Gordon Gray

U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine has reached a turning point: 1. The President just waived sanctions on Russia, weeks after he signed the Graham bill that imposes them. He struck a deal to buy Russian diesel despite previously putting tariffs on countries, like India, that import Russian oil. And the President announced an energy ceasefire that, while desirable, neither Russia nor Ukraine agreed to. 2. Then there’s the mounting pressure on Ukraine. Trump called for Zelensky to be replaced by new leadership. Ukraine’s Starshield service slowed, making it harder to counter incoming drones and missiles. The administration reportedly threatened to cut intelligence and weapons sales if Kyiv didn’t stop striking Russian energy sites. 3. All that has happened over just the past week. In total, it marks a sharp shift away from supporting Ukraine and toward relaxing the pressure on Moscow. Why? 4. It’d be nice to believe that the administration has reached some new, heretofore unimagined theory of victory, in which Russian aggression won’t succeed but Ukrainian independence will. 5. Nyet such luck. The driver of this policy shift appears to be the President’s desire to lower diesel costs before the midterm elections.  6. Diesel prices are high, mostly because of the Iran war, which admits of no near-term solution. So the administration wishes to boost Russian supplies, even at the price of hobbling Ukraine’s offensive against Russian refineries. The rest seems personal frustration that Zelensky, quite understandably, won’t comply.  7. Domestic political considerations always influence U.S. foreign policy, but here we face the worst of all worlds. Diesel prices are unlikely to come down much and, even if they do, the President’s party looks likely to lose at least one house of Congress anyway. 8. The bigger casualty here is U.S. support for the victim and U.S. pressure on the aggressor. Perhaps forgotten after 4+ years of war is that it is about more than Ukrainian survival. 9. The cardinal rule of the postwar world is a prohibition against forcible conquest. Countries can’t simply decide they’d like to take another’s territory and wage war to get it.  10. Allowing that, and without imposing severe costs for it, is a step toward a global law of the jungle. The U.S. has resisted that for 80 years, and for a simple reason: we’ve seen that world before, and it was not good. 11. Americans thus have stake in ensuring Ukrainian survival. At stake is far more than the price of diesel. 12. At this turning point, the saving grace is that U.S. policy is likely to turn again. In our era of inconstancy, Washington might tack back toward Kyiv - after the elections, or if diesel prices retreat, or in light of Russian depredations, or just because. Given the costs piling up now, that return cannot come soon enough.