How the 2024 Election Could Decide the Fate of the Russia-Ukraine War

Presidential elections are rarely won or lost over foreign affairs. But in the early stages of the 2024 race for the White House, Ukraine has already become a potent issue on the campaign trail. President Joe Biden insists he'll support Ukraine for "as long as it takes." Former president Donald Trump claims he'll end the war in "one day" as soon as he re-takes office. The two candidates' dueling visions offer voters the starkest contrast in foreign policy between the major parties in 20 years, since the debate over the Iraq War played a key role in the 2004 presidential race and eventual victory by George W. Bush.

The split between Biden and Trump on Ukraine—and the divide within the Republican field of candidates over U.S. involvement in the war—reflects a broader national debate about the role America should play on the world stage in the post-Iraq and Afghanistan era.

Biden points to Ukraine as proof that robust American leadership is necessary for democracies to prevail over autocratic regimes in the great power competition of the 21st century. Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, favor "America First"-style isolationism, calling for sharp limits on U.S. involvement in other countries' conflicts. Some longshot GOP hopefuls like former Vice President Mike Pence espouse more traditional conservative foreign policy views, supporting a more activist role for America as leader of the ''free world.'' But they are increasingly out of step with the party's grassroots base, who have soured sharply on aid to Ukraine since the conflict began.

Just as Ukraine will likely play a pivotal role in who wins the presidency, so the 2024 election could be also a determining factor in the outcome of the war for Kyiv. The winner of the White House will set the tone for the NATO alliance backing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's government and help determine how much Western military assistance it gets going forward, if the war hasn't ended by Inauguration Day 2025. And the election matters just as much, if not more, for charting U.S. foreign policy beyond Ukraine. The stakes are especially high for Biden, who has tied his foreign policy legacy to Ukraine's stand against Russia.

"Biden cannot afford for the Ukrainians to lose," Thomas Graham, a former senior director for Russia on the National Security Council, tells Newsweek. "If this is a battle between democracy and autocracy, then we can't allow the autocrats to win."

Biden and Zelensky aren't the only ones hoping for a certain outcome in 2024, of course. Leaders in Europe are watching the election closely as well to see whether they'll have a partner in the U.S. under Biden, or a frenemy under Trump or another like-minded GOP candidate. And there's no secret who Russian President Vladimir Putin is rooting for.

"The U.S. election is the key to taking the pressure off [for Putin], and he has a lot riding on it," Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former senior National Security Council adviser, tells Newsweek. "There's a real calculation that Putin is making that he just needs to outlast the United States and Ukraine."

Biden's Vision: Stay the Course

The prospect of a prolonged conflict presents awkward political challenges for Biden. He promised in 2020 to end America's forever wars and then delivered soon after taking office, though the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan was a chaotic affair. Now, as his 2024 campaign gets underway, Biden is leading a surrogate war between the West and Russia that has claimed thousands of lives and cost tens of billions, with no end in sight.

An unexpectedly swift end to the war is possible, but unlikely. Ukraine is in the middle of a major counteroffensive powered by Western tanks and other weapons, aimed at severing the Russian land bridge between mainland Russia and Crimea. Ukraine has made some gains, but progress remains slow, and most analysts tracking the fighting believe the war won't end anytime soon.

At this point, Biden's long-term strategy for Ukraine—preserving its sovereignty and handing Putin a geopolitical defeat, without deploying U.S. troops or triggering a larger confrontation with Moscow—hinges on the president winning reelection. Biden needs more time to hold the NATO alliance together and keep military aid flowing to Ukraine. But it's a tricky sell to an American public that's generally supportive of Ukraine but wary of seeing the United States enmeshed in another costly, prolonged foreign conflict, however indirect.

"Biden's always been an internationalist," says Thomas Patterson, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. The president believes "in traditional alliances and having an obligation as leader of the 'free world,'" Patterson adds. "If this was the early 1950s, [Biden's worldview] would resonate like crazy. I'm not sure how much that works anymore."

The president typically talks about the war in Ukraine in sweeping historical terms, leaving it up to others to dissect the details. The White House, and leading GOP hopefuls for president, declined requests for comment for this story.

Senior aides to Biden and allies outside the administration offer a blunt analysis of the president's calculus. They argue that the money spent on Ukraine—a fraction of the $2 trillion-plus the United States spent on the war in Afghanistan—is a bargain price for turning Russia into a weakened pariah state without risking any U.S. lives in the process.

"When Biden talks about America's interests in supporting democracies over autocracies, this isn't just empty idealism. It's part of a shrewd strategy that America's had since 1945," says Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland under Bill Clinton. "If you want to be realpolitik about it, the resources we're spending to support Ukraine are actually a pretty good investment."

Yet it remains to be seen whether voters will agree, or if Biden's approach to the war can serve as a model for future U.S. foreign policy.

"We have the type of ally in Ukraine that we never had in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Libya," John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine during the George W. Bush administration, and who now heads the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, tells Newsweek. "When we offered Zelensky a ride out of town, he said, 'Send me ammunition.' In Kabul, when the Taliban was threatening to take the city, [former Afghanistan President Ashraf] Ghani got himself out of Dodge."

Ukraine's willingness to fight on its own makes it an imperfect comparison to the Bush-era "forever wars" in the Middle East, Herbst and others say. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. and its coalition partners did nearly all of the initial fighting, then spent years training local allies to fight insurgent forces that did not have conventional standing armies.

In contrast, Ukraine has a highly motivated fighting force that's proved adept at integrating advanced foreign weaponry into what at the start of the war was a largely Soviet-era military arsenal. Those factors—combined with an outpouring of international support that did not materialize in quite the same way for the U.S.-backed governments in Iraq and Afghanistan—has allowed Ukraine to defend itself against the full-scale invasion of a nuclear superpower in the largest land war in Europe since World War II.

The war in Ukraine is a reminder that "when you back countries that are actually determined to fight for themselves you can win in the end," Fried says. Biden's strategy would be vindicated if Ukraine ultimately prevails. Whenever the war is over, Fried says, "If Ukraine is free and secure, it would end Putin's dream of a Russian empire. That would be a huge success for the United States."

The GOP View: Get Out Fast

It's not a foregone conclusion that Ukraine will win the war, however. And if the final outcome of the conflict remains uncertain, it's equally unclear exactly how Trump—or DeSantis, and the rest of the GOP primary field, for that matter—would define success for Ukraine.

Polls show Trump and DeSantis' isolationist tendencies are popular with Republican primary voters. Overall, Americans largely approve of the Biden administration's policy toward Ukraine. In June, 62 percent of respondents told Gallup that they were in favor of continuing to "support Ukraine in regaining territory." But the same poll found that, among self-identified Republicans, a 49 percent plurality said they would rather have the United States pursue a policy to "end the conflict as quickly as possible," regardless of the terms. The results underscore a growing divide on the right over foreign policy that would have been hard to picture as recently as the early aughts, when the vast majority of Republicans backed the wars started by Bush.

"Trump has really shifted the Republican Party," says Patterson, the Harvard historian.

Trump laid out his vision for Ukraine in a July 16 interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business. "I would tell Zelensky, 'No more. You got to make a deal.' I would tell Putin, 'If you don't make a deal, we're going to give [Zelensky] a lot,'" Trump said. "I will have the deal done in one day. One day."

But Trump did not provide any details and, if anything, DeSantis' plan for Ukraine is even less clear—though the Florida governor famously signaled his overall disinterest in the war earlier this year.

On March 13, before he was fired from Fox News, Tucker Carlson tweeted out the written responses of several potential Republican presidential candidates to a questionnaire he sent them. DeSantis wrote that "becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not" a pressing national interest for the U.S. DeSantis walked the comment back 10 days later, saying that "obviously, Russia invaded—that was wrong." He went on to call Putin a "war criminal."

Still, DeSantis' open disdain for America's involvement in Ukraine is shared by a growing number of far-right Republicans in Congress. Last month, 89 House Republicans voted for a proposal to cut $300 million in military aid to Ukraine. A separate plan to block all future military aid to Ukraine drew 70 House GOP votes. (The amendments, part of a debate over defense spending, failed to pass.)

Many Republican voters share the view that America is spending too much on support for the war. According to a June survey by Pew Research, 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that the U.S. is giving too much aid to Ukraine, up from just 12 percent who felt that way a year earlier. By contrast, only 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners believe U.S. financial support for Ukraine is excessive.

The isolationist wing of the Republican Party's increasing appetite for cutting—if not eliminating—U.S. support for Ukraine is at odds with the more traditional GOP view, which has been critical of Biden for failing to do more to push back against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

To date Biden has provided Kyiv $43 billion in security aid. The funding has gone to providing Ukraine with increasingly advanced weapons systems—including HIMARS and Patriot missiles, tanks and other equipment—but often only after months of deliberation by the administration and, in some cases, after being cajoled by European allies.

"The Biden administration says, as does every member of NATO, that our objective is the restoration of full sovereignty and territorial integrity to Ukraine. That's either the goal or it's not," says John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush. "So, what are the resources to do that?"

House Foreign Relations Chairman Michael McCaul tells Newsweek that Biden's handling of the war "jeopardizes the robust bipartisan support in Congress" for Ukraine. "Slow-rolling crucial weapons systems for Ukraine has not only prolonged the conflict but also sent a signal of weakness to adversaries like the CCP," McCaul says, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

The view is echoed among the more mainstream Republicans running for president. Pence, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have all called for the continuation of robust Western aid to Ukraine. Yet the establishment quartet are all polling in the low single digits, and combined they command less than 15 percent of the primary vote in most polls. In contrast, Trump is leading most GOP primary polls with more than 50 percent of the vote, despite his recent third indictment on charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and DeSantis is the only other candidate who routinely tops more than 10 percent.

'Time Is Beginning to Work Against Us'

There's still plenty of time for a long shot Republican candidate to break out of the pack. But it's more likely at this point that if the 2024 election does lead to a transfer of power in Washington, the next occupant of the Oval Office will hold a view on Ukraine that's different from Biden's, and well outside the American mainstream.

A Trump victory would threaten the lifeline of military and economic assistance that has allowed Ukrainian forces to keep up the fight thus far. But his return to office wouldn't guarantee a quick end to the war, Alexander Vindman, a former director for European Affairs at the National Security Council during the Trump administration, tells Newsweek.

"The Ukrainians don't have any choice but to continue fighting for as long as they can," says Vindman, who became a star witness in Trump's first impeachment inquiry after disclosing the 2019 phone call in which the former president asked Zelensky to investigate the Biden family in exchange for U.S. military aid. That would remain true, Vindman says, "even if the United States takes an isolationist turn in 2024 and Ukraine does not receive one additional dollar of support from Washington."

Ukraine's continued defense past 2024 could involve similar levels of outside assistance, albeit from different sources. It's difficult to imagine a Trump administration bringing together the kind of international coalition that Biden's team has assembled in support of Ukraine, experts told Newsweek. But if an "America First" freeze in transatlantic relations were to occur in 2025, Ukraine's neighbors could respond by playing a larger role in the conflict, says Mathieu Droin, a European policy expert and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"It remains to be seen whether European countries are capable of filling in the gap should U.S. support drop off," Droin tells Newsweek. "But the incentive is there for them to at least try."

Regardless of which party controls the White House, Ukraine will need someone to step up with additional military aid to achieve a decisive battlefield victory and avoid getting caught in a long war of attrition that favors Russia, says Anton Gerashchenko, an influential Ukrainian security expert.

"Time is beginning to work against us," Gerashchenko tells Newsweek. "Yes, more tanks can be delivered a year from now. F-16s can be delivered a year from now. But Russia's population is 3.5 times larger than ours. We do not have enough manpower to fight forever."

Russia can more easily sustain a higher casualty rate than Ukraine, and there's still no sign Putin is seeking an off-ramp, Aleksandar Matovski, a Russia expert and professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, tells Newsweek, stressing that he was expressing his personal views. "No matter how much damage we inflict on Russia and on Russians, Putin may simply choose to hold out for as long as it remains physically possible for him to do so," Matovski says.

Russia is also relying on relatively older, often economically disadvantaged soldiers who were mobilized to fight in the war, Gerashchenko notes, while Ukraine is losing a greater portion of its cultural elite and educated middle class, many of whom volunteered to fight. It's a harsh arithmetic for Ukraine, Gerashchenko says.

"We need more weapons, we need them in much greater quantities, and we need them while at least some of our best-trained and most experienced soldiers are still on the battlefield," he says. "We need increased assistance now, in order to ensure that we do not end up needing assistance for the next decade—or longer."

How Ukraine Plays at the Ballot Box

The Biden administration has insisted from the first days of the war that Ukraine will decide its own fate. Democrats are confident the president's approach to Ukraine will prevail in 2024. They note that while Biden's job approval numbers are low, polls show he's running even with Trump, and most Americans believe the U.S. should continue backing Ukraine—for now, at least.

Voters will see Ukraine and foreign policy generally as a character test, one that may benefit Biden if he faces Trump in the general election, Celinda Lake, Biden's chief pollster in 2020, tells Newsweek.

"It's an explicit contrast of steady leadership versus chaotic leadership," Lake says. The war in Ukraine "also allows the president to show strength and allows him to make age an advantage. Foreign policy is the one realm where age clearly becomes experience."

Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist based in Iowa, says Ukraine can be a winning campaign issue for Biden so long as his messaging around the war doesn't get bogged down in the details. "The 10,000-foot argument is safer ground," Link says. Biden should keep asking, '"Whose side are we on here?'" Link said.

Biden's strategy is already paying off from a policy perspective, says Weiss, the former NSC adviser and Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Everything has gone in the exact opposite direction of what Putin thought was strategically important for him" at the start of the war, Weiss says.

"Now there's a heavily armed, heavily militarized Ukraine on Russia's border that has close relationships with the West, and a claim on military and economic support," he adds.

It's still too early to tell if Ukraine will receive the concrete security guarantees—in the form of NATO and European Union membership—that Zelensky says it needs to guard against a future Russian invasion. Following the NATO Summit in Lithuania last month, Biden shut the door on the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO until the war is resolved. It was a blow to Kyiv, one that Biden seemed to try to soften by expressing hope that Russia can't "maintain the war forever."

"Eventually, President Putin is going to decide it's not in the interest of Russia—economically, politically, or otherwise—to continue this war. But I can't predict exactly how that happens," he said. "My hope is and my expectation is, you'll see that Ukraine makes significant progress on their offensive and that it generates a negotiated settlement somewhere along the line."

Securing a second term is Biden's best chance to shepherd the peace process from the White House. Given how much the U.S. has already invested in Ukraine, Biden has little choice but to press forward, says Graham, the former National Security Council adviser. "The president keeps saying for as long as it takes," Graham says. At this point, he's "not going to back away."