Chris

Again, the US administration has been dragged kicking and screaming to its present position by facts on the ground.

It’s pretty clear by now that US policy is to wear down Russia but prevent a total collapse of Russia itself. The spectre of the break-up of the USSR still haunts Washington and they don’t want a repeat of it. So Ukraine can win, but not so spectacularly that Mother Russia itself implodes.

Unfortunately for the US, they’re not the only ones with a say in all this. Europe, and especially Eastern Europe which has lively and recent memory of what it’s actually like to live under Moscow’s shadow, has been throwing everything it can into Ukraine. In terms of sheer quantity of kit that might not be as much as the US, but in terms of capability, German-built Leopard tanks and Franco-British Scalp-Storm Shadow cruise missiles represent capabilities the US has attempted to keep out of the theatre. Furthermore the Ukrainians have had an incentive to develop long-range strike capabilities of their own.

And the end result of all this is that none of the long-range strike capability Ukraine now has, is under any sort of political control or influence from Washington. In acknowledging Ukrainian agency in this area, Blinken is really just acknowledging the inevitable failure of a short-sighted policy that has achieved nothing for the US and has cost a lot of Ukrainian lives as the war has ground on when deep-strike capability just might have hastened Russia’s collapse and shortened the conflict.