The president made a remarkable declaration at the NATO summit in Madrid this week:
Speaking at a news conference at the close of a NATO summit in Madrid, Mr. Biden said that Americans and the rest of the world would have to pay more for gasoline and energy as a price of containing Russian aggression. How long? “As long as it takes, so Russia cannot in fact defeat Ukraine and move beyond Ukraine,” he said.
Biden is likely asking for more than the public will be prepared to accept, and that will make his Ukraine policy difficult to sustain over the coming months and years. When Biden took office, he and his officials emphasized that they were going to make U.S. foreign policy work for the benefit of most Americans. The message now is that Americans should expect to pay a significant price for the sake of our government’s current policy in Ukraine. Instead of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” the message now is that conditions here will worsen for the foreseeable future and the public will just have to put up with it.
It is striking how risk-averse Biden is on most other foreign policy issues, but on this one there appear to be no worries about the enormous backlash that he is courting. The president risks not only political losses for his party in November, but he also risks souring most Americans on the “liberal order” or “rules-based order” that the U.S. claims to be upholding. It might be possible to sustain public support for sanctions and assistance for Ukraine if the administration could show that it was trying to bring the war to an end sooner than later. It is one thing to ask for collective sacrifice for a larger good when there is some identifiable and achievable goal, and it is quite another to tell people that this will go on indefinitely.
Public frustration with open-ended conflicts is common, and the only way that the public usually tolerates such conflicts is if the costs remain low. Supporting an open-ended conflict with rising costs is likely politically unsustainable even if U.S. forces are not directly involved in the fighting. The public will rightfully want to know how it is going to end, and they will need to believe that the current leadership has some idea of how to achieve that. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has paired its “as long as it takes” message with the position that the war is likely to continue for years and that the U.S. isn’t going to press for a compromise that would end it earlier. That is a misguided policy, and it is definitely a losing political message.
The politics of this issue are complicated by the fact that U.S. and allied sanctions are a contributing factor in pushing the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world towards recession. As much as Biden needs to blame all of this on Russia, his own sanctions policy is also partly responsible for worsening economic conditions. There is also good reason to doubt that the economic war is having enough of the desired effect on the Russian government to make continuing it worth the costs. The public may be prepared to accept higher costs if they are necessary for achieving an important goal, but if the policy doesn’t or can’t succeed most people are likely to turn against it before long.