Biden’s Mixed Messaging on Endgame in Ukraine Shows a White House Adrift

Not everybody will be persuaded by President Trump’s recent assertion that he could singlehandedly end the war in Ukraine in a day, but one thing no one could fault Mr. Trump for is lack of audacity or focus. The Biden administration, by contrast, looks increasingly adrift on the most pressing foreign policy matter of the day.That is not only because the president seems unable to keep himself from conflating Ukraine and Iraq, which according to most atlases are two different countries. It’s also that there are two divergent narratives from the White House about the course of the war in Europe, and only the biggest Biden enthusiast would argue they create any kind of synergy for conflict resolution. The problem is that, in effect, the two narratives cancel each other out and undercut progress on the diplomatic front, or even any appearance of it. The story is starting to eddy through the mainstream and European press. And it’s not hard to imagine that the lack of clarity could make things more difficult on the battlefront.As first reported by the Washington Post, Ukrainian officials recently told the director of the CIA, William Burns, that they seek to push Moscow into negotiations by the end of the year. They hope to do so by recapturing as much Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine as possible by then. Mr. Burns was on a trip that had been kept under wraps, and met with President Zelensky and top Ukrainian officials at Kyiv.To what extent the Ukrainian objectives gelled with forecasts from Langley is not immediately clear. Intelligence sharing between Washington and Kyiv is practically seamless, to say nothing of America’s robust, ongoing security assistance. A Ukrainian commander told The Washington Post that “We have an agreement: 24/7, we’re in touch.” So it is hard to imagine that the strategic goals would not be in some kind of alignment. According to the Ukrainian officials cited in the Post, military planners believe that they can not only take back a large amount of territory by the autumn but also move deeper into eastern Ukraine. They could even position artillery and missile systems closer to the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. One official close to Mr. Zelensky said that “Russia will only negotiate if it feels threatened.”Though the Burns meeting lacks the buzz of, say, the upcoming summit at Vilnius of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the parley clearly points to an end game to the war, replete with an approximate timeline. Entering negotiations with Russia by year’s end is quite different from the Biden administration mantra of throwing support to Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”Whether on the battlefield or campaign trail, sound bites generally do not make for the soundest strategy. That timeline, even if unrealistic, also appears to contradict remarks by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, who on Friday told the National Press Club that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will not only be “very very bloody” but will take a “very long” time.General Milley said that “War on paper and real war are different. In real war, real people die.” Underscoring General Milley’s point, Russia claimed late last week to have killed 30 Ukrainian soldiers who had been trying to cross the Dnieper River in the Russian-occupied Kherson region. The soldiers were reportedly struck by a single Iskander hypersonic missile.If the end game is already on the books, so to speak, why the endless weeks of attrition? General Milley allows that while the counteroffensive is “advancing steadily,” progress has been slower than expected, with Ukrainian forces “some days moving forward just one kilometer or less.”The dichotomy between a violent, protracted war on one hand and a preliminary timeline for negotiations on the other bespeaks, not for the first time, a White House being led by events instead of proactively leveraging adversaries’ weaknesses to steer a swifter and more decisive course. Mr. Biden recently described President Putin as “a bit of a pariah around the world.” That is true, but how productive is it for a president to be trotting out the same language more than one year into a global conflict? What exactly Mr. Trump had in mind when he said he could end the war in a day is something only he himself may know. It bears repeating, though, that the first bang of the Russo-Ukrainian war began under President Obama’s watch, with the Russian annexation of Crimea, and subsequently erupted under President Biden’s bumbling, inattentive gaze. A more capable, engaged, and visionary commander-in-chief might look for ways to bridge the gaps between his intelligence and defense teams and bring a feckless actor like Russia to the table sooner rather than later. It turns out that Mr. Biden is not that man, and in war, time is often less friend than foe.

Biden’s Mixed Messaging on Endgame in Ukraine Shows a White House Adrift

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