One notable and little-reported conclusion emerging from the House Democratic impeachment proceedings is a
consensus among some foreign policy professionals that President Trump's Ukraine policy has been an improvement over President Barack Obama's.
Ukraine was an occasionally hot issue in the 2016 campaign for all the wrong reasons. At the Republican convention, a
false headline in the
Washington Post, "Trump campaign guts GOP's anti-Russia stance on Ukraine," gave birth to a
false narrative that candidate Trump, desperate to appease Vladimir Putin, would undermine U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
Then Trump became president, and his administration enacted a new policy that not only continued a broad range of assistance to Ukraine but also expanded that aid to include the provision of Javelin anti-tank missiles — the so-called "lethal aid" that the Obama administration had declined to provide.
The Trump aid program has significantly helped Ukraine defend itself against Russia, according to three career foreign policy officials whose impeachment investigation testimony has been released in recent days:
William Taylor, the highest-ranking American diplomat in Ukraine;
Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine; and
Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine who was recalled by Trump in May.
Start with
Taylor. Questioned by Republican lawyer Steve Castor,
Taylor called Trump administration policy a "substantial improvement" over what came before.
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