Tell Us What You Mean

I genuninely wish that those who, like the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Ukraine isn’t losing the war, but thanks in part to Mr. Biden’s limits on its defenses Kyiv isn’t winning either. The war has devolved into a bloody stalemate with horrific casualties on both sides. Russia is making slow territorial gains in Ukraine’s east at high cost. Ukraine has held its salient in Russia’s Kursk region, but the Kremlin is massing for an assault to repel the Ukrainians with the help of some 10,000 North Korean troops.

Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy isn’t the triumph that he and the press advertise. At every stage of the war he has limited the military aid the U.S. would provide and how it was used. Artillery, Patriot air defenses, tanks, F-16s and long-range missiles: the Pentagon has delayed providing advanced weapons for fear that Vladimir Putin might escalate the conflict.

The limits have hurt Ukraine’s ability to go on offense against Kremlin forces, including key nodes of supply, communications and weapons stores inside Russia. Mr. Putin’s forces have until recently had a sanctuary inside Russia to attack Ukraine without fear of being hit. Even now the U.S. restricts Ukraine from long-range missile strikes on Russian territory. The U.S. learned the hard way in Vietnam and Afghanistan that you can’t win a war when your enemy has a safe haven.

seem to think that the only thing standing between Ukraine and victory is the stingy United States, would tell us what they mean. The measures that they support:

If Mr. Putin won’t negotiate a peace that Ukraine can live with, Mr. Trump will have to increase U.S. and Ukrainian military leverage to assist diplomacy.

That would mean supporting another aid package in Congress and removing limits on Ukraine’s use of weapons.

Do they not understand that the technology of those long-range weapons means the direct involvement of the United States in programming and guidance?

My view is basically the same as George Kennan’s was. NATO membership for Ukraine is a red line over which the Russian leadership is willing to go to war. Said another way Russia invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided by ending NATO expansion in 2004 (not to mention not fomenting a revolution in Ukraine ten years later). European Union membership might have been fine but the Germans are smart enough to recognize that admitting Ukraine to the EU would brings costs greater than any benefit they might realize from the admission.