Barr predicted that ‘Putin will pursue Russian strategic goals more assertively and feel little need to find agreed-upon frameworks’ with the U.S.
In his forthcoming book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, Bill Barr predicted that Russian president Vladimir Putin would become more aggressive with Joe Biden at the helm in the United States.
“I am afraid that, with a wavering, intermittently alert Joe Biden in the Oval Office, Vladimir Putin will pursue Russian strategic goals more assertively and feel little need to find agreed-upon frameworks with the United States,” writes Barr, who served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump.
“Given Biden’s manifest weakness, Putin is likely to feel he’s better off making no concessions at all,” he adds, before going on to argue that “demonizing Putin is not a foreign policy.”
Barr also devotes space to decrying the investigation into the relationship between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, saying that Democrats engaged in “a treasure hunt to find an explanation for their loss” in the 2016 presidential election. He calls the idea that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia a “preposterous theory.”
According to the former attorney general, the hostility toward Russia engendered by the Mueller investigation distracted Democrats and their media allies from a long overdue confrontation with a rising China — and set an unprepared Biden up for a confrontation with a besieged dictator.
“Managing the single threat from China will be hard enough, but dealing simultaneously with a hostile Russia is a challenge we should seek to avoid. A sensible foreign policy at this stage would be to engage with Russia to explore whether there is a feasible framework for a more constructive relationship. Unfortunately, with the media ready to pounce on President Trump as a Russian stooge — if not a Manchurian candidate — at the slightest sign of detente, the President’s hands were severely tied, especially during an election year.”
The warning in One Damn Thing After Another, an advance copy of which was obtained by National Review, is notable in light of recent events. Putin launched an invasion into neighboring Ukraine a little over a year into Biden’s presidency.
Putin proceeded with what he originally called a “peacekeeping” mission after Biden intimated that a smaller military operation might not be met with many repercussions.
“It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera. But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia,” said Biden in a press conference held at the White House in January.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki cleaned up Biden’s comments in a statement promising that any kind of infringement on Ukraine’s sovereignty “will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies.”
Since the beginning of the conflict last week, the United States and its allies have enacted sweeping sanctions that have already done significant damage to the Russian economy. Biden declared during his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening that Putin “thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready.”
Barr’s memoir, published by Harper Collins, will be available for purchase on March 8.