OPINION:
In their only debate so far, Vice President Kamala Harris asserted that former President Donald Trump deserved blame for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine because he had been too chummy with the Russian strongman. “But let me tell you something,” Mr. Trump rebutted. “She is a horrible negotiator. They sent her in to negotiate. As soon as they left, Putin did the invasion.”
ABC’s David Muir then subtly but critically intervened and asked Ms. Harris not about her role in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine but if she had met with Mr. Putin. Ms. Harris demurred, saying she had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, not Mr. Putin. While technically true, the response conveniently sidestepped the reality of her failed, public diplomatic attempt to deter the invasion, which is what Mr. Trump was accurately describing.
Ms. Harris led the American delegation to the Munich Security Conference in 2022, an event with a fraught history in terms of signaling developments between Russia and Europe. In 2007, for example, Mr. Putin himself had given a seminal speech at the conference in which he announced his plans to challenge the unipolar U.S.-dominated post-Cold War world order and create an imperial Russian rival.
Over the ensuing years, Mr. Putin pursued this goal with incursions into Georgia in 2008 and the Ukrainian Crimea in 2014. In mid-February 2022, he appeared poised to move into Ukraine proper.
The seriousness of Ms. Harris’ errand in Munich was no secret. The United States was still reeling from the catastrophic surrender of Afghanistan just six months earlier and trying to regain its footing on the world stage. Eager to bolster the vice president’s foreign policy bona fides, her “allies” trumpeted to a friendly media outlet that her mission would be “the most critical foreign trip of her vice presidency,” adding that “[t]he rapidly intensifying stakes make Harris’ trip to the annual gathering all the more important.… She will find herself in the centers of the action, under pressure to perform the tasks of an American diplomat at this heightened moment while allies and foes alike closely analyze every word she says and every meeting she takes, trying to assess the U.S. posture.”
The most important venue for this effort was Ms. Harris’ formal speech to the conference, standing at the same podium Mr. Putin had used in 2007. She said Russia should not invade Ukraine because NATO was “unified” and that while U.S. troops would not defend Ukraine, “every inch” of NATO territory would be protected.
In terms of consequences, Ms. Harris declared, “I can say with absolute certainty: If Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States, together with our Allies and partners, will impose significant and unprecedented economic costs.”
It was Feb. 19, 2022. Three days later, Mr. Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, and the Biden-Harris administration offered to evacuate Mr. Zelenskyy shortly thereafter.
It is very difficult to interpret this series of events as anything but an abject failure of the vice president’s diplomatic attempt to deter the invasion and the willingness of the Biden-Harris administration to abandon Ukraine once it happened. If anything, her performance accelerated Mr. Putin’s actions as he interpreted correctly that Washington had no credible threat of force to stop him.
In addition, Mr. Putin concluded (also correctly) that the administration would not take the truly crushing economic measures to shut down Russian energy exports and threaten China, his new “partner without limits,” with secondary sanctions that might have changed his course of action.
It is the height of disingenuity for Ms. Harris to assert that if Mr. Trump had been reelected in 2020, Mr. Putin would now be “sitting in Kyiv right now.” Mr. Putin didn’t invade Ukraine during Mr. Trump’s presidency, he did it after observing President Biden and Ms. Harris’ weakness for more than a year, culminating in the vice president’s 2022 performance in Munich.
The debate moderators let her off the hook, but Americans deserve to know the truth about who actually — and publicly — failed to prevent the war in Ukraine: Kamala Harris.
• Victoria Coates is vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.
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