Ignore Kamala Harris, and you can hear the West giving birth to an endgame

Vice president Kamala Harris meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington last week. Picture: Win McNamee/Getty Images via AFP

In every field of endeavour, the phenomenon of the “silly season” occurs.

Under pressure of events or social signs, hysterical claims begin to be heard. With the presidential election in its final weeks, it’s Ukraine’s turn.

We can immediately add a caveat. President Joe Biden hasn’t completely lost his head but still calls for victory without defining what victory means.

And Donald Trump still avoids the word victory, preferring to speak of the settlement or deal he imagines he will deliver if he becomes president.

Into even the dimmest precincts, moreover, has dawned a realisation: The President’s and ex-president’s stances might actually be compatible, if not identical.

Then there’s Kamala Harris. Adding to the faint but slowly accumulating mosaic by which we must judge her presidential aptitude, she thundered last week against any territorial concession by Kyiv. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin. And let us be clear – they are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.”

These words presumably will be forgotten or eaten if she becomes president. Never mind that Biden never exhibited – and from the very beginning, in every word and deed – a scintilla of enthusiasm for trying to rid every inch of Ukrainian soil of Russian troops. And neither has Trump.

Let’s also exempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from the silly season accusation. In keeping with CS Lewis’s observation about the political abuse of language, the word “radical” isn’t a synonym for bad and Zelensky was using the word correctly when he called vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s proposal “too radical”. Beyond what was needed or appropriate is Vance’s support of a deal that legalises, rather than merely acknowledges, Vladimir Putin’s occupation of Ukrainian territory.

In his secret heart, Zelensky knows his own stance is also “too radical” – expecting Russia to retreat to its 1991 borders, expecting Putin to submit to international criminal prosecution and pay reparations.

The politics of Zelensky’s position, he further knows, is a big problem for the deal he knows will be needed to end the fighting.

Without issuing a mea culpa, I twice stated in these columns that Harris isn’t an idiot. Readers should know that this opinion is under revisement.

Her amateurish statement was obviously meant to appeal to a segment of the echosphere. Let’s understand: What we saw from certain conservative and never-Trump Republican pundits with the rise of Trump we’ve also seen from certain online military commentators who have gained new audiences and prominence thanks to the Ukraine war.

They become excessively conscious of their “brands” and this has driven their “analysis” in ways that depart from reality.

In their tweets, they created a melodrama in which Biden is the doughty and relentless defender of Ukraine while Trump is eager to sell it out. In their hasty backfilling now, they’ve had to start painting Biden as a surprising and disappointing betrayer of Ukraine when, in fact, his administration’s behaviour and (extremely careful) rhetoric have been consistent all along.

Biden and his administration supposedly had been too paralysed by fear of Russian nukes to provide Ukraine the desired long-range weapons or call for Russia’s total defeat. In reality, they never had any interest in upsetting the status quo in Crimea or the eastern Donbas, which Russia has occupied since 2014.

Team Biden sees Putin’s reinvasion of February 2022 as a giant strategic blunder, with large strategic dividends for the West. Team Biden has only ever been interested in locking in these gains. At a stretch, you might even suspect Biden’s conspicuous unwillingness to call for a major US rearmament is a signal to Putin that the US has no ambitions beyond formalising this new and advantageous status quo vis-a-vis Russia.

Biden’s rhetoric has nonetheless been careful not to get crosswise with admirers who see Ukraine heroically upholding Western values and interests. This dodge is now fraying and these avid supporters are starting to call Biden a sellout, which they must do to justify their previous rhetoric about Trump v Biden on Ukraine.

The silly season is upon us and yet an optimist senses a necessary stage on the way to some kind of progress. A ceasefire begins to glimmer in the cards.

If so, it will still require convincing Putin that he won’t gain any further Ukrainian territory even as the cost of the war begins to be visited on Russia’s own territory. This will be a job for whatever US administration takes power next.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL