Biden’s Cold War savvy has shielded Ukraine

Could Ukraine be the big loser in the fast-approaching US presidential election? Whatever the outcome in November, the signs are that a future president will want to shift the focus away from a stalemated war on Europe’s eastern fringes to the strategic challenge posed by China.

There’s the prospect of a White House occupied again by Donald Trump, who can barely conceal his indifference towards Ukraine, and his chosen veep, the punchy senator JD Vance, who is on record as saying: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” On the other side of the barricades is Kamala Harris, who has stayed tepidly on the Biden message (supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”) but who is even more resistant to escalation than her present boss.

Whoever wins will not want to cede to Ukrainian demands for American backing for strikes on Russian soil or for quick Nato membership. Joe Biden is the last leader of a generation that thought deeply about the transatlantic role in the defence of Europe. It was Biden’s passion that kept the arms flowing to Ukraine; his intuition that turned the Ukrainian cause into a way of regenerating a no longer “brain-dead” (copyright E Macron) Nato. And it was Biden’s reticence that stopped the defence of Ukraine from turning into an all-out war against Putin’s Russia. When he takes his hat and moves out to Delaware that Cold War savvy will have gone and the urgency of the defence of Ukrainian democracy, one of the defining issues of our time, will have dissipated.

I wish it were not so but the slightly incoherent Jacksonian realism of the first Trump term could well soon be expanded in a Trump 2.0 to become the benchmark of US foreign policy. It is a worldview that rejects crusading neo-conservatism (Iraq war, toppling of Saddam Hussein, export of democracy) and shrugs off isolationism as not being appropriate when there is a global challenge from China.

Realism in the Trump era means a hard-nosed definition of national interest and national honour, a readiness to use force but only if it can be justified to a domestic audience (for example, the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander). It is named after the 19th-century president Andrew Jackson because he was regarded as a populist, up for a scrap or a duel, but recognised the limits of military force as well as limits to government and indeed democracy. Expanding today’s defence of Ukraine would not meet the Jacksonian criteria. A Trump administration will want out. Vance’s “realist” approach to Ukraine leads to him a plan of sorts. The US, he calculates, needs to end its contribution to the war because it has to devote arms production to building a deterrent to China attacking Taiwan. Second, the US has to acknowledge that Kyiv is not strong enough to launch a decisive counter-offensive against Russia. So what to do? Make an offer to Putin that freezes territorial lines close to where they are at the moment. Guarantee Kyiv’s neutrality but also contribute to security assurances.

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Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser (tipped for high office if his ex-boss returns), also makes the case for a negotiated settlement. “Trump’s approach would be to continue to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, financed by European countries, while keeping the door open to diplomacy with Russia — and keeping Moscow off balance with a degree of unpredictability,” he says. As for Europe, “it should admit the country to the EU immediately, waiving the usual bureaucratic accession protocol”.This is less a “realist” plan than an act of surrealism, painting over almost everything we have learnt about Putin’s ambitions in the past 30 months. Putin will welcome a Trump initiative on Ukraine as an open invitation to gobble up the country and perhaps some of its neighbours. Realpolitik sounds like common sense because it respects strength in numbers — yet as the western powers discovered with Stalin in Yalta in February 1945, smaller states tend to be carved up. Realist politics do not always reach the right conclusion.

But at least it is a plan for Ukraine (even if it’s one that entails Ukraine surrendering territory at gunpoint), while Biden is leaving the White House without any kind of answer as to what should happen next. Harris has put in the time — three appearances at the Munich security conference is an achievement of sorts — and has, in Philip Gordon, a sound national security adviser. They reportedly get on because they share an interest in the Middle East. Ukraine, not so much. That was always Joe’s thing.

How then to prevent Ukraine falling off the map during a noisy presidential transition? Not with a sentimental farewell tour but rather by the still incumbent president using his remaining months in office to step up a gear, speeding up deliveries of air defence systems to Kyiv and quietly lifting the restraints imposed on Ukraine’s use of western-made high-tech weaponry behind Russian lines. Not a reckless act of war but rather a calculated autumn and winter battering of Putin’s forces that could put him on the back foot for negotiations.

Some imagination is needed, too — the hiring of private contractors to repair western kit close to the battlefront, tactical weapons instructors in situ — as a signal that the West is ready to provide a security cushion when the war winds down. That’s realist thinking. No peace plan is ever going to turn Ukraine into a neutral Switzerland. Putin has put the whole continent on a war footing.