How quickly would Trump wash his hands of Ukraine?

For American politicians, all wars are two-front wars. There is a hot battlefield somewhere in the Middle East or the South China Sea, and there’s a political battlefield in Washington, D.C. The domestic contest is decisive. The same goes for Europe. With Joe Biden riding into the sunset and the presidential campaign drawing to a close, American interest in Ukraine is winding down, too. Europeans talking tough about ‘standing up’ to Russia had better be prepared to do so on their own.

Donald Trump’s campaign message, muddled though it is, bodes ill for the Ukrainian war effort. His patience with this war would not extend 24 hours into his presidency, he warns. For J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, the Ukraine war is a mistake the United States should wash its hands of. How much of Ukrainian territory can be regained in any peace negotiations is Ukraine’s problem, not America’s. The Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has a vaguely pro-Ukraine position – one that she has barely mentioned since September. There is a reason for her silence. Americans are no longer as emotional about Ukraine as they were when Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv in February 2022, and half the country called Russian aggression a ‘major threat’. This summer, a Pew Center poll found that just a third feel that way. Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal found that Americans prefer Trump’s Ukraine policy to Harris’s, by 50 per cent to 39. The US ambassador to Nato, Julianne Smith, announced that Washington did not plan to invite Ukraine to join the organisation any time soon.

The Ukrainian cause has got wrapped up in the part of Biden’s agenda that is most ruthless and least popular. In his State of the Union in March, Biden compared his situation with that of Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, when ‘Hitler was on the march’.