Don’t Blame Ukraine’s Failures on Donald Trump

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zalensky Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

In The Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins explains at length the history of presidents dealing with Ukraine and its Russian problem and cautions readers to avoid believing anyone blaming Trump for Ukraine’s failures. He writes:

Even tendentious newspaper accounts, rolled out in the final days of a close election, can’t conceal that Donald Trump, during his presidency, had in common with every recent president that he wasn’t keen on the U.S. becoming Ukraine’s military guarantor.

George W. Bush invited Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but not yet. President Obama said nothing to deter Vladimir Putin’s 2014 invasion, and was satisfied in the aftermath with modest economic sanctions that “challenged Putin with the tools that we had at the time.” Joe Biden famously said a small incursion might be OK.

There was only one real revelation at the end of his 2020 impeachment trial after his allegedly improper phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Mr. Trump, like every other president, spent part of his time fighting off aides who wanted to inveigle the U.S. into committing more deeply to the country. But Mr. Trump also sent weapons that Mr. Obama withheld. He bluntly warned Mr. Putin against further depredations in a way that Mr. Obama and, later, Joe Biden never did.

Lo, all this context goes missing from a lengthy New York Times investigation of what it calls his “animus toward Ukraine [that] remains front and center in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign.”

For his “animus,” the paper cites the fact that Mr. Trump denied Russian meddling in the 2016 election—as if it weren’t obvious to him that Democrats only cared about the subject to delegitimize his election. It cites his belief that Ukraine backed Hillary Clinton—which was known to anybody who consulted the plain reporting of the Financial Times, Politico and others at the time.

It cites his calling Ukraine “corrupt,” as if former Vice President Joe Biden hadn’t been boasting all over town about his largely apocryphal fights against Ukrainian corruption for the Obama administration.

Mr. Trump, the Times further complains, failed to “push back” at their Hamburg meeting when Mr. Putin lectured him on Ukraine. But, in the paper’s own telling, Mr. Trump pushed forward—advising Mr. Putin that he was prepared to give weapons to Ukraine and inviting his comment. (Mr. Trump may not realize that meetings exist to engage in theatrics to tell the press about later.)

The facts the Times cites don’t add up to animus. They add up to one more president dealing ambivalently with the problem of Ukraine.

The Washington Post followed up this week with its own lengthy and pointless elegy on the unnamed then-Central Intelligence Agency analyst who prompted the first Trump impeachment.

In a strange journalistic decision, the paper won’t identify Eric Ciaramella by name, though he no longer works for the government. His name is widely available in the media; any chatbot can cough it up in a nanosecond. Newspapers usually aren’t in the business of withholding key information from their readers. In this case, the Post also withholds any critical examination of Mr. Ciaramella’s actions and motives even five years after the fact.

And yet realities have a way of breaking through. In a few short weeks Kamala Harris has gone from saying any concession to Russia would be “surrender” to saying NATO membership for Ukraine is a question to be addressed “if and when it arrives at that point.”

Bloggers and academics who attached themselves to Ukraine’s cause are finally waking up. The “betrayal” they predicted under Mr. Trump is happening under Mr. Biden, if betrayal means not holding out for Russia’s complete defeat.

Read more here.