keep Russia from conquering Ukraine and extinguishing its sovereign independence but that the retaking of territory must be weighed more heavily against resource constraints, human costs, and escalation risks.
Preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty matters: the United States helps the victim of blatant aggression (tragically underscored by Russia’s missile strike in Kharkiv on Thursday that claimed 51 lives), keeps Russian forces away from Nato territory, defends international law, and shows would-be invaders that crime doesn’t pay. At the same time, Biden should note that none of these objectives requires the US to support a Ukrainian attempt to liberate Crimea. Nor must Ukraine necessarily regain, prior to a ceasefire or settlement, every inch of land it has lost since February
2022. Such an outcome, if it is militarily feasible at all, would come at immense costs in lives and treasure. The Biden administration has not committed itself to any particular territorial outcome, but neither has it foreclosed maximalist options. It would be wise to start doing so.
Further, the Biden administration should pursue ending the war – through diplomatic steps to restart talks – as vigorously as it arms Ukraine. For now, neither Kyiv nor Moscow is willing to stop fighting, but conditions may never become ripe unless the parties communicate in advance with US encouragement and participation. Diplomacy takes time to succeed, as demonstrated by a wealth of experience from the armistice that ended the Korean war to the nuclear agreement with Iran. The US is uniquely capable of bringing the parties together. It has yet to try in earnest. Although the effort would almost certainly not yield rapid and dramatic results, it would show that Biden is serious about bringing the conflict to a close and is doing his utmost to avoid the escalation risks and financial costs of a long war.
Finally, Biden should highlight the substantial commitments of aid made by the US’s European allies, and call on them to give more to Ukraine and to take the lead in European defense more broadly. The stakes of this conflict are greater for Europeans than they are for Americans, and prudence demands that European governments plan for the possibility that US support might dry up. When Biden instead calls for aiding Ukraine on the grounds that “we are the indispensable nation in the world”, as he has recently repeated, he implies that the US should bear almost any burden and should keep bearing such burdens in perpetuity. It is better politics, and better policy, to press European states to take responsibility for defending their own region while the US addresses domestic needs and security in Asia.
Ironically, this approach resembles the one the White House adopted in the opening months of the war, when officials spoke of dealing Russia a “strategic failure” rather than a total territorial defeat, and envisioned the conflict ending in a negotiated settlement. Since then, official rhetoric has escalated and domestic support has eroded. Although assisting Ukraine was bound to get more contentious over time, returning to more achievable objectives would make a political difference.
Many Republicans who recently voted against the latest aid package have voted in favor of previous ones. They may be willing to help Ukraine again. Even the 29 members of Congress who vowed to oppose further aid in an open letter last month focused on the flaws of US strategy. Rather than question the desirability of Ukrainian success, they balked at “an open-ended commitment to supporting the war in Ukraine of an indeterminate nature, based on a strategy that is unclear, to achieve a goal yet to be articulated to the public or the Congress”.
Biden should answer these concerns. He will not make partisanship go away, but he can isolate the partisan critics from the principled ones and put the war effort on a sustainable footing. Nothing could be more dangerous for Ukraine than to allow outright opponents of aid to look like the lesser of two extremes and the guardians of Americans’ best interests.
Stephen Wertheim is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy
The Biden administration should pursue ending the war as vigorously as it arms Ukraine