President Joe Biden can't get Congress to pony up aid to Ukraine whenever he asks. Legislators fell for that gag early on, but they just aren’t buying it now. Consequently, Biden is going after the assistance to Kyiv as a funding fait accompli by signing a ten-year binding agreement with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky guaranteeing US military and other aid. Ostensibly, Biden plans to establish a predictable flow of arms and other assistance to bolster Ukraine's ability to stop and defeat Russia.
Long-Term Ukraine Funding Will Be a Tough Sell
Biden wants to eliminate the speedbump congressional skeptics in the House of Representatives placed in the way of his quick-fix funding of Ukraine with a foreign assistance package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. However, the real and not-so-veiled reason Biden, the man without a strategy, wants to lock in aid is to hobble former President Donald Trump from reducing or eliminating military and financial assistance to Ukraine if Trump is elected in November.
The idea is not new. "The Biden administration and its European allies are laying plans for long-term military assistance to Ukraine to ensure Russia won't be able to win on the battlefield and persuade the Kremlin that Western support for Kyiv won't waver," The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2023. Nonetheless, committing the American taxpayers to a decade-long obligation to support Ukraine without any concept of what the money is attempting to accomplish is not a recipe for success with US lawmakers.
That is precisely what the latest White House scheme intends. Now, in the third year that the courageous Ukraine armed forces have been battling the invading Russian hordes, the conflict has wrought devastation and death in Eastern Ukraine. However, there has not been one word from the Biden administration on how the American taxpayers' dollars are going to win the day for Kyiv.
"As long as it takes" is Biden's only explanation for what the future portends for a US commitment. Recent reports from the Ukrainian front lines are not encouraging, even if they aren’t quite hopeless. "Russian forces made confirmed advances near Chasiv Yar and Avdiivka and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area," according to an Institute for the Study of War dispatch from May 1.
President Zelensky's plight is easy to understand, and his outreach to the US for military help cannot be faulted. The opportunity for Kyiv to ice a long-term agreement with the US for a sustaining aid package could not be more appealing. As the German Press Agency (DPA) explained:
"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday said that Kiev and Washington were working on a bilateral security agreement, part of his ongoing effort to ensure his war-torn country receives long-term support. 'We are already working on a specific text…Our goal is to make this agreement the strongest of all,' said Zelensky in his evening video address."
The problem with the ten-year aid pact is that it looks a lot like an extended foreign military assistance treaty. President Biden cannot finalize that level and purpose of military aid without an appropriation and authorization from Congress. If the White House thought getting the recent $60 billion Ukraine foreign assistance supplemental appropriation passed was a challenge, obligating the US Government for ten years will be an even higher bar.
Saddling Future Presidents With Biden’s Deal?
"But ultimately a key purpose in locking such a long-term deal in would be to keep it immune from potential interference by a future Trump administration," ZeroHedge observed. Suppose former President Trump wins back the presidency in November. In that case, the Biden effort to inoculate aid to Ukraine from any action by the new president may be out of time for Congress to take action. Furthermore, Biden's gambit to prevent the next president from undoing a long-term agreement with significant budgetary impact will be an unpopular move with House congressional leaders and is surely headed for troubled waters. If Congress believes what Biden proposes should be handled as a treaty, that will require in accordance with Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution a two-thirds vote of the Senate. If there is a next President Trump, he is the US chief executive and should not be stymied by the questionable decisions of his predecessor.
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