"The immediate questions are how long the United States can persist in supporting a “plan” for Ukraine's victory that does not actually exist, to what extent Trump’s call for negotiations is a likely endpoint for U.S. policy no matter which candidate wins in November, and whether both the Biden White House and Harris herself are just hoping Ukraine holds the line through the election — at which point their no-negotiation stance may become a lot more flexible.
The longer-term questions involve the place of Ukraine in American grand strategy, which is dealing with a range of dangerous stress points at the moment. The initial hope that the Ukraine conflict would neutralize one of our challengers looks relatively vain: Russia has weathered our economic warfare and seems to be thriving, for now, with a conflict economy deeply integrated with our more significant rivals in Beijing. And that Sino-Russian integration is a key part of a landscape that a recent bipartisan report by the Commission on the National Defense Strategy called “the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945,” in terms of our vulnerabilities to our major adversaries and “the potential for near-term major war.”
There may be some hyperbole in that assessment, but certainly this is the most fraught moment for American power since the end of the Cold War, with challenges on a scale that requires either substantial rearmament, meaningful retrenchment or some combination of the two. And the current White House has struggled with this balance, first retrenching chaotically in Afghanistan, and thereafter responding to new crises by doubling down on America’s promises — but without a clear plan to make those commitments sustainable, to match our rhetoric with underlying strength." [1]
1. The Most Important Question Kamala Harris Hasn’t Answered: Ross Douthat. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 28, 2024.
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