How Biden’s Ukraine strategy benefits from Republican opposition

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden at the White House on Dec. 21. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The usual assumption is that presidents benefit from having Congress united behind their stated foreign policy strategy. Partisan discord can call a strategy’s durability into question. But sometimes discord provides a president with an opportunity that can be exploited for political and strategic benefit.

In the second year of the war in Ukraine, President Biden will be positioned to do just that, with populist Republicans who oppose continued support for Ukraine as his foil. Republican sniping about his trip to Kyiv this week offered a glimpse of what lies ahead. The administration might even be furtively grateful for divided government if it helps bring the war to an end on terms favorable to the United States.

Start with the fact that the president is not, on the evidence of the war’s first year, an enthusiast for what strategist Edward Luttwak has called “the victory lobby.” Many in Western capitals and the media believe that the only acceptable outcome to the war is a total defeat of Russia, including its expulsion from all of occupied Ukraine and possibly the collapse of the government in Moscow.

That has not been Biden’s inclination. He has emphasized the importance of defending Ukraine while avoiding the risk of direct war with Russia. In the war’s first year, the steady escalation in Pentagon military assistance to Kyiv — culminating most recently with battle tanks — has not been led by the White House. It has been driven by Congress and sustained media pressure, which the administration tends to resist before falling in line.

This demonstrated caution runs counter to Biden’s soaring rhetoric about the war. He has cast it as part of an existential struggle between “democracy and autocracy,” declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” and insisted that his administration will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

Meanwhile, Republican voters’ enthusiasm for a forcefully pro-Ukraine policy has waned, and some of their representatives are following suit. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri delivered a speech criticizing U.S. policy on Thursday, citing the threat from China, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who helped hold up Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House speaker, introduced a resolution this month against further support for Kyiv. This conservative tendency will have greater expression in the GOP-controlled House, making Biden’s incremental approach appear more hawkish by contrast.

That contrast might well work in Biden’s favor. He can take political credit for the United States’ record of strongly supporting Ukraine — broadly popular with Democrats and independents — while attributing limits on that support to recalcitrant Republicans. For example, The Post last week reported on remarks by a “senior administration official” who said, “We will continue to try to impress upon [Ukraine’s leaders] that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” citing the likelihood of resistance from Congress.

That remark sparked outrage within the victory lobby, but the stance it revealed was hardly a surprise to close observers of administration policy and media messaging. Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in November raised the possibility of a negotiated end to the war, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently signaled that he is thinking actively about the war’s endgame. As Bloomberg’s Hal Brands observed this month, “The US doesn’t want the war to drag on forever, because it is turning much of Ukraine into a wasteland while taking a toll on Western treasuries, arsenals and attention.”

That is not what the influential liberal internationalists in Biden’s elite base want to hear, or what Biden’s rhetoric has suggested they can expect. Nor, of course, is it what Ukraine’s courageous defenders want to hear. While Biden clearly envisions a viable, well-armed Ukraine as part of any settlement, he likely sees the risks and costs associated with Kyiv’s version of victory as too high for the U.S. government to bear.

Politically, Biden and his allies can cast populists in Congress as their chief ideological opponents — as heartless at best and opponents of democracy at worst. But behind the scenes, I suspect, some officials are grateful that Congress is no longer united in support of escalating America’s role in the war.

That gives the administration more flexibility in the next year. It can say that while it wants to make available the full suite of American weaponry until Kyiv’s vision of victory is achieved, it is politically constrained at home. The presence of a “bad cop” in Congress could help the “good cop” administration nudge Kyiv toward the negotiating table while maintaining its trust (which is crucial to making any settlement sustainable).

Signs of internal American discord over the war in Ukraine could embolden Putin, it is true. But democracies rarely have the luxury of fighting wars as a unified front. The challenge for a foreign policy leader isn’t to create uniform agreement, but to leverage disagreement in pursuit of the national interest.

Republican skepticism of the war is likely to persist, and one interpretation is that this will undercut America’s strategic objectives. Another interpretation is that it will help the Biden administration triangulate and make its real objectives — the degradation of Russia’s military, the preservation of Ukraine’s independence and the avoidance of direct war — more likely to be vindicated in the end.