A President Who Cannot Conceive of Victory

By Noah Rothman 

Tuesday, May 14, 2024 

 

Yesterday, I wrote of President Joe Biden and his administration’s extraordinary facility for self-sabotage that this White House “cannot envision victory, either for America or its allies.” Indeed, “it sees only the prospect of ambiguous outcomes, to which it can muster the contribution of only half measures.” It was only hours later that one ranking administration official proved the observation correct. 

 

Israel and the United States are “struggling over what the theory of victory is,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told CNN reporter Kylie Atwood on Monday. “They talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” he said of his Israeli counterparts. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.” 

 

As CNN’s Alex Marquardt observed, Cam’s comments dovetail with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s befuddling remarks on Sunday. Then, Blinken insisted that Israel’s small-footprint strategy in Gaza — the very strategy the U.S. lobbied Israel to adopt — was failing because it had allowed Hamas to reconstitute itself in areas the Israeli Defense Forces had already cleared. Since that calibrated approach had been unable to achieve its tactical goals, Israel should abandon its strategic objectives entirely. Victory over Hamas is unachievable “no matter what they do in Rafah,” Blinken said, “or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do.” 

 

This approach — lose now, lest we risk the prospect of losing later — explains the Biden administration’s woefully inadequate response to Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, too. The Biden administration spent the better part of a year arguing with itself over what weapons platforms it would provide Ukraine. It argued itself into believing that this or the other weapons system would destabilize the international environment and risk an escalation vis-à-vis Russia, only to cave to itself at some later date. Recently, the Biden administration’s functionaries articulated a similar logic to explain their pusillanimity: victory is unattainable, so why even try? 

 

“Advisers to President Joe Biden have begun debating internally how and whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should shift his definition of a Ukrainian “victory” — adjusting for the possibility that his country has shrunk irreversibly,” CNN reported in the summer of 2022, mere months after Russian forces were beaten back from the gates of Kyiv and Kharkiv and just a few months prior to a similar Russian retreat from Kherson across the Dnipro River. 

 

“Whether Ukraine can take back these territories is in large part, if not entirely, a function of how much support we give them,” said one unnamed congressional aid. If the Biden administration agreed with that sentiment, the withholding of long-range rockets, tanks and half-track vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft, cluster munitions, and a variety of other platforms is indicative of the administration’s fatalism. 

 

This outlook can also be seen in the Biden administration’s approach to domestic politics. The president’s reelection campaign seems incapable of conceptualizing a victory other than a squeaker. It is focusing its efforts on assembling the narrowest coalition of left and center-left voters that might be just enough to push Biden over the threshold in November. Commanding victories are off the table. 

 

The president and his allies might believe their outlook is sophisticated and nuanced. They take the long view of history, in which there are no permanent successes — no cause that is definitively won because no cause is ever definitively lost. This White House’s problem is that their opponents do not think that way. By all accounts, Moscow still seeks the subsummation of all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation by force. Hamas and its Iranian proxies still pursue the extermination of Jews and, ultimately, “death to America.” Donald Trump — or, at least, Donald Trump’s strategists — have not set their sights on a narrow victory. They are trying to cleave off the margins of the Democratic coalition and once again bring down the “blue wall” that represents the party’s last bulwark. 

 

Biden and his supporters may not be able to conceptualize victory, but their enemies do. So, too, do our foreign allies. The president and his partners should reflect on why their oh-so-sophisticated conception of history seems to elude everyone else.