Opinion | Trump Has a Plan for Ukraine: It’s Biden’s

Like a slim majority of Americans and strong majority of pundits, I disagree with the House GOP rump seeking to stop aid to Ukraine. But America has a two-party, adversarial political system. It isn’t a polity of enforced unanimity. Nothing is ever unopposed (48 House Democrats voted against the creation of Medicare).

We have one president at a time and Joe Biden has been pro-Ukraine only in comparison to the GOP renegades. He has consistently withheld requested weapons, fearing escalation as if Vladimir Putin might commit global suicide because a war outside his borders is going badly (did the U.S resort to nukes in Iraq?).

This column thought Mr. Biden should be more enterprising in the early days, when Mr. Putin was flummoxed by failure, before sunk costs and thousands of deaths had to be justified. But Biden policy has been suspiciously unnimble, with perhaps the main instruction to national security adviser Jake Sullivan being: Keep the war of low salience to the American voter.

A frozen, Korea-style outcome may have been the lightly spoken Biden aim all along. Now comes a Washington Post report detailing a “secret” Donald Trump plan that strikes fundamentally the same note.

Last time I wrote about this subject a reader taxed me with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who claimed Mr. Trump in private vowed to cut off Ukraine. My response: “Orbán speaks for Orbán. He was speaking to a Hungarian audience. I wasn’t there to question him about exactly what Trump said or what he thought he heard Trump say but if Trump wanted to say something intelligible on Ukraine, he would.”

Not surprisingly, the Post now tells us Mr. Orbán’s claim was categorically “false.”

Mr. Trump, his critics are correct, has no fixed star. He wants outcomes that glorify Mr. Trump. These same critics, incapable of consistency whenever a cheap talking point beckons, actually credit him with one fixed and consistent position: pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine. When you hear this, you’re hearing hackery. It’s a complete misunderstanding of who Mr. Trump is and how he operates.

Nor does it help.

The great navigational shoal in this war isn’t Russia’s interest, it’s Ukraine’s. The Zelensky government has been unwilling to explain to its public that even if Russian forces could somehow be expelled it would be a temporary outcome.

Ukraine is a weak polity—it won’t level with its people about the real price of victory, a long cold war until Russia changes, yet neither will it draft its young into the fight.

Mr. Putin’s is a weak polity—squandering its troops rather than husbanding them for a decisive offensive, refusing to impinge on its urban elite with conscription. The Kremlin’s budgeting indicates its effort must peak this year.

The collective West is proving weak too. Gifted with an undeserved strategic opportunity, armed with 20 times Russia’s GDP, NATO could stop the war tomorrow by writing a sizable but affordable check to deny Mr. Putin hope of further advances.

In this situation, Mr. Trump, it’s a slight oversimplification to say, is high-risk and high-reward and Mr. Biden is low-risk and low-reward. In fact, it’s hard to see much good happening either way. With Mr. Trump, there’s a slight chance of some out-of-left-field deal, but your main expectation should be very similar whoever’s elected: half-baked drift unless and until the Russians mount a competent threat to capture Kyiv, then a panicked, unpredictable response.

U.S. management of recent wars shouldn’t fill voters with confidence. Neither should its management of the Trump phenomenon. The collapse of elite credit with a large part of our electorate, those now supporting the GOP isolationist wing, is directly traceable to the lame Russia hoaxes that were the elite answer to the Trump electorate’s message of dissatisfaction.

In his most important job, healing this breach, Mr. Biden quickly went AWOL, then added insult to injury by specifying electric-vehicle handouts and student-loan forgiveness as his new agenda. Against all evidence, he now decides America wants him for a second term, missing the opportunity history sometimes gives a one-term president to advance difficult, unpopular, necessary decisions that a hostile world requires, even if the electorate hasn’t caught up with realities yet.

The failing spirit turns to a deus ex machina in such circumstances. How bad could Kamala Harris be? Three of the last four vice presidents who acceded unexpectedly to the presidency (TR, Coolidge, Truman) worked out fine. LBJ was the exception, using his fortuitous elevation to launch agendas that mostly played out poorly for America.

Failing some wild card, I would advise Ukraine’s European friends to be ready for an extended period in which the U.S. is unable to provide leadership amid the rising dangers of the world.