By Ross Douthat / The New York Times
Not all the policy questions left unanswered by Kamala Harris’ studiously vague presidential campaign are created equal. It is not especially urgent, for instance, to know how Harris’ views of the ideal health care system have evolved since the great Medicare for All debates of 2020, given the strong likelihood that as president she would share power with a Republican Congress and any sweeping domestic policy initiatives would be stillborn.
It is rather more important, on the other hand, to know what a President Harris would do about the war in Ukraine, the most significant crisis that she would immediately inherit.
With Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington last week, we were treated to a formal restatement of Harris’ support for the Biden administration’s position from early in the war, which envisioned Ukraine taking back most of its lost territory: Standing beside the Ukrainian leader, the vice president dismissed any deal-making that involves territorial concessions as Putinist fellow-traveling and “proposals for surrender.” (The intended contrast with Donald Trump is obvious, since Trump is promising to immediately seek an armistice even as he declines to detail terms.)
But even as the vice president was issuing this statement, the administration was leaking doubts about Zelensky’s supposed plan for victory, dismissing it as “little more than a repackaged request for more weapons and the lifting of restrictions on long-range missiles,” to quote The Wall Street Journal. In other words, it’s a request for help to slow the grinding pace of Russian gains, but not a plan to actually deliver the victorious endgame that Kyiv and Washington have officially been seeking.
In fairness to Zelensky, it’s not clear what form such a plan could take, absent the direct NATO intervention that the Biden White House has prudently resisted. The situation on the front has turned against Ukraine over the last year, with the main question right now being just how bad things are likely to get.
The Economist, speaking for some part of the Western establishment, has an intensely pessimistic assessment in its latest issue, emphasizing Russian advantages in numbers, firepower and cash. Cathy Young, writing for The Bulwark, has a more optimistic take, arguing that the current Russian push may hit its limits soon, that Moscow may be hoping “to seize as much land as they can by winter, in hopes of getting a cease-fire deal that freezes the territorial status quo.” But both readings converge on the reality that for now Ukraine’s main goal is to stabilize the front, and the hope of a rapid Russian retreat that many hawks nurtured in 2022 and 2023 has slipped away.
Such a situation presents two levels of uncertainty about what a Harris administration might decide to do. The immediate questions are how long the United States can persist in supporting a “plan” for 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 war would neutralize one of our challengers looks relatively vain: Russia has weathered our economic warfare and seems to be thriving, for now, with a war 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.
Ukraine in this context isn’t just a major strategic problem in its own right but one decision point among many, from the Middle East to East and Northeast Asia, that will test the next president’s ability to set priorities, recalibrate commitments and match our expansive ends with our more limited means.
Does Harris have a different vision from the current president on how to defend the Pax Americana? Does she have any specific vision? None of the unanswered questions about her candidacy are likely to matter more, or have answers that cost more if the world does not cooperate.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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