The last two weeks’ worth of diplomatic news on the Ukraine war – the Europeans’ ultimatum to Moscow (after discussion with Trump) to agree to a ceasefire or else suffer new sanctions; the message by Trump demanding that Ukraine agree to meet with Putin in Turkey and casting doubt on Ukraine’s willingness to make a deal; Trump’s message a few days later excusing Putin for not being at the meeting; the (predictable) non-agreements in Turkey and then, yesterday, with Trump – has made it clear that there still is no U.S. policy on the war. Practically since the day he was sworn into office, Trump has gone back and forth, over and over again, on Ukraine and Russia: now chastising Ukraine and Zelenskyy, while praising Putin and Russia; now gesturing in the direction of Ukraine and saying how shocked (shades of the scene in “Casablanca”) he is about Russian targeting of civilians; now stating that he’s walking away and that it’s up to the Ukrainians and Russians to work something out. The question one might well ask is how long this can continue: are we facing a few more weeks or months of the cycle, or a few more years?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that, as I have pointed out elsewhere, U.S. foreign policy is simply not governed by a logic of consequences. Policy makers in Washington practically never take into account that a particular option they are considering will lead to certain good or bad medium- or long-range outcomes; nor do they ever bother discussing the probability of those consequences resulting from one or another option. Indeed, when those consequences do result, they are considered in a way completely disconnected with U.S. policy, as if they were some kind of randomly occurring natural catastrophe, or perhaps indicative of problems with “those kind of people” or with “that part of the world.” Clear failure even to arrive at the most immediate of hoped-for situations is considered as a good reason to try harder, doubling or tripling efforts, all the time implying that it was the critics of the policy who didn’t try hard enough, or whose arguments gave hope to adversaries. For this reason, decisions can almost always be reopened for debate on the grounds that policy is being carried out incorrectly; and those decisions themselves can almost always be contested on the grounds that policy has not been given a fair chance. Since no one really cares about consequences, except as a talking point used to bash bureaucratic opponents, there is no particular set of facts that bring debate to a close.
But this is a bird’s eye view. Closer to the Oval Office, one finds that there are warring clans of advisers, each pushing a particular option and ready, at the drop of a hat, to push back against the options advocated by others. For the better part of 15 years, as Franz Schurmann showed, advocates of naval and air power, advocating its use primarily in East Asia and Latin America, squared off against pro-NATO advocates of using infantry. The first group advocated “rollback,” the second “containment,” but in fact their dispute affected dozens of issues in foreign policy, year after year. Another example is the Team B dispute, starting in the Ford presidency and bubbling on through Bush the elder’s one term in office. More recent examples have to do with policy toward China, or Iran. What these issues have in common is that they are in domains where the U.S. has enormous numbers of policy instruments available (military, economic, and intelligence, for starters), that the options considered revolve around the use of particular combinations of those instruments, and that high-level officials feel a sense of urgency. Most issues do not check all three of those boxes, and so policy either continues inertially, in a routine manner (for example, most “security assistance programs”); or else is the subject of a quasi-consensus (for example, the current crusade against the UN and specialized international organizations, or against public health).
If we return now to Ukraine-Russia policy, we can see that the issue is quintessentially one of warring clans, both with a complete lack of interest in reasoning from preferred consequences to the actions they favor. On the one hand, we have the old-line, cold war-ish Republicans, such as Rubio, Waltz, and Kellogg, with their cheerleaders in Congress, such as Graham and Rogers. For them, to paraphrase Faulkner, the cold war isn’t past history, it’s not even in the past, and so U.S. policy should be directed at imposing as much harm as possible on Russia, with Ukraine being the arena in which those efforts take place, regardless of the chances of this policy making it more likely Russia will give in. On the other hand, we have the anti-European, anti-NATO types, such as Vance, Hegseth, and, for the most part, the entire MAGA-verse. This group is animated by a hatred of liberal democracy, a concomitant admiration of populist right-wing strongmen, an inchoate sense that Russia somehow deserves to dominate its “near abroad,” and a burning desire to move U.S. military forces to the “Indo-Pacific” in preparation for what they see as the coming war with China; the idea that slamming the door on Ukraine might well lead to a worsened position for the U.S. is not even on the radar screen. Although, a priori, Trump is closest to the second clan, especially because of his admiration of Putin and his thirst for revenge on Zelenskyy for having, as he sees it, opened the door to his first impeachment, he has nowhere near the same obsession with Ukraine that he does with, say, tariffs or immigration, and thus is prey to whichever clan speaks to him most recently.
One might imagine that at some point, the bubbles will pop and the cycle will stop: Trump will put sanctions on Russia, or cut off military and intelligence support for Ukraine. But either course of action would lead to loud screams from one or the other clan and, as a result, create big public relations problems for Trump with a key element of his advisers. Like most U.S. presidents, these are the only kinds of consequences he actually cares about. For the foreseeable future, it’s bubbles as far as the eye can see.