Biden has stood inept before Putin since becoming president.
Biden has stood inept before Putin since becoming president.
N o American leader with all his faculties would squeeze Ukraine into letting Russia take more of its territory unconventionally in exchange for Moscow promising not to conquer it by conventional invasion.
Joe Biden isn’t that kind of leader. If Ukraine simply makes more territorial concessions to Russia’s armed proxies in the besieged country’s troubled Donbas region, and Vladimir Putin makes the easy promise not to invade with his own army in return, Biden would consider it a fair deal.
The idea draws eerie parallels between Biden, who fancies himself a foreign-policy historian, and one of the weakest leaders of the past century: British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.
Just days before World War II began in August 1939, Chamberlain thought he could convince Adolf Hitler not to invade Poland. Hitler accused Poland of violating agreements about the rights of the German Free City of Danzig and Poland’s minority population of ethnic Germans and vowed self-defense against the Poles. Today, Putin accuses Ukraine of violating the Minsk Agreement that imposed a cease-fire in the Donbas region, vowing to defend the Russian minority there while claiming his military maneuvers are purely defensive.
The reasoning Chamberlain sent to Hitler the day before the Führer’s pact with Stalin sounds almost like Biden’s reasoning with Putin more than eight decades later:
If such a truce could be arranged, then, at the end of that period, during which steps could be taken to examine and deal with complaints made by either side as to the treatment of minorities, it is reasonable to hope that suitable conditions might have been established for direct negotiations between Germany and Poland upon the issues between them (with the aid of a neutral intermediary if both sides should think that that would be helpful).
The comparison is no exaggeration. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, head of the British defense staff, warns that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to wider security implications for NATO on par with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
Russia violated a 1993 agreement not to claim Ukrainian territory — a deal brokered by the Clinton administration, with Biden’s full support as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — by persuading Ukraine to surrender its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal unilaterally to Russia. In exchange, the U.S. and NATO countries would assure the integrity of Ukraine.
Putin’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and its occupation of the breakaway areas of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas, violate that 1993 pledge.
Biden has stood inept before Putin since becoming president. He pawned away all the leverage that the Trump administration built against Moscow. This includes surrendering to Putin’s demand for an unconditional renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), without any controls on tactical nuclear weapons and Russian nuclear modernization, and lifting Trump’s sanctions that would have stopped Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany.
Biden has opposed every major effort to deter Russia since the Reagan administration’s arms buildup in the 1980s.
Reagan understood the value of oil as a weapon. He collaborated with the Saudis to drive down the price of oil to between $7 and $9 a barrel in 1986 to ruin the Soviet economy. He came down hard on the Soviet effort to create a gas pipeline to Western Europe, saying in 1982 that it would make Europe vulnerable to the Soviets.
Biden opposed Reagan’s strategy to collapse the Soviet Union and its Communist Party.
Today, with his climate extremism and the closure of America’s Keystone XL pipeline, Biden has helped Putin by contributing to a surge in the price of oil and gas.
Putin came away from last week’s teleconference with Biden looking like the winner. Biden helplessly sputtered threats of sanctions if Russia invades — a warmed-over version of the Obama-era sanctions that drove China and Russia closer together.
Biden has said he has no plans to shore up U.S. troops along NATO’s Eastern flank or to sell defensive military equipment to Ukraine before a Russian invasion.
Chamberlain showed his fecklessness to Hitler by handing Czechoslovakia to the Nazis at the Munich Conference the year before the war. Biden is even softer.
Russia may be considering throwing 175,000 troops at Ukraine from various directions, according to a U.S. intelligence document obtained by the Washington Post. Ukrainian intelligence reported that the Russians moved supplies of weapons, fuel, electronic warfare equipment, and drones into eastern Ukraine last month. Russian regular-military personnel arrived to reinforce intelligence, reconnaissance, and military-engineering forces already located in the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
According to Ukraine’s defense ministry, Russia has used propaganda to hide the presence of its forces inside Ukraine’s borders. Russia has conducted similar operations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regions of Georgia its troops occupied after the collapse of the Soviet Union, prior to its 2008 invasion of the country. Russian forces similarly backed separatists in these territories to assert sovereignty, as Moscow is doing today in the Donbas.
Ukraine estimates that 94,000 Russian troops have been forward based along its borders. Video appeared online on December 3 purportedly showing Russian heavy equipment being moved via train near the Ukrainian border. Russia controls two rail lines along Ukraine’s eastern border that it uses to send military supplies. Russian mine-clearing equipment has also been reported among the assets the Russians have deployed to confront Ukrainian defensive minefields. Another video shows Russian BUK anti-aircraft missiles being moved to the border.
Another report from December 5 showed Russian troop movements by armored vehicles in Russian-occupied Crimea near the frontier with mainland Ukraine. It appeared on a Telegram channel belonging to the “Summaries of the Novorossiya militia.” Novorossiya (New Russia) is the name used by Russian nationalists, dating to the time of Catherine the Great, for the Ukrainian Black Sea region.
Russian fighters intercepted NATO fighters over the Black Sea last Wednesday, and NATO and Russian fleets in the Black Sea carried out drills simulating attacks on each other.
“The crews of aircraft accomplished bombings against a target field, firings of rockets against coastal and naval targets and practiced the combat training tasks of hunting down and tracking mock enemy submarines and surface ships in the Black Sea in the course of their combat training,” the Russian Black Sea Fleet said in a statement published by TASS.
A report posted by former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, who currently serves as the co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, suggested on Twitter that Russia could invade Ukraine from four directions.
At a time when America and the West need a Churchill, we have a Chamberlain.