The administration has spent the duration of this war languishing in a psychological prison of its own making.
The administration has spent the duration of this war languishing in a psychological prison of its own making.
E veryone knows the Trump administration 2.0 will take a different approach to navigating the war Moscow unleashed against Ukraine in February 2022. Beyond that, the former president has cultivated a lot of ambiguity around precisely how he would revise Joe Biden’s handling of that crisis. For that reason, the transition period is likely to be a dangerous one. Both parties to this conflict understand that they have a small window to reshape the dynamics on the battlefield ahead of Inauguration Day. Both Ukraine and Russia are pulling out all the stops.
Russian forces are advancing on several axes, one of which is inside the Russian Federation proper. The fight inside Russia’s Kursk region, into which Ukrainian forces mounted a daring raid in August and where Kyiv’s forces have dug in for a long fight, has “reached an intensity rarely seen during 2½ years of war,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Moscow has deployed some 45,000 troops to the region,” the report added, “including some of its best forces who are attacking in nonstop waves.” Meanwhile, “Ukraine has also sent many of its best brigades to Kursk.” In addition, Ukraine’s forces have made the most of Biden’s belated decision to loosen the reins and allow Kyiv to fire U.S.-made long-range ordnance at the staging areas and ammo depots inside Russia that facilitate Moscow’s expansionist war.
The only strategic objective Kyiv could have hoped to achieve by capturing Russian territory in the first place was to secure a bargaining chip that would foreclose on the prospect of a cease-fire deal that freezes in place the lines of contact on the battlefield. It’s reasonable to assume that Russia would not acquiesce to the indefinite occupation of its own territory. The Kremlin would have to surrender its own land grabs to reacquire Russian turf. But Biden’s reluctant acquiescence to one of Ukraine’s long-sought requests calls into question the president’s strategic thinking, such as it is.
The Biden administration’s approach to Russia’s campaign of territorial conquest was plagued by self-doubt from the start. That is why he withheld valuable weapons platforms from Ukraine until the point at which their battlefield utility was limited, and that’s why he declined to approve the use of U.S. ordnance in its most efficacious way until it was too late.
The Ukrainians were lobbying the administration to allow HIMARS strikes on Russian targets as far back as early spring. “The assistance is for the defense and not for offensive operations in Russian territory,” said one unnamed U.S. official explaining the administration’s objections. The Biden administration managed to overcome that initial reluctance by late May when it allowed strikes on certain Russian targets. But that dispensation was limited to targets on the other side of the border from Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast, where the most intense combat was not taking place.
Team Biden seemed similarly off-balance when Ukraine invaded Russian territory. “The Ukrainians did not tell the Americans about their plans in advance, possibly, U.S. officials said, because they feared the Americans would try to persuade them to call off the high-risk mission and because of Ukraine’s obsessive concern about leaks,” the New York Times revealed. U.S. vehicles, arms, and munitions featured prominently in that advance, but the Ukrainians were still not at liberty to augment its offensive by using HIMARS or ATACMS platforms in support of its troops. “Again, we don’t support long range attacks into Russia,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh insisted.
Last week, the Biden White House had another change of heart. Once again, it came too late to achieve maximum effectiveness. What was it that produced this shift in the administration’s strategic rationale? According to the Times reporting, one potential objective “is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.” Even better would have been to send that signal before Pyongyang dispatches combat troops to a European conflict.
No, the logic of the Biden administration’s shifting tactics makes little sense outside the consideration of American domestic political dynamics. Team Biden is as in the dark when it comes to Trump’s outlook toward this war as its primary combatants are. The Bidenites are giving Ukraine the tools it needs to shape outcomes on the battlefield in advance of the new administration, the effect of which would be (it hopes) to create conditions that prevent Trump officials from throwing Kyiv under the bus at some future summit.
Whatever else there is to say about this strategy, it exposes the Biden administration’s fecklessness. If the only reason why the Biden administration sees advantage in giving Ukraine free rein is because his successor may not, that is an indictment of the Biden administration’s conduct of this war. Its strategic thinking was forever clouded by the overinterpretation of signals emanating from everywhere except Ukraine’s battlefields.
Russia’s response to Biden’s too-little-too-late exercise in strategic coherence and Biden’s reaction to it illustrate the faulty thinking that typified this White House’s approach to the conflict. In a ham-fisted attempt at signaling, Russia shot off an RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile armed with a MIRV (multiple independent reentry vehicle) warhead — all of which are typically reserved for nuclear combat. Moscow’s goal was to shock anxious Western observers into stupefied complicity, but the Biden administration has somehow managed to compartmentalize its horror. That makes you wonder if the Biden administration’s fear of escalation was ever anything other than a product of motivated reasoning. After all, if the prospect of Trump’s accession to the presidency can overcome the fear of nuclear conflict, maybe the latter was never that strong an inducement in the first place.
But it may be too late now. Battered by a brutal enemy who evinces no regard for civilian life and has revived total warfare in the 21st century, the Ukrainian people are in the mood to sue for peace. The best outcome now available to the West is another “frozen conflict” — one that Moscow will thaw out at a time and place of its choosing, when it has regained its strength, in order to seize more Ukrainian territory and destabilize the Western alliance. In the interim, it will ignite crises along the line of contact (just as it did when the Minsk frameworks were operative) designed to extract ever more concessions from the West. All the while, the logic of the NATO alliance will ensure that the West must commit more resources to Europe — not fewer — in response to the deteriorating security environment on the continent.
These are far from ideal outcomes, and they might have been avoided. The present administration has spent the duration of this war languishing in a psychological prison of its own making. The administration’s paralyzing fear of Russian escalation led it to sacrifice opportunity after opportunity. Today, on its way out, it is bequeathing a bad hand to Trump, one made markedly worse by the administration’s solipsism. The actions it has taken betray how much time and advantage were unnecessarily lost to this White House’s self-indulgence.