Last May, President Joe Biden waived Trump-era sanctions against a major company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — as well as its CEO, Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi agent and a Putin “associate.”
Last November, as Russian troops were already massing on the Ukrainian border, Biden officials convinced congressional Democrats to drop the sanctions from the defense-spending bill. Last month, Biden sent two administration officials to Capitol Hill to lobby the Senate to kill Ted Cruz’s bill that would have reinstated the sanctions. At the time Chris Murphy, who for years peddled Russia hysterism at home, noted that “the administration was pretty powerful and pretty persuasive today.” Apparently, since Democrats then used a tool of racist oppression to stop the sanction bill — though you wouldn’t have known it from the headlines, as the media suddenly forgot the word “filibuster.”
Only today, after his administration declared an invasion was an inevitability, did tough-guy Biden finally let sanctions move forward. I’m all for making Putin’s life as uncomfortable as possible moving forward, but why didn’t Biden leave sanctions in place and use the potential of waiving them as a carrot. As some oil-industry execs have pointed out, if Putin takes Ukraine it won’t matter anyway. Perhaps Nord Stream 2 sanctions wouldn’t ever have made a difference, but they almost certainly won’t now. Why was Biden so intent on letting Russian oligarchs off the hook? (I suspect two reasons: one, the president’s strategy of appeasing Putin in hopes of incentivizing good behavior; two, it rhymes with Bermany.)