First, Ukraine itself. Promises of support for a nation’s struggle are proper. But privately, the President needs to convey some of that hard-headed realism he claims he’s brought to more than half a century of foreign-policy debates.
Ukraine has every right to defend its territory, but it doesn’t have a right to American money and materiel to prosecute a conflict without end. Reports that China may start arming Russia’s military only reinforce the risk that Ukraine’s heroic battle becomes a protracted stalemate, and it is time to start prodding Kyiv toward a plausible endgame.
Nobody wants to talk about territorial concessions, but Russia isn’t going to surrender Crimea or, it seems, most of the Donbas, where historically pro-Russian populations lend a patina of legitimacy to some of Moscow’s claims. Some kind of conditional – perhaps deliberately ambiguous – territorial deal, or at least a truce along acceptable front lines, will be needed. It’s a messy solution that falls short of Mr Zelensky’s aims but is better than years of war.
Mr. Zelensky will need incentives for such a deal – offering to help rebuild the country through some new Marshall Plan – though we shouldn’t forget that for 20 years Ukraine was among the worst-performing and most corrupt European nations. Americans need assurances that the blank check they have given courageous Ukrainian fighters won’t be replaced by one payable to fat Ukrainian oligarchs.
More important, in return for painful Ukrainian concessions, some way could be found –perhaps membership in the European Union or even the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation –to bind Kyiv more tightly to the West.
Which brings us to Mr. Biden’s second audience: Moscow. Despite Vladimir Putin’s fever dreams, the Russian empire is, like other European empires over the past two centuries, in terminal retreat. Its disastrous campaign in Ukraine, far from reversing that retreat, has accelerated it. The idea that he’ll use Ukraine to launch a war on the rest of Europe is ludicrous, and he is no fool. Despite the bluster, he hasn’t dared touch the hair on a NATO soldier’s head. The message he should receive is: Don’t mistake our desire for peace for weakness.
The third audience is the European allies. Expect self-congratulatory back-slapping about how magnificently the alliance has performed in the past year. But some realism here is also essential. It isn’t the “alliance” that can claim credit, it’s the US. I don’t demean the contribution the Europeans have made, but it is the American government and people that have, for the umpteenth time in little over a century, stepped up to save a far-flung European country from the predations of another continental power. Does anyone think for a second that if the US had washed its hands of Ukraine a year ago, the other NATO members would have leapt to defend it? Germans would now be clinking champagne glasses in the Kremlin in celebration of some new pipeline deal.
The war isn’t a repudiation but an affirmation of longstanding doubts about Europeans’ willingness to defend themselves. They continue to rule an empire of their own mind — a curious realm that combines “Imagine there’s no countries” posthistorical pacifism with cynical economic opportunism. The combination results in a modern defence capability that couldn’t repel Morocco, let alone Moscow, and a repeated eagerness to subordinate strategic priorities to economic wants — from Russian energy to Chinese export markets.
Mr Biden’s message should be blunt: Get real about the Hobbesian world we inhabit and decide whose side you are on in the strategic contest between the U.S. and China, or the next time some megalomaniac comes nibbling at your territory, it won’t be American dollars that save you.
Which brings us to the most important audience – the American people. The President needs to explain urgently to his fellow citizens how exactly the arms and money spigot for Ukraine isn’t draining the country’s military capabilities and its reservoir of strategic capacity for the long twilight struggle with China. The $US100 billion committed so far can’t become an annual outlay – at least not without a big increase in overall defence spending which, given budget constraints, is unlikely, and a big increase in military manufacturing resources.
And when Americans see their president blithely dismiss the threat from a Chinese surveillance aircraft floating over US territory for a week while scrambling fighters to shoot innocuous objects out of the sky, they have a right to ask whether this administration is matching our limited resources to our objectives.
Instead of worrying publicly about the softening of American – he means Republican – support for a long hot war with an uncertain outcome, the president should start building support for a cold peace in which the nation can achieve its larger objectives.
WSJ
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President Joe Biden made an impressive display of support in Kyiv for Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky. But as Mr Biden delivers stirring declarations of defiance in the face of Russian aggression, there are at least four audiences to which he should be delivering critical messages this week.