Today in the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib quotes Stephen Sestanovich, a Russia expert and former national-security official who now teaches at Columbia University: “It’s hard to avoid the thought that Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco suggested to Putin that this is a guy who can be pushed around.”
(Sestanovich is no reflexive Biden critic or right-winger; he has worked in administrations of both parties and in Bill Clinton’s second term, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department’s ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union.)
Putin also remembers the last time he seized Ukrainian territory, when Joe Biden was a heartbeat away from the presidency. Biden talked a good game back then, too:
Russia’s leaders have responded with a brazen — brazen military incursion, with a purposeful ratcheting up of ethnic tensions inside Ukraine, with a rushed and illegal referendum in Crimea that was, not surprisingly, rejected by virtually the entire world, and now, today, with steps to annex Crimea.
We join Poland and the international community condemning the continuing assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the blatant — the blatant violation of international law by Mr. Putin and Russia.
Russia has offered a variety of arguments to justify what is nothing more than a land grab, including what was said today. But the world has seen through — has seen through Russia’s action and has rejected the logic — the flawed logic behind those actions… It’s a simple fact that Russia’s political and economic isolation will only increase if it continues down its current path and it will, in fact, see additional — additional sanctions by the United States and the EU.
But the tough talk was backed up by minimal action. Benjamin Haddad and Alina Polyakova wrote at the Brookings Institution, “though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of the Reset, President Obama remained reluctant to view Moscow as anything more than a local spoiler, and thought the whole mess was best handled by Europeans. France and Germany spearheaded the Minsk ceasefire process in 2014-2015, with U.S. support but without Washington at the table. The Obama administration did coordinate a far-ranging sanctions policy with the European Union—an important diplomatic achievement, to be sure. But to date, the sanctions have only had a middling effect on the Russian economy as a whole (oil and gas prices have hurt much more).”
By the Trump years, even former Obama officials felt they had under-reacted to Russian provocations and ignored the growing threat from Moscow:
Other administration officials look back on the Russia period with remorse.
“It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” said a former senior Obama administration official involved in White House deliberations on Russia. “I feel like we sort of choked.”
But if you think I’m being too harsh on the Obama team consider this brutal assessment: “I believe that our response in 2014 was too slow and too incremental. And it’s confirmed by the lessons that I learned, and that I believe others in the national security community learned, to better address Russia’s ongoing aggression… I believe one of the lessons I learned is that it would have been appropriate and necessary to provide Ukraine with what it needed to defend its territory.”
That tough appraisal is from Celeste Wallander, President Biden’s nominee to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. From 2013 to 2017, Wallander served on the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia and Central Asia.
In other words, not even the people who thought up the Obama-era response to Putin thought it was tough or effective, and no one is willing to argue it amounted to an effective deterrent. The Russian dictator likely already thought Biden was all bark and minimal bite. And then he watched the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.