On the menu today: If you’ve felt like there’s a widening gap between the Biden administration’s lavish and grandiose rhetoric about helping Ukraine and its much more meager actions, you’re not alone. It turns out that apparently the entire Washington foreign-policy establishment sees the same gap, but is just too sympathetic to Biden’s team to complain about it on the record. But the day also brings good news, too, as the American West’s once-dire drought has mitigated significantly over the past few months.
Mostly Meaningless Rhetoric on Ukraine
For a while now, I’ve contended that President Biden’s policies regarding Ukraine are graded far too generously. The game plan appears to be to intermittently try to sound like Winston Churchill while sending weapons systems at a snail’s pace, months and months after the Ukrainians have said they need those weapons systems. Biden will visit Kyiv and pledge to support Ukraine as long as it takes, but ignore the fact that the Ukrainians are begging for more ammunition and artillery. It’s rather difficult to launch a spring offensive without enough stuff to shoot at the enemy.
There are other glaring contradictions between the administration’s rhetoric and actions. Immediately after the downing of the MQ-9 Reaper drone, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called his Russian counterpart and told him that the “United States will fly and operate wherever international law allows,” including air space near Ukraine. Then a week later, the administration revealed that the drones have altered their routes and are staying further away from Ukraine “to avoid being too provocative.”
The administration draws red lines and then backs away from enforcing them. In any given week, President Biden can speak about the conflict at length, or barely mention the ongoing war at all. Biden’s rhetoric is a lot more triumphalist than the reports on the ground from Kyiv and the front lines. And this isn’t even getting into John Kerry’s running around insisting we have to find a way to work with Russia on climate change.
According to Julia Ioffe, who used to write for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Politico, and who now writes for the new publication Puck, Washington’s foreign-policy establishment actually has a lot of gripes about how the Biden team is handling the crisis. It just doesn’t want to say so on the record:
Everyone I spoke to who participated in these White House briefing calls was vociferous in praising the Biden administration’s policy on Ukraine. They wanted to give the president and his advisors credit for this and credit for that. They really had done a terrific job, everyone said, of saving Ukraine and acting nimbly in a rapidly evolving, predictably unpredictable conflict. But as soon as we went off the record or spoke on background, the truth flowed like a mighty river.
It turns out that Washington’s foreign policy set has grown increasingly frustrated with the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy. What is it, exactly? On one hand, the administration has been consistent in its line on Ukraine: Ukraine must win, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, this must not turn into World War III, and we must defend and strengthen the rules-based (and American-designed) international order.
But what does any of that really mean? What does winning in Ukraine even look like? Do we agree with Ukraine that it means restoring its 1991 borders? If we advocate for “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” then what did it mean when Antony Blinken — just “Tony” to the community — told a group of experts that Crimea was Putin’s red line, and therefore America’s as well? Does our concept of victory actually diverge from the Ukrainians’ vision? And what does “as long as it takes” mean in the context of providing Ukraine with more sensitive weapons systems, like ATACMS, or dwindling weapons stocks in the U.S. and Europe? How “all in” are we? “If they have a strategy, it hasn’t been shared,” one expert on these regular briefing calls with administration officials complained.
The rest of Ioffe’s article indicates that everyone inside and outside of the administration is waiting to see how the war looks after the Ukrainians’ spring offensive. But no one expects the Ukrainians to completely drive the Russians out by summer or fall, and it is unfortunately possible that the battle lines won’t look all that different then than they do now.
Since the war began, Biden has pledged, “I will not pressure the Ukrainian government — in private or public — to make any territorial concessions. It would be wrong and contrary to well-settled principles to do so.” Now, I know this is going to shock you, but there’s a good chance that Joe Biden wasn’t completely honest when he made that pledge.
Back in February, during the State of the Union address, President Biden vowed to the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. that, “America is united in our support for your country. We will stand with you as long as it takes.” A week later, reporting revealed that the administration’s message to the Ukrainians behind closed doors was the opposite: Future aid packages may well be considerably smaller than originally promised, and the U.S. can’t send assistance “forever.”
According to Ioffe’s reporting, the foreign-policy community expects the Biden team to start nudging President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept some sort of disappointing ceasefire by the end of this year or next year. Ioffe continues:
That’s not good enough even for some of the administration’s public allies, who, in our conversations, consistently called out the gap between what Biden and his advisors were saying publicly and what they were planning for in private. “We rhetorically say something and then we revert to incrementalism,” one participant in the calls told me after dutifully praising the president. “That’s a bipartisan comment, by the way. We engage in this really high rhetoric and we just hope no one’s going to call us on it. But we’re going to get called on this one. We’re not playing for success, we’re playing for stalemate — and stalemate is not going to be successful for us.”
And this is one of the things that makes Joe Biden so insufferable as a commander in chief: What he says and what he does are often no more than distant cousins, and sometimes they’re diametrically opposed. On the campaign trail in 2019, Biden laughably claimed that, “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.” He began his presidency with the egomaniacal boast that “America is back!” simply because he was now the president. When meeting with Zelensky in Kyiv, Biden said, “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for, for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President: for as long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes” turned out to be a lot briefer, and more conditional, than Biden was willing to say. Speak loudly and send the Ukrainians a small stick, half a year after they asked for a big one.
Hey, Never Mind, the Western Drought Is Fine Now
Apparently, all it took to end the West’s nearly two-decade drought was for me to write about it at the end of January. Two months ago, the winter rains and snowfall were on a path to only slightly mitigating the long-term consequences of the drought, and the water levels in reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead were getting so low, state officials warned that hydroelectric plants might no longer be able to work normally.
Today, the U.S. Drought Monitor, which measures conditions from California to Montana and from Washington to New Mexico, is at its lowest level in years. One year ago, almost 70 percent of the American West was at drought levels rated “severe,” “extreme,” or “exceptional.” (Those are drought levels two through four; level one is “moderate.”) This morning, less than 13 percent of the American West is in “severe,” “extreme,” or “exceptional” conditions.
Repeated deluges of rain, described as “atmospheric rivers,” have drenched California, offering a dramatic turnaround to a state that was frighteningly parched when the year began. California’s snowpack has reached record levels; the state Department of Water Resources reports that the southern Sierra snowpack is at 289 percent of normal for this date.
Lake Shasta has risen 118 feet since the beginning of December. The state is rolling back a slew of water-use restrictions.
ADDENDUM: Today is the kickoff of the National Review Institute Ideas Summit. You can check out the agenda here and learn more about the speakers here. You have probably heard of some of these folks, such as former attorney general William Barr, Megyn Kelly, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, some guy named Mike Pence. . . .