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.

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 conflict. But as soon as we went off the record or spoke on background, the truth flowed like a mighty river.

It turns out that Washington’s foreign policy set has grown increasingly frustrated with the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy. What is it, exactly? On one hand, the administration has been consistent in its line on Ukraine: Ukraine must win, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, this must not turn into World War III, and we must defend and strengthen the rules-based (and American-designed) international order.

But what does any of that really mean? What does winning in Ukraine even look like? Do we agree with Ukraine that it means restoring its 1991 borders? If we advocate for “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” then what did it mean when Antony Blinken—just “Tony” to the community—told a group of experts that Crimea was Putin’s red line, and therefore America’s as well? Does our concept of victory actually diverge from the Ukrainians’ vision? And what does “as long as it takes” mean in the context of providing Ukraine with more sensitive weapons systems, like ATACMS, or dwindling weapons stocks in the U.S. and Europe? How “all in” are we? “If they have a strategy, it hasn’t been shared,” one expert on these regular briefing calls with administration officials complained.

In recent weeks, however, it seems that at least part of the policy has become a bit less gauzy. It can be articulated, essentially, as this: Let’s wait and see how Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive goes, and then we’ll reassess.

Depending on how the offensive goes for Ukraine, the administration has hinted that it will reassess and recalibrate its policy. But what does that look like? “The White House has certainly said things like we need to do everything now, do whatever we can now to make this big push,” said a second participant in the calls. “And everyone is like, ‘What’s next?’”

“I think the administration’s expectation has been that Ukraine has everything it needs for an offensive and if they don’t get anything done, well, then we’ll have to reassess,” the first participant told me. “What that reassessment means, it’s not clear to me. Does that mean hold our levels of support steady? Does it mean we escalate [our levels of support]? Or does it mean that we start having a conversation about how do we freeze things?” Added this participant, “It’s not clear which one they’re thinking of. Escalation of support is very unlikely, so it’s probably the first or third options.”

Still another participant in the calls reflected another frustration: Are we giving Ukrainians enough to win? Or does winning simply mean as much as Ukraine can claw back with the current levels of support and during this very finite window of opportunity? It seemed, this third participant told me, that at this point a Ukrainian victory just means “Whatever Ukraine can muster. And then… what?” this participant wondered. “I’m assuming it means taking it to a negotiating table, but that’s assuming that Russia will come to the negotiating table and that Ukraine will come to the negotiating table.”

“I think we have a policy until late summer/early fall and then it’ll get caught in our political process, at which point we’ll say, ‘Well, we tried. We helped them as much as we could,’” this participant added. “I don’t think there’s a strategy beyond the $95 billion aid package, which runs out at the end of the fiscal year [in the fall]. And then I don’t know what. I don’t think they will go to the Hill again in the fall to ask for more. If the Ukrainians are wildly successful, that may help. But if we are largely where we are now, if Ukraine makes some gains but it’s still basically what it is today, I don’t know what the administration does in the fall.”

To be clear, pretty much no one expects the Ukrainian offensive to result in a decisive victory. All of Washington that is paid to think about this war is now feverishly gaming out possible scenarios, both in cocktail party conversation and in more formal tabletop exercises. I recently attended such an exercise, and there, like everywhere, all roads seemed to lead to stalemate and some kind of negotiated solution in the long run, regardless of how well the spring offensive goes this year. It’s as if when Chairman Mark Milley went rogue back in November to say that this war wouldn’t be settled on the battlefield but at the negotiating table, he wasn’t speaking out of school but reflecting a nascent Washington consensus.

“I think they want this to happen this year,” the first participant of the White House calls told me of the beginning of a negotiated solution. “We have elections next year and we’re in campaign season already. Ukraine might take back some territory but it won’t be a massive territorial takeback. I think that’s where we’ll be at the end of the year. They’re going to want to hold the line and Congress will support them on that.”

However, another person familiar with the administration’s thinking and who has participated in some of these calls, was adamant that the White House has no intention of stopping aid to Ukraine. Another participant told me the White House made clear on a call one month ago with the N.S.C.’s new Russia senior director Nicholas Berliner that they would go to Congress for more aid in the fall, regardless of the offensive’s outcome. The question is how much they’ll ask for—and how much they’ll get. That will be part of the fall reassessment. “It’s not that the U.S. will stop supporting Ukraine,” said the person familiar with the administration’s thinking. “It’s that the U.S. and other Western countries may not be able to give Ukraine a decisive advantage on the battlefield. That’s the issue. The U.S. is committed to supporting Ukraine, but it can’t commit things it does not have. At a certain point Washington will have to reassess, including the balance between the U.S. and Europeans.”

Still, this gap between official Biden administration rhetoric has been worrying Ukrainians, who are telegraphing that they are concerned that this plays right into Putin’s plan: wait out the fickle Americans, without whom the Europeans are as good as useless, and then grind the Ukrainians down. “Ukrainians have been asking if the U.S. intends to press Ukraine into some kind of negotiated settlement,” said the person familiar with the administration’s thinking. “My sense is the U.S. doesn’t want a false stalemate. The game plan is to provide Ukraine a window of opportunity but assume the war ends up as a natural stalemate. Then, seek negotiations or a frozen conflict.”

That’s not good enough even for some of the administration’s public allies, who, in our conversations, consistently called out the gap between what Biden and his advisors were saying publicly and what they were planning for in private. “We rhetorically say something and then we revert to incrementalism,” one participant in the calls told me after dutifully praising the president. “That’s a bipartisan comment, by the way. We engage in this really high rhetoric and we just hope no one’s going to call us on it. But we’re going to get called on this one. We’re not playing for success, we’re playing for stalemate—and stalemate is not going to be successful for us.”

Julia