What Biden Didn’t Do at His Russia-Sanctions Presser

M uch of what President Biden said in this afternoon’s press conference on sanctions against Russia was cheerleading disconnected from reality. He complained, for example, that Russia attacked Ukraine just as the U.N. Security Council was meeting “to stave off Russia’s invasion.” He left out the inconvenient detail that the vaunted Security Council was being chaired by . . . yes, Russia. The assembled powers, moreover, had no intention of staving off anything in Ukraine. Indeed, in today’s remarks, Biden stressed this week’s mantra that he intends to “defend every inch of NATO,” implicitly underscoring the fact that he will not defend any inch of Ukraine.

And no, I am not saying he should do so — at least, not with American combat forces. We should be giving the Ukrainians the weapons and logistical assistance they need to mount a long-term insurgency that will cost Russia dearly (as the CIA did in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and as was done to us by Iran and other sponsors of the insurgency in Iraq). My narrow point here, though, is that the Biden administration’s modest hope all along has been to punish Russia for an attack that Biden not only predicted but inadvertently encouraged with his “minor incursion” gaffe. There was no thought of staving off the attack before it occurred.

That said, the sanctions that Biden announced were not nothing. They will make life difficult for Russia’s government and military, as well as its state-dominated financial, energy, and tech sectors. At least some Putin cronies will also start feeling the pinch.

There’s a problem, though — one that Biden seemed to concede in repeatedly stressing the “long-term impact” of the sanctions: They will only prove anything more than a nuisance for Moscow if the countries imposing them are willing to stick with them for as long as it takes. And Biden’s confidence in that willingness, despite his bravado, does not appear high.

The president kept emphasizing that he was trying to “minimize the impact” of the sanctions on Americans and our allies, particularly in Europe. But there is going to be impact, and it is going to be felt most keenly in the U.S. and Germany, whose economies are most entangled with Russia’s. (Recall that before Democrats spent the Trump years pretending to loathe Russia, they spent most of the Obama years assuring Americans that, besides being a useful strategic partner, Russia was a great place to do business.)

After the Afghanistan debacle, Biden has a credibility deficit. What’s going to happen to sanctions support if what he suggested would be minimal pain turns out to be more than that?

One thing that is going to happen, for sure, is that Biden will turn to page one in the Democratic Party playbook and demagogue energy companies for rising prices. Keep in mind: It is Biden’s anti-fossil-fuel policies, his strangulation of American energy production, that not only are causing surging prices but, in so doing, are underwriting Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. Yet today, the president theatrically implored oil and gas companies not to take advantage of what’s coming by price-gouging. That’s sheer gaslighting. Prices are going to keep climbing because of the laws of economics. The driver is Biden’s and his woke party’s environmental radicalism, not America’s energy producers and their financial backers.

A concrete example of Biden’s lack of confidence in the announced sanctions involves the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). That’s the global cooperative whose messaging system enables international financial transactions. Biden and his coalition continue to avoid excluding Russia from SWIFT, which would cause the Kremlin real pain. As Carnegie’s Moscow Center notes, when the U.S. got Iran excluded from the SWIFT system (as part of President Trump’s “maximum-pressure campaign” to curb the Iranian nuclear program), the resulting inability to conduct dollar-denominated commerce cost Tehran almost half of its oil revenue and 30 percent of its foreign trade.

Western officials have been jabbering about cutting Russia off from SWIFT since 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and started the war that he now seems determined to finish. But they never do it. In part, they see it as too provocative: Russia has made clear that it would regard exclusion from SWIFT as “a declaration of war” (to quote Putin lackey and then–prime minister Dmitry Medvedev).

More to the point, the U.S. and our allies resist out of a self-interest calculation that Biden would prefer not to discuss: As I recently noted, Europe is dependent on Russia for 40 percent of its gas and 25 percent of its crude oil, and if a SWIFT exclusion prevented Russia from reaping the profits from that commerce, Putin would shut off the taps. Europe has no contingency for dealing with that, and additionally, we now depend on Russia for 7 percent of our oil imports — about 595,000 barrels per day. (Note also that the price exceeded $100 per barrel for a time today, before receding back to $93, around where it’s been for weeks, which is higher than it’s been in eight years.)

Consequently, when Biden omitted any mention of SWIFT from his catalogue of sanctions this afternoon, and then was inevitably asked about it by reporters, he tap-danced. And, being Biden, that means his answers were internally contradictory.

First came the prepared answer: There’s no need to do a SWIFT exclusion because the sanctions we’re imposing on Russia’s banks are more severe than such an exclusion would be. Then, naturally, there came the shoot-from-the-hip answer: We’re not cutting Moscow off from SWIFT because our partners do not wish to take that step at this time (which hardly means that Biden is willing).

This makes no sense. Clearly, if the bank sanctions were really so severe that doing a SWIFT exclusion would be superfluous, there’d be no reason to refrain from a SWIFT exclusion. The remorseless fact is that, despite Biden’s bravado, his coalition is clearly not ready to get that tough. Although Putin has been preparing for the possibility, a SWIFT exclusion would have real teeth. That is why EU technocrats — for whom weapons references are strictly metaphorical — refer to it as the “nuclear option.” In other words, there is no SWIFT exclusion because Russia has the EU over an oil barrel.

That, of course, is why it is just maddening that Germany fully intends to make that problem twice as bad with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. Don’t be fooled by this week’s celebrations (more like sighs of relief) over Berlin’s purported “suspension” of the project, which would double the gas Germany already gets from Russia through Nord Stream 1 (which runs directly between the two countries under the Baltic Sea). Nord Stream 2, which Biden previously green-lit, was not ready to go online yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, so Germany’s “suspension” didn’t really cost it anything. Rest assured, though: Once today’s Western thunder over Ukraine fades into the more familiar sigh, there is a far greater chance that Berlin will get Nord Stream 2 up and running than that the EU will sign off on booting Russia from SWIFT.

So one striking thing about Biden’s remarks is that, despite castigating Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies do not think it is a sufficiently major “incursion” to cut Moscow off from SWIFT. The other thing that people will remember is that Biden refused to answer when pressed about why the U.S. and its allies have not sanctioned Putin personally. The president was asked repeatedly about this at the press conference. His tack was either to ignore the question or pretend that he hadn’t heard it.

President Biden took the podium to talk tough and show resolve. He didn’t completely fail, but for now, the big takeaways are the tough sanctions he is not willing to impose.