Serious public debate should not pretend that no strategy exists. It can easily be inferred by any observer of the conflict.
A letter from 29 congressional Republicans, six of them senators, asks the Biden administration for more transparency regarding U.S. aid to Ukraine, on the theory that Congress needs more information before approving the latest request for an additional $24 billion in aid. The signatories cover a spectrum of the right edge of the GOP caucus, including MAGA figures such as J. D. Vance, Tommy Tuberville, Paul Gosar, and Andy Biggs; libertarians such as Rand Paul; and more small-government conservative types such as Chip Roy and Mike Lee. The letter’s request for more concrete information about the flow of money is reasonable enough. Congress has duties of oversight, and those duties become especially important when asked to renew emergency spending. The nature of emergencies — such as the arrival of the pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine — is such that it is typically more important to authorize getting dollars out the door quickly than making sure every penny is properly directed and accounted for. But the press of time is no longer an excuse once the executive comes back asking for multiple tranches of funding over the succeeding months or years.
Where the letter misunderstands the conflict, however, is in its strange insistence that we do not have a strategy in supporting Ukraine:
Your request cites President Biden’s pledge that “we will stand with Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty for as long as it takes” [as well as others by administration officials]. . . . These statements imply an open-ended commitment to supporting the war in Ukraine of an indeterminate nature, based on a strategy that is unclear, to achieve a goal yet to be articulated to the public or the Congress. . . . How is the counteroffensive going? Are the Ukrainians any closer to victory than they were 6 months ago? What is our strategy, and what is the president’s exit plan? What does the administration define as victory in Ukraine?
There are two problems with this. First, we already have a strategy, even if the president has not been especially clear in communicating it to the voting public. Second, these questions appear to assume that we also need a detailed plan to fight the war and bring it to a specific resolution — but we can’t have those things because we’re not the ones fighting the war.
On the first point, we have both a grand strategy and a more specific strategy. The grand strategy is to maintain the post-Cold War order of Europe, and in so doing, demonstrate our continuing capacity and resolve to maintain the post-Cold War order of other theaters, as well. Some of that order dates back to 1945; the rest emerged after 1991. Its elements include settlement of the post-Soviet borders of the continent; preclusion of aggressive war as a means of revising those borders, in order both to deter such wars and to discourage the large European military establishments required to conduct or defend such wars; preventing the threat of aggressive war from reducing European states to vassals of powers hostile to the United States; keeping faith with both formal and informal American alliances and security guarantees; preserving American control of shipping lanes and American access to markets and trade; and, so much as feasible, maintaining the space in which nations with some degree of popular sovereignty can develop institutions of democracy, republicanism, constitutionalism, and classical liberalism. Every element of that grand strategy is menaced by the possibility that Russia could extinguish Ukraine’s sovereignty (de jure or de facto) by invading it and imposing the Kremlin’s desired war aims.
More specifically, our support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion aims to degrade Russia’s offensive military capacity, in order to deter it from further threats to its European neighbors; demonstrate American resolve to our enemies and allies in the South China Sea and other conflict zones; preserve so much of Ukraine’s sovereignty and control of its pre-2022 (and, ideally, pre-2014) territory as is possible; and raise the costs and reduce the benefits to Russia of its war, in order to deter other hostile states from invading nations aligned with the U.S. and its allies. We also aim to strengthen our relationships with Europe, which is a two-way street: Many of the European states care as much or more about this war than we do (as it affects them more directly), and accordingly, it is encouraging that — as Jim Geraghty has detailed — Europe as a whole has contributed more aid to Ukraine than the U.S. has, and numerous European states have committed a significantly higher share of their GDP to such aid than we have.
Anyone following this war knows all of this. It is no secret, and has been discussed extensively in public debates. It is similarly clear what our strategy does not entail: regime change in Russia or the establishment of American military outposts in Ukraine. It is entirely fair to complain that Joe Biden has done a terrible job of communicating this; he has yet to give a prime-time address to the public laying it all out, he has been hesitant to personally provide much detail on the war’s progress to the public, and his 2023 State of the Union address was very vague on the topic. It is also fair to complain about Biden’s failure to deter the invasion in the first place (his “minor incursion” line was a master class in the failure of credible deterrence), as well as his inconsistent management of the actual aid, which has regularly entailed slow-walking particular weapons systems or walking back previous statements that particular weapons would not be provided. But no amount of presidential ineptitude and decrepitude changes the fact that everybody already knows what our strategic objectives are.
On the second point, we don’t need an “exit strategy” because we never entered Ukraine in the first place — not in the way we went into Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, or Korea. When you’re financing another country’s resistance to invasion, you hope for total expulsion of the invader, but you’re not in a position to decide when enough is enough. We weren’t in that position in the 1980s when we backed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan or the contras in Nicaragua. They were fighting our enemies, and that was enough. In the event, we ended up succeeding in expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, and ended up regretting our exit from Afghan affairs thereafter; the endgame in Central America was more ambiguous. But the real exit strategy is that we stop helping when the Ukrainians stop fighting, and the Ukrainians stop fighting when the Russians stop fighting them.
That said, a simple definition of victory in Ukraine is not hard to describe: the survival of Ukraine as a sovereign state, able to govern itself without dictation from Moscow and to defend itself against any future effort to extinguish that sovereignty. Everything else is negotiable. And while we have some influence over Ukraine, and we can fairly debate the size of appropriate American aid packages in light of our other commitments, at the end of the day, it’s the Ukrainian government and not ours that will decide what terms are acceptable in order to make peace with Russia.
Congressional pressure can, of course, seek to smoke out any ulterior objectives that this administration might have, so long as it holds power. But serious public debate should not pretend that no strategy exists. It can easily be inferred by any observer of the conflict.