Hello,
and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest’s regular Tuesday
installment from yours truly on foreign policy and national security.
These days, that usually means something about the war in Ukraine, which
remains one of the biggest foreign policy issues that the Biden White
House is grappling with. The American public might be getting sick of
it, but it is still very much one of the main topics of conversation in
the foreign policy establishment—labeled “the Blob” by Ben Rhodes and “The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam. So it goes. | ![Biden’s Private Ukraine Deadline]() | | Biden’s Private Ukraine Deadline | | The
D.C. foreign policy establishment is growing restless as the Biden
White House resists calls to articulate a more specific strategy if
Ukraine fails to make significant gains by the fall. | |
| Since
the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House has held
regular calls with prominent people in the Washington foreign policy
establishment, trying to keep the heads of think tanks and prominent
experts apprised of what the administration is thinking and planning in
countering Moscow. The goal of the regular calls has been to inform,
persuade, and shape the analysis produced by this town’s foreign policy
elite.
Everyone I spoke to who participated in these White House briefing calls was vociferous in praising the Biden administration’s
policy on Ukraine. They wanted to give the president and his advisors
credit for this and credit for that. They really had done a terrific
job, everyone said, of saving Ukraine and acting nimbly in a rapidly
evolving, predictably unpredictable conflict. But as soon as we went off
the record or spoke on background, the truth flowed like a mighty
river.
It
turns out that Washington’s foreign policy set has grown increasingly
frustrated with the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy. What is it,
exactly? On one hand, the administration has been consistent in its line
on Ukraine: Ukraine must win, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,
this must not turn into World War III, and we must defend and strengthen
the rules-based (and American-designed) international order.
But what does any of that really mean?
What does winning in Ukraine even look like? Do we agree with Ukraine
that it means restoring its 1991 borders? If we advocate for “nothing
about Ukraine without Ukraine,” then what did it mean when Antony Blinken—just “Tony” to the community—told a group of experts that Crimea was Putin’s
red line, and therefore America’s as well? Does our concept of victory
actually diverge from the Ukrainians’ vision? And what does “as long as
it takes” mean in the context of providing Ukraine with more sensitive
weapons systems, like ATACMS, or dwindling weapons stocks in the U.S.
and Europe? How “all in” are we?
“If they have a strategy, it hasn’t been shared,” one expert on these
regular briefing calls with administration officials complained.
In
recent weeks, however, it seems that at least part of the policy has
become a bit less gauzy. It can be articulated, essentially, as this:
Let’s wait and see how Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive goes, and then
we’ll reassess. | | | My
sources in the administration stress that Ukraine now has everything it
needs for a successful push to regain territory, most likely in the
southeast, where Ukraine hopes to cut Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.
Since the beginning of the year, I have heard from State and White House
officials that Ukraine is not economically viable without Zaporizhzhya.
If Kyiv doesn’t wrest back control of this province, which Russia has
illegally annexed, Moscow can maintain its stranglehold on the Ukrainian
economy by blockading its ports and cutting off Ukraine’s exports.
Using these ports, Ukraine used to feed 400 million people a year. Since
the outbreak of the war, the agricultural industry has taken a severe
hit and Ukraine lost one-third of its G.D.P.
Depending
on how the offensive goes for Ukraine, the administration has hinted
that it will reassess and recalibrate its policy. But what does thatlook like? “The White House has certainly said things like we need to do everything now, do whatever we can now to make this big push,” said a second participant in the calls. “And everyone is like, ‘What’s next?’”
“I
think the administration’s expectation has been that Ukraine has
everything it needs for an offensive and if they don’t get anything
done, well, then we’ll have to reassess,” the first participant told me.
“What that reassessment means, it’s not clear to me. Does that mean
hold our levels of support steady? Does it mean we escalate [our levels
of support]? Or does it mean that we start having a conversation about
how do we freeze things?” Added this participant, “It’s not clear which
one they’re thinking of. Escalation of support is very unlikely, so it’s
probably the first or third options.”
Still
another participant in the calls reflected another frustration: Are we
giving Ukrainians enough to win? Or does winning simply mean as much as
Ukraine can claw back with the current levels of support and during this
very finite window of opportunity? It seemed, this third participant
told me, that at this point a Ukrainian victory just means “Whatever
Ukraine can muster. And then… what?” this participant wondered. “I’m
assuming it means taking it to a negotiating table, but that’s assuming
that Russia will come to the negotiating table and that Ukraine will
come to the negotiating table.”
“I
think we have a policy until late summer/early fall and then it’ll get
caught in our political process, at which point we’ll say, ‘Well, we
tried. We helped them as much as we could,’” this participant added. “I
don’t think there’s a strategy beyond the $95 billion aid package, which
runs out at the end of the fiscal year [in the fall]. And then I don’t
know what. I don’t think they will go to the Hill again in the fall to
ask for more. If the Ukrainians are wildly successful, that may help.
But if we are largely where we are now, if Ukraine makes some gains but
it’s still basically what it is today, I don’t know what the
administration does in the fall.”
To
be clear, pretty much no one expects the Ukrainian offensive to result
in a decisive victory. All of Washington that is paid to think about
this war is now feverishly gaming out possible scenarios, both in
cocktail party conversation and in more formal tabletop exercises. I
recently attended such an exercise, and there, like everywhere, all
roads seemed to lead to stalemate and some kind of negotiated solution
in the long run, regardless of how well the spring offensive goes this
year. It’s as if when Chairman Mark Milley went
rogue back in November to say that this war wouldn’t be settled on the
battlefield but at the negotiating table, he wasn’t speaking out of
school but reflecting a nascent Washington consensus.
“I
think they want this to happen this year,” the first participant of the
White House calls told me of the beginning of a negotiated solution.
“We have elections next year and we’re in campaign season already.
Ukraine might take back some territory but it won’t be a massive
territorial takeback. I think that’s where we’ll be at the end of the
year. They’re going to want to hold the line and Congress will support
them on that.” | | | Dmitri Alperovitch,
who heads Silverado, a D.C.-based think tank, told me he’s been hearing
from elected American officials across the political spectrum that the
questions from their constituents about why the U.S. is spending so much
money in Ukraine have been coming more frequently. “It’s not just
Republicans, it’s also Democrats saying that big aid packages to Ukraine
are not going to get support from their constituents,” Alperovitch
said. “These are not left-wing or right-wing politicians. These are
moderates.” He was blunt about the likely outcome. “This offensive, if
Ukraine makes progress, they’ll buy themselves some life. If they don’t,
it’ll be hard to get supplies to keep going.”
However,
another person familiar with the administration’s thinking and who has
participated in some of these calls, was adamant that the White House
has no intention of stopping aid to Ukraine. Another participant told me
the White House made clear on a call one month ago with the N.S.C.’s
new Russia senior director Nicholas Berliner that they would go
to Congress for more aid in the fall, regardless of the offensive’s
outcome. The question is how much they’ll ask for—and how much they’ll
get. That will be part of the fall reassessment. “It’s not that the U.S.
will stop supporting Ukraine,” said the person familiar with the
administration’s thinking. “It’s that the U.S. and other Western
countries may not be able to give Ukraine a decisive advantage on the
battlefield. That’s the issue. The U.S. is committed to supporting
Ukraine, but it can’t commit things it does not have. At a certain point
Washington will have to reassess, including the balance between the
U.S. and Europeans.”
Still,
this gap between official Biden administration rhetoric has been
worrying Ukrainians, who are telegraphing that they are concerned that
this plays right into Putin’s plan: wait out the fickle Americans,
without whom the Europeans are as good as useless, and then grind the
Ukrainians down. “Ukrainians have been asking if the U.S. intends to
press Ukraine into some kind of negotiated settlement,” said the person
familiar with the administration’s thinking. “My sense is the U.S.
doesn’t want a false stalemate. The game plan is to provide Ukraine a
window of opportunity but assume the war ends up as a natural stalemate.
Then, seek negotiations or a frozen conflict.”
That’s
not good enough even for some of the administration’s public allies,
who, in our conversations, consistently called out the gap between what
Biden and his advisors were saying publicly and what they were planning
for in private. “We rhetorically say something and then we revert to
incrementalism,” one participant in the calls told me after dutifully
praising the president. “That’s a bipartisan comment, by the way. We
engage in this really high rhetoric and we just hope no one’s going to
call us on it. But we’re going to get called on this one. We’re not
playing for success, we’re playing for stalemate—and stalemate is not
going to be successful for us.”
| | | That’s all from me this week, friends. Stay tuned for Tina, on Wednesday, and I’ll see you back here next Tuesday. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse. |
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