Only last week, the Biden administration's national security team was glumly focused on "Trump-proofing" support for Ukraine against what looked like the increasing possibility that former President Donald Trump would win in November. But that was last week.
The tone, and the message sent to Kyiv, changed markedly over the weekend with the stunning announcement that President Joe Biden was quitting the race to let Vice President Kamala Harris take on Trump as the new nominee for the Democrats.
In a phone call Monday with Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin renewed the "unwavering support" of the U.S. in the fight to defeat the invading forces of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the mechanisms to limit what Trump might do in a second term to cut off that support were already in place.
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At the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado, last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, when asked directly about "Trump-proofing," for the first time spoke to the various steps the U.S. and its allies have taken to guard against the possibility of Trump ditching commitments to Ukraine should he return to the White House.
The term "Trump-proofing" has become a common expression among pundits, academics and reporters amid the rising questions over the future of the support when a new U.S. president is sworn into office in January.
In line with his "America first" agenda, Trump has criticized the more than $53.7 billion in military aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, according to a tally by the State Department. His pick for vice president, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has been more blunt.
In a podcast when he was running for the Senate seat in 2022, Vance said, "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other."
At the Aspen forum, Blinken said that "every administration has an opportunity, of course, to set its own policy. We can't lock in the future."
But he noted that the U.S. and more than 20 other countries -- including NATO allies, Japan and the European Union -- pledged at the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., earlier this month to continue their military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
"Were we to renege on that -- I suppose that's possible -- but happily we've got another 20 some-odd countries that are doing the same thing," Blinken said.
Also, the aid and training assistance for Ukraine would be funneled through a new NATO command being set up in Wiesbaden, Germany, to make the support more difficult to cut off, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
In his own remarks at the Aspen forum, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the bilateral security agreements the U.S. has signed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have put the diplomatic "architecture in place" for U.S. support to continue through the next administration.
He said the support would "endure no matter what happens with our politics," in an ongoing effort "to convince the allies that the U.S. has staying power."
As uniformed officers, Air Force Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the SACEUR, or Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, were limited in what they could say at the Aspen forum on the policy guidelines for support of Ukraine, but both noted the need to confront Russian aggression.
Brown declined to comment on the possibility of a Trump administration withdrawing support for Ukraine -- "that's a hypothetical I'm not going to get into," Brown said, but added that "if collectively we stop supporting Ukraine, Putin wins." In addition, "we have credibility that's at stake, not just the U.S., but NATO."
Brown also doubted Trump's repeated boast that he could work out a peace deal for Ukraine in a day. "If he can get that done in 24 hours, that would be great," Brown said to laughter from the audience.
Without mentioning Trump, Cavoli noted that one of the former president's main complaints about NATO -- that member states were failing to meet the goal of spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense -- had been addressed.
At least 23 of the 32 NATO member states now meet the 2% goal, and "many nations are concluding that 2% is not enough, that they're going to have to go higher than that," he said.
"Poland is spending upward of 4% right now. The U.K. is coming up to 2.5% as their announced goal. I think we'll see that across the board," Cavoli said.
"We can't be under any illusions. At the end of a conflict in Ukraine -- however it concludes -- we are going to have a very big Russia problem," the general said. "We are going to have a situation where Russia is reconstituting its force; is located on the borders of NATO; is led by largely the same people as it is right now; is convinced that we're the adversary; and is very, very angry."
The European allies "have awakened to the fact that the house is on fire," Cavoli said. "This is not a show, and this is not just rhetoric. This is true concern about the stability of their continent, and the survival of their states."
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