Biden’s Private Ukraine Deadline

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Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest’s regular Tuesday installment from yours truly on foreign policy and national security. These days, that usually means something about the war in Ukraine, which remains one of the biggest foreign policy issues that the Biden White House is grappling with. The American public might be getting sick of it, but it is still very much one of the main topics of conversation in the foreign policy establishment—labeled “the Blob” by Ben Rhodes and “The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam. So it goes.

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Biden’s Private Ukraine Deadline

The D.C. foreign policy establishment is growing restless as the Biden White House resists calls to articulate a more specific strategy if Ukraine fails to make significant gains by the fall.

JULIA IOFFE

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House has held regular calls with prominent people in the Washington foreign policy establishment, trying to keep the heads of think tanks and prominent experts apprised of what the administration is thinking and planning in countering Moscow. The goal of the regular calls has been to inform, persuade, and shape the analysis produced by this town’s foreign policy elite.

Everyone I spoke to who participated in these White House briefing calls was vociferous in praising the Biden administration’s policy on Ukraine. They wanted to give the president and his advisors credit for this and credit for that. They really had done a terrific job, everyone said, of saving Ukraine and acting nimbly in a rapidly evolving, predictably unpredictable...

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