The Russian invasion of Ukraine has served something of an all-purpose scapegoat for the Biden administration. Biden and his team continually blame inflation on the “Putin price hike” or the “Putin tax hike.” “We’ve never seen anything like Putin’s tax on both food and gas,” Biden said in remarks at the Port of Los Angeles. Your higher gas bill, your higher grocery bill, your higher electricity bill – in the Biden narrative, Vladimir Putin is to blame for all of this.
We’re told that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is even worsening the consequences of climate change; this morning, the New York Times laments that the Russian invasion of Ukraine roiled the world energy markets, slowing down the transition to renewable fuels.
And there are varying degrees of truth to these assertions. U.S. inflation and gas prices were already rising to troubling levels before the Russian invasion, but Russia’s invasion no doubt exacerbated those bad trends. Russia’s invasion undoubtedly disrupted the movement of key food supplies, worsening the risk of famine around the globe.
But there’s a serious political risk to the Biden narrative that Putin’s invasion opened up Pandora’s box and unleashed a whole world of new troubles. As Biden tells it, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has killed tens of thousands, put millions of people around the globe at higher risk of famine, forced Europe to face a coming winter with insufficient heat and energy, slammed the global economy by weakening the post-pandemic recovery and aggravating already-high inflation, and forced Americans to pay much higher food, gasoline, and energy bills — likely helping send the U.S. economy into a recession. NATO may be more unified, but Putin is embracing Iran. Everything from your household budget to international trade to the planet’s climate are now in weaker, more endangered shape because of Putin’s decision in late February.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had such far-reaching and catastrophic effects on the world . . . Americans may wonder, Why didn’t the Biden team do more to stop it? No doubt the Biden team wanted to stop it, but the Biden team kept emphasizing that the U.S. and NATO would not militarily intervene, and of course there was the president’s awful “limited incursion” gaffe. Biden spent much of his first year in office attempting to restore a “stable, predictable relationship” with Putin, dropping U.S. opposition to Nord Stream 2, and back in September 2021, Melinda Haring, the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, wrote that the U.S. is governed by “an administration that decidedly wants to ignore Russia.”
No doubt, Putin looked at Biden and saw an obstacle easy to overcome. Based upon the events of the past week, you have to figure Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman saw the same pushover.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risked unleashing economic Ragnarok, maybe it was worth a larger and more elaborate effort at deterrence?
And if the Biden team contends it’s unreasonable to expect Biden to bring Putin’s days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe to an end . . . that’s exactly what Joe Biden promised he would do on the campaign trail in 2019.