It’s a safe bet that no leader outside the United States is following its current election more closely than Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – and with good reason. If Kamala Harris wins the US presidential election in November, she will almost certainly continue Joe Biden’s policy toward Ukraine, but if Donald Trump returns to the White House on 20 January, he could cease military support for Ukraine, meaning it would eventually run out of the weaponry it needs to resist Russia.
Or Trump could continue arming Ukraine for a while, but as a segue to a settlement – ideally one presided over by him. During his speech accepting the Republican party’s presidential nomination, Trump vowed to end the war in Ukraine. In a phone call with Zelenskiy the next day, he pledged to achieve a “just peace”, but Kyiv has good reason to fear that he would, at a minimum, allow Russia to retain the Ukrainian territory it holds and also shut Nato’s door on Ukraine.
As Trump sees it, arming Ukraine does not serve any important US national interests and pumps billions of dollars into a war it cannot win, wasting money that should be spent on pressing needs at home and parrying genuine threats abroad. In his eyes, Russia is not among the latter, and China, which he regards as the principal foe, ought to be the focus.
The people often mentioned as candidates for top foreign policy posts in a second Trump presidency, such as the China hawk Elbridge Colby, have made the same case. So, more importantly, has Trump’s choice for vice-president, the Ohio senator JD Vance. In his speech accepting his nomination as Trump’s running mate, Vance didn’t mention Ukraine, but his call for an “America first” foreign policy left no doubt about his stance on the war in that country.
In February, during his remarks at the annual Munich security conference, Vance went into specifics on the Ukraine war. Using the Patriot air defence missile and 155mm artillery shells as examples, he opined that even if Congress approved the then pending $61bn in economic and military assistance – it subsequently did so in April – the US, and more so Europe, lacked the wherewithal to produce the volume of weapons Ukraine would need to keep fighting. He added that billions of dollars in additional US aid “is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield”.
Trump’s own pronouncements on Ukraine tend towards rousing rhetoric rather than the nitty-gritty facts beloved by policy wonks, but Vance’s detail-based presentation at the Munich forum aligned precisely with Trump’s views, which face no opposition from quarters that matter to him.
The Republican party once had a strong internationalist wing that was committed to US leadership on a variety of fronts and rejected anything that smacked of isolationism. The late John McCain, a former senator for Arizona, took this worldview. Trump has cast that segment of the party into the wilderness. Its lingering representatives, such as the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, are powerless and discredited. (McConnell was booed when he took to the stage to nominate Trump at the GOP convention.) Trump, in effect, owns the Republican party, which today contains no dissenting voices of consequence on foreign policy and certainly not on Ukraine.
The press and the well-resourced thinktank world won’t alter Trump’s views on Ukraine. Trump the billionaire has artfully styled himself as a contrarian outsider who disdains the “mainstream media” and Washington’s galaxy of foreign policy experts. He paints them as part of an elite whose highbrow internationalism led to the “forever wars”, for which working men and women paid the price in blood and treasure. His critique of the role the US has played in Ukraine’s war flows from this larger narrative.
Trump does care deeply about public opinion, but it is highly unlikely to change his outlook on Ukraine. Save during protracted wars or after terrorist attacks (such as 9/11), Americans don’t dwell on foreign policy; nor, typically, does it strongly influence their votes. Plus, the Trump-Vance claim that Washington’s laggard, freeloading European allies should assume the primary responsibility for aiding Ukraine because its fate matters far more to them than to the US resonates with millions of voters. True, millions of others dislike Trump, but his stance on Ukraine isn’t a major reason.
Ukraine’s resistance won’t end abruptly if Trump wins the election. Ukrainians remain determined to fight on and have enough weapons to do so for months. Furthermore, the European countries supporting Ukraine won’t abandon it. Yet as of the end of April, the US had provided $50.4bn worth of the military assistance received by Ukraine, versus $42bn from Kyiv’s 10 largest supporters from other Nato countries combined. Were US military aid to cease, they wouldn’t be able to fill the void.
Could Trump’s boundless self-regard and obsession with winning induce him to continue arming Ukraine for fear that its defeat would make him look weak compared with Vladimir Putin? Possibly. But based on Trump’s numerous statements on Ukraine, it is more likely that Kyiv’s already difficult predicament will become worse if he wins in November.
No wonder Zelenskiy watches the US election so attentively. He may have taken some solace from Trump’s comment that Ukraine’s survival matters to the US, not just to Europe; but it won’t allay his fears. Nor should it.
Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
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