In Ukraine, Is Biden Winning the Spin War but Losing the Real War?

Remember the war against Franco,
That’s the kind where each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs.

— Tom Lehrer, The Folksong Army, 1965

I n his two speeches delivered last week, President Joe Biden unquestionably won the spin war against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Biden is no Churchill, and every recent president from Reagan through Obama, inclusive, probably could have performed better. Nevertheless, Biden got the job done. If Putin proceeds with his plan to conquer Ukraine, he is definitely going to look bad.

But Putin is not fighting a spin war. He is fighting a real war.

In real wars, spin-war victories have limited utility. The Spanish Republicans beat Franco in the spin war, hands down, and the Abyssinians certainly trounced Mussolini. In 1939, Poland absolutely crushed the combined forces of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in the spin war, and after the Nazis bombed Rotterdam, the Dutch gave Hitler one hell of a spin-war beating. That said, none of these conflicts turned out well for the spin-war victors.

It’s also true that the Allies beat the Axis in spinning World War II, but it took quite a bit more than spin to prevail in the real conflict.

It is to be expected that Western leaders, who win their offices by shaping appearances to win the approval of voters, should be better at spin than Kremlin autocrats. That is their skill set, after all, and it can even potentially be an asset in times of war. A problem occurs, however, when they confuse such make-believe for reality.

In war, reality is relevant.

Last week, we had the spectacle of Western leaders gathering in Munich to congratulate each other on how much they are doing to defend Ukraine, when in reality, they are not doing much at all. The United States has done the most. We have sent Ukraine 600 tons of arms and ammunition. That may sound like a lot, but it’s actually trivial. For comparison, when the British Expeditionary Force, which was about the same size as the current Ukrainian Army (350,000 men in the BEF compared to 450,000 Ukraine soldiers today) fled Dunkirk, it left behind over 400,000 tons of equipment. Other contributions have been totally ludicrous. The Netherlands, which have seven times the GDP of Ukraine, is supporting the latter with 3,000 helmets and 100 (that’s right, one hundred) sniper rifles. Germany, with over 30 times Ukraine’s GDP, is sending 5,000 helmets, a field hospital, and no weapons at all.

Such pitiful contributions are nothing but theater, designed to placate domestic constituencies with the appearance of resolve and action. But Putin will neither be deterred nor defeated by such role-playing games.

The Ukrainian army has numbers and commitment, but it lacks the arms required to defeat Putin’s blitzkrieg. It needs fighter air cover, which the U.S. could provide. Instead of fleeing our embassy in Kyiv, we should have sent fighters to protect it — along with the rest of the city — from Russian air attack. At a minimum, we should send copious supplies of anti-aircraft missiles, which are essential to neutralize Russian air superiority and give the Ukrainian army a fighting chance. The U.S. Army has hundreds of mobile short-range ballistic-missile systems, called ATACMS that can send a 500-pound conventional warhead 200 miles. These are GPS-guided, so they can’t miss. If Ukraine had these, plus fighters or anti-aircraft-missile systems to safeguard them, they could turn invading Russian armored columns into masses of flaming wrecks. Yet, despite the fact that Biden has known full well for some time that this invasion was coming (he has repeatedly said so) none of the necessary weaponry has been provided.

By pretending to do what is necessary, instead of actually doing what is necessary, we are guaranteeing a defeat that will have catastrophic consequences for the Western alliance.

Biden aims to spin, while Putin aims to win. That needs to change.