Whatever happens in November, the next president’s approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine will determine America’s broader role in the world.
By Matthew Kaminski
08/04/2024
POLITICO
There’s by now a set caricature of what the U.S. presidential election means for the world’s worst land war in 80 years.
Former President Donald Trump and his Veep JD Vance would move to end the conflict quickly and scale back U.S. support for Ukraine and NATO, presumably with disastrous consequences for both. Kamala Harris represents Biden-era continuity and would support Ukraine with incremental, if large, aid packages “as long as it takes,” in her current boss’ phrase.
I’d bet on neither outcome. If you block out the noise around Trump and look at actual actions, the potential for a far more sympathetic approach to Ukraine is coming into focus. As for Harris, she almost certainly wouldn’t bring the same people or basic assumptions as Biden in her approach to the war — which might also be good for Ukraine.
Buried in the political news of the past few weeks, a more dynamic debate has started to play out within both camps. And those behind-the-scenes discussions mean that Trump and Harris’ views, and ultimately policies, are still in flux.
Obviously for the Ukrainians, this is existential. American decisions on military aid, political signals on any settlement and future support for Kyiv and its relationship with Putin will decide what kind of state, if any, the Ukrainians will have.
The approach to Ukraine will also be the litmus test of future U.S. foreign policy. It will be the best signal we get on the next administration’s approach to NATO, its commitments to other allies and most of all, its posture toward an increasingly aggressive China. The stakes here are bigger than what happens on the ground in Ukraine in 2025.
Harris as a Vessel
As on most issues, Harris hasn’t had time to publicly flesh out her views on the world since she abruptly stepped in to lead the Democratic ticket. To foreign officials and voters alike, she’s a mostly blank canvas to project hopes and anxieties on.
Based on conversations I’ve had with Ukrainians close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, you hear two things simultaneously: Harris is reassuring as a member of a team they know well — and they would also want her to break with it once in the Oval Office.
The divisions within the Democratic Party and between the Biden administration and the pro-Ukraine camp in Washington are greater than advertised. In public, Ukrainians and their allies along with most Democrats generally give Biden fulsome credit for building a global coalition and marshaling unprecedented military and economic support for Kyiv. In private, those assessments are less generous and, from some Ukrainian officials, biting.
Biden has slow-walked the supply of weapons and put restrictions on their use, out of a concern over escalation with a nuclear-armed power in Russia that in retrospect looks exaggerated. That Biden caution and frequent indecision throughout the war has hampered Ukraine’s campaign and frayed nerves in Kyiv.
Frustrations with Biden peaked during the NATO summit last month. After a Russian missile partially destroyed a children’s hospital in Kyiv as the summit started, the White House denied a Ukrainian request to use U.S.-supplied weapons to hit the launch sites of the missile in Russia itself. Russia felt no repercussions for that strike.
The caution reflects Biden’s own instincts and that of his team. Throughout the term, foreign policy has been closely held by a small team of long-time advisers — principally National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, his deputy Jon Finer and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. None are expected to stay on in a Harris administration.
Ukraine offers a chance to make a break with Biden that would rhetorically be more subtle than her recent criticism of Israel — but substantively more consequential if she were to clarify that the U.S. wants Ukraine to emerge victorious and to back that up by lifting the restrictions on what kind of U.S. weapons are provided and how they are used. Earlier this summer, Harris attended the peace summit that Zelenskyy put on in Switzerland, and to Ukrainians’ delight invoked “our strategic interests” in forcefully supporting Ukraine.
The alternative to providing more forceful support for Ukraine is to accept a Russian sphere of influence and therefore victory there, which would undermine American strategic interests.
Is There a Real Trump to Stand Up?
Mostly out of view as well, there’s also a struggle for where Trump will take foreign policy. Like Harris, he has sent signals on Ukraine that all sides in this argument — from Putin to the rising isolationist wing of the Republican Party to Zelenskyy himself — are projecting their hopes onto.
The Trump “id” led to the pick of Vance, Ukraine’s worst nightmare. The Ohio senator comes from the wing of the party — and the family, as his friend Donald Trump Jr. again made clear last week with a viral tweet that mocked Zelenskyy — that doesn’t think Ukraine is America’s problem. Given intellectual heft by Elbridge Colby and the New Right and populist venom from the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Tucker Carlsons, this crowd would cut Kyiv off and explain away Putin’s Anschluss.
The Trump “ego” has at the same time embraced a realist-bordering-on-internationalist approach toward Ukraine. Remember, and the Ukrainians for sure do, that his administration armed the
Ukrainians with Javelins in 2017 that saved them two years ago when Putin went in big; Barack Obama had refused to arm them after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and started a proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
After choosing Vance and claiming the nomination, the first foreign leader that Trump called was Zelenskyy. People who are familiar with the details insist it went even better than the warm readouts from their conversation. According to them, Trump told Zelenskyy it was “fake news” that he’d help Putin and promised to push for a just peace.
That phone call — Trump had enough self-awareness not to call it “perfect” — was a not-so-subtle message to the Republican fringe on Ukraine: STFU. Earlier this spring, after spending months talking down Biden on Ukraine, Trump provided House Speaker Mike Johnson political cover to approve the $60 billion aid package to Ukraine.
“The fact that Trump described this as a good call means his animus against Zelenskyy is old news,” John Herbst, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who tracks their Washington lobbying closely at the Atlantic Council, told me. “It’s why the populist wing of the party was against Ukraine. If Trump is not there, then they’re not there.”
Zelenskyy and his people also see Ukraine allies in Trump’s orbit and have worked to cultivate three in particular: former National Security Council chief Robert O’Brien, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. All three are mentioned in discussions about national security posts in a second Trump administration. Notably, Pompeo was the second byline on David Urban’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week that laid out an ambitious plan to support Ukraine, including membership in NATO. It’s one that even a neocon would like. The sharpest contrast to the Urban-Pompeo proposal isn’t the current Biden or any future Harris approach but what the Project 2025 wing of Trump World has put forward.
All the usual Trump caveats apply. No one knows what Trump will do, often not even Trump. The constants of his decade on the world stage are: unpredictability; a transactional, as opposed to principled, approach to foreign affairs; and a penchant for personalizing policy. In a conflict of Trump id against ego, the id often prevails — that would be a bad-case scenario for Ukraine.
But the bottom line is that Trump’s victory in November doesn’t necessarily mean Ukraine’s doomed or Putin’s saved. The outcome is up for grabs and the people around Trump are fighting over it.
No matter who wins the White House, the next president will have to define any U.S. engagement in Ukraine far more clearly in terms of American interests.
The Ukraine skeptics have done that already: Why spend billions on a lost cause in Ukraine when undocumented immigrants are “invading” across America’s southern border and working families here could use the cash? Give Putin the land he conquered already in Ukraine, they say, and this will be over.
There’s a counterargument that the other side of the Trump brain can embrace as could any future Harris administration. Top leaders at NATO and Ukrainians themselves have been making
it for a while: Putin is China’s proxy, and the clash in Ukraine is truly over whether the free world or a Beijing-led alliance will prevail.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the late Carter-era national security adviser, once said: “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” His fellow ethnic Pole Radek Sikorski, the country’s current foreign minister, updated that in a talk on the sidelines of the NATO summit this way: “Russia can either be an ally of the West or a vassal of China. Putin chose the latter.”
A world with spheres of influence — the kind sought by China and Russia — would hurt America in multiple ways, not least economically by shrinking the space available to U.S. goods, including for defense hardware and investment. That is an interest-based argument for arming the Ukrainians to win the war that they, not U.S. soldiers, are fighting.
What does victory look like for Ukraine? Trump and Harris can do what Biden hasn’t done and define it: Ensure a sovereign Ukraine emerges with its security guaranteed ultimately by the U.S.
This fight isn’t about land. The mollify-Russia caucus gets that wrong. A land deal won’t satisfy Putin. He wants to subjugate Kyiv and turn his sights elsewhere. Putin and the Ukrainians, in moments of candor, agree on that.
To achieve a just peace, the Ukrainians want to make their sacrifices in the past decade of war with Russia count. Ukraine can give up territory, even if no politician can say so now, in exchange for a place securely in the West — with a Ukrainian state that has defensible borders and eventually resides inside NATO. Ukrainian politicians and officials have privately told me as much since the war started. To bring about that outcome, Ukraine will need more robust military firepower and victories on the battlefield to force Putin to the table on terms they can accept.
The good outcome for Ukraine and the U.S. isn’t all that hard to picture after the November elections. The surprise of the past few weeks: It’s equally easy, but obviously far from a sure thing, to imagine it happening under a Harris or a Trump presidency.
Matthew Kaminski is editor-at-large, writing regularly for POLITICO Magazine on American and global affairs. He’s the founding editor of POLITICO Europe, which launched in 2015, and former editor-in-chief of POLITICO. He previously worked for the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, based in Kyiv, Brussels, Paris and New York.