Forget President Biden’s pledge to support to Ukraine “as long as it takes.”
US policies suggest that the administration, for whatever reason, does not actually want Ukraine to win.
And what reason does China have to think that the United States will behave differently when it invades Taiwan?
Action speaks louder than political rhetoric.
True, the United States has extended large military and financial support to Ukraine, worth well over $70 billion.
However, the slow and piecemeal nature of the assistance all but guarantees that Ukrainians will not be in a position to retake their territory – certainly not in the course of the current, painfully slow offensive.
It turns out, the Wall Street Journal reports, that the Biden team were well aware of the gaps in Ukraine’s capacities ahead of the offensive but “hope Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.”
Hope is no substitute for strategy – or for, say, demining equipment, which Ukrainians desperately need to accelerate their advances in the south.
What seems like a disappointing pace of the offensive has not provided a new sense of urgency in Washington, but rather entrenched a dangerous Ukraine fatigue, which takes it as a given that Ukrainians will make only limited gains in the coming months.
The administration, for example, is still refusing to provide Ukraine with long-range artillery, the ATACMS, even after France and the UK crossed this imaginary “red line.”
The United States provided Ukrainians with a homeopathic dose of 31 Abrams tanks, while thousands of them are collecting dust in storage.
Waiting for what? Nobody knows.
As the training of Ukrainian pilots on F-16s begins only in August, the fighter jets – which the Ukrainians also desperately need to provide cover to their troops — will likely make it to Ukraine only in 2024, if at all.
True, the decision to move ahead with cluster munitions was significant and laudable, but it needs to be read against the background of the West’s collective inability to boost the production of ordinary, 155-millimeter, artillery shells.
Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea grain deal and its subsequent attack on Ukrainian port infrastructure are a clear escalation, with the aim of exacerbating food insecurity in some of the most vulnerable societies in the world, and destabilizing the West with subsequent migratory flows.
Thus far, this Russian move has gone unchallenged, inviting more brazen behavior.
Biden’s unwillingness to go big has consequences.
At home, a static of frozen conflict combined with an open-ended commitment to supporting Ukraine is bound to become a political liability come the 2024 election season.
The best way to silence the domestic critics of US assistance for Kyiv is to ensure the war is a success story, not yet another inconclusive open-ended ‘entanglement’, to be abandoned with embarrassment.
Internationally, the half-heartedness sends a signal of weakness to our adversaries, most importantly to China.
If the administration is concerned about possible escalation with Moscow, given the latter’s nuclear arsenal, then surely it will be equally concerned about escalation with Beijing once Xi Jinping does move on Taiwan.
Not only is China also a nuclear power, its capacity for economic coercion and influence in the ‘global South’ are larger by several orders of magnitude.
If some in Washington think a face-saving ‘off-ramp’ is needed for Russia, then surely they will be looking for one for China as well.
For the likes of the White House’s climate envoy John Kerry, after all, the latter remains a necessary partner in the global effort to deal with climate change.
Those who say that the United States needs to prioritize, in its diplomacy or in its defense budget, the looming confrontation with China have a point.
However, the most important part of that policy mix is to send the signal that crossing the United States and starting wars of aggression that run counter to our interests does not pay.
And unless the administration sends out that signal in Ukraine, loud and clear, it is setting itself up for political failure at home and, more seriously, for defeat in the Indo-Pacific theater.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
