Not all the policy questions left unanswered by Kamala Harris’s studiously vague presidential campaign are created equal. It is not especially urgent, for instance, to know how Harris’s 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 this week, we were treated to a formal restatement of Harris’s 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, though 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 past 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 leaders in 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.
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