The Media vs. Ukrainian Peace?
The anti-Trump agitprop around Putin’s war isn’t helping anybody.
There’s a reason, after a previous assassination attempt, I wrote a column headlined “Rethinking Trump and the Ukraine War” and mentioned the trickle, which since has become a flood, of U.S. government pseudo-crackdowns on Russian propaganda. These crackdowns seem mainly designed to flog the idea to U.S. domestic voters that the Kremlin backs Donald Trump.
I also drew a connection to the “witless polemic,” as I called it, of analysts who think it advances Ukraine’s cause to paint a likely U.S. president and his 75 million voters as Putin supporters.
The latest would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, may well have been a fan of such agitprop. He lacked Lee Harvey Oswald’s military training but not his wannabe aspirations, having traveled to Ukraine to pose, apparently in unwelcome fashion, as an organizer of foreign legionnaires.
Which brings us to today’s subject. Even without a second attempt on Mr. Trump, that subject would have been the Biden administration’s looming, unavoidable and consequential decision about how heavily to involve U.S. capabilities in Ukraine’s expanding campaign to strike targets inside Russia.
The decision involves risks. It needs to be made as part of a plan, not as another episode in the “no, no, no, yes” routine that has defined Joe Biden’s response to Ukrainian aid requests. Indeed, neither Kamala Harris nor Mr. Trump should be especially easy with Mr. Biden (or his aides) making so pregnant a call whose consequences they would inherit.
Vladimir Putin is again threatening escalation but he hasn’t, despite what you’re hearing, threatened nuclear use, which would be strategically grotesque even for him, as the boy who cried wolf so many times he made it impossible for his adversaries to know when he meant it.
The moment has also arrived when Ukraine remembers that its interests aren’t the same as U.S. interests. The most important aim behind its Kursk offensive may be the least spoken: As long as Kyiv holds Russian territory, nobody will impose, and Russia can hardly accept, a freezing of current positions, as suggested by Trump running mate JD Vance.
The signaling has been no less elaborate on the Western side, with noisy consultations and travels, culminating in Friday’s meeting with Mr. Biden and the new British prime minister, who reportedly advocates allowing Ukraine to use NATO-supplied weapons to bring the war more deeply into Russia. From a distance, the signs are the sort that even might precede negotiations.
To U.S. strategists, understand, the current fighting is already superfluous and has been since Mr. Biden’s military chief bruited a cease-fire two years ago.
The victory that most serves the U.S. would be a deal that turns a hot war into a cold war while letting Washington shift its attention elsewhere (not an unfamiliar experience for U.S. allies). Already U.S. geostrategists are looking forward to wooing Mr. Putin from his Chinese captivity.
Complicating matters, some cease-fire advocates in the West go wrong, and get themselves rightly suspected of being Putin allies, by insisting Ukraine should be extorted to seek peace by cutting off American aid, as if this wouldn’t be an incentive for Mr. Putin to keep fighting.
The obvious path: Extort Ukraine’s compliance with a peace deal by piling on the aid commitments, to assure its long-term self-defense.
This isn’t a job for a lame duck, much less a U.S. president of uncertain cognitive function, much less the author of the U.S. strategy so far, which has all but amounted to coaxing Mr. Putin to dig himself deeper into a failed war.
From a cynical perspective, this made sense during Mr. Biden’s first term. He could avoid stating a definition of victory that he could be criticized for or judged against. Had he achieved the second term he sought, he would have to lay his cards on the table. That’s when Ukraine was likely to discover that, for all the media talk that possibly excited the alleged assassin Mr. Routh, the Biden objective isn’t different from the Trump objective. The only difference is the political interest that allows Mr. Trump to put into words what Mr. Biden won’t.
In a televised presidential debate, forms should be observed: Mr. Trump should have said (as he has before) that he told Mr. Putin to stay out of Ukraine and in that sense favors a Ukrainian victory. But war isn’t a sporting event. The Biden administration wished to defer responsibility, but an endgame to meld U.S. and Ukrainian interests is becoming a necessity perhaps even before the next president takes office.
This involves risk—Mr. Putin has his own endgame in mind though I imagine he no longer can believe in some giant reversal by which Ukraine doesn’t end up a heavily armed if unofficial ally of a strengthened and enlarged NATO.
But in another sign of how badly off-kilter this election has become, we may not discover until after Election Day whether Ms. Harris has any thoughts at all on what should happen next.
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Appeared in the September 18, 2024, print edition as 'The Media vs. Ukrainian Peace?'.