On the menu today: The short-attention-span theater of our modern media environment works in Joe Biden’s favor once again, as most people simply forget that a week and a half ago, the president warned that the world “faced the prospect of Armageddon.” Eleven days later, we can now be clear that Biden’s shocking comment wasn’t in response to some new intelligence or a subtle message to the Russians. It was just Joe being Joe, blurting out whatever is on his mind at any given moment, blindsiding the rest of the government while remaining oblivious to the consequences. Meanwhile, the U.S. policy toward the Russian invasion appears to be to arm the Ukrainians piecemeal and hope for the best.
Hey, Weren’t We Facing ‘Armageddon’?
Eleven days ago, at a Democratic Party fundraiser at the home of the Murdochs, President Biden, out of the blue, warned that the world “faced the prospect of Armageddon” because of the potential Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
What is weirder: that Biden said it, or that in the eleven days since, Biden has offered only the briefest and most generic remarks on Russia and Ukraine?
Since then, Biden issued a written statement denouncing Russian missile attacks on civilians, signed on to a joint statement from the G-7, mentioned Ukraine in a written statement on World Food Day, issued a written statement on a United Nations vote condemning Russia’s attempts to annex Ukrainian territory, and said during a press gaggle that Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure are “. . . brutal. It’s just — it’s beyond the pale.”
At the closed-door, high-dollar fundraiser for House Democrats in Los Angeles on Thursday, Biden briefly touched on the topic again: “Did any of you ever think you’d have a Russian leader, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons that would — could only kill three, four thousand people and be limited to make a point?”
It often seems as if Biden speaks more openly about his foreign policy at closed-door Democratic fundraisers than he does in his public remarks to the country. Notice that the White House never released the full transcript of Biden’s remarks at the “Armageddon” fundraiser, but released the transcript of Biden’s remarks at another fundraiser earlier that day. Biden did not mention Russia or Ukraine in his remarks at that event.
You should also notice that we haven’t had any big presidential address to the country and the world about the stakes of this conflict. We’re not seeing any special briefings to Congress about nuclear escalation. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, isn’t emulating her predecessor Adlai Stevenson and confronting her Russian counterpart about how the country’s aggression and recklessness is bringing the world closer to nuclear confrontation. No demands of “Don’t wait for the translation,” or “I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over.” The Biden administration authorized an additional $725 million dollars in security aid for Ukraine. But otherwise, it’s wartime business as usual.
As Peggy Noonan observed, “If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. When JFK spoke, it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.”
Apparently, Biden blindsided the rest of the U.S. government with his remarks; no one else in the government seemed to know what stirred Biden’s concern that particular day. The morning after the president’s remarks, Defense Department spokesman J. Todd Breasseale said to Politico, “To be clear: We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor do we have indications that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons.” His statement was echoed, verbatim, by State Department spokesman Vedant Patel the same day.
The following Sunday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had to do cleanup: “His comments were not based on new or fresh intelligence or new indications that Mr. Putin has made a decision to use nuclear weapons and, quite frankly, we don’t have indication that he has made that kind of decision.”
Clearly, Biden’s “Armageddon” remarks were not a deliberate strategy or a subtle form of messaging to the Russians. That was just old Joe, rambling about whatever was on his mind, blurting out his anxieties about one of the major foreign-policy crises on his watch.
I don’t want to pull a full Michael Brendan Dougherty here, but you get the feeling that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a crisis that really befuddles Biden, his foreign-policy team, and the so-called “foreign-policy blob” — the foreign-policy establishment found in the government, think tanks, international institutions, Capitol Hill, media, and academia.
What do you do when you have an autocrat who has absolute power in his country, an apparently unquenchable appetite for territorial conquest, a mountain range’s worth of historical grievances, a lifetime’s worth of paranoia and secrecy from a career in espionage and intelligence, a willingness to throw away seemingly endless fortunes in blood and treasure, considerable energy leverage over central Europe, debatable mental stability, and nuclear weapons?
Remember, there was a time when it was widely believed that bringing Russia into the international economy would help establish global stability and security. (Until Kosovo, no two countries that had McDonald’s restaurants in them had ever gone to war.) But in the end, having American brands sold in Moscow didn’t make much of a difference. Having extensive energy exports to Europe enhanced Russia’s leverage instead of mitigating it. All the trade ties and economic interaction with the rest of the world — and the threat of far-reaching crippling sanctions — didn’t matter because the country was ruled by a guy who really wanted that territory, who saw himself in near-messianic terms, and who was willing to pay any price in both Ukrainian and Russian lives to get it.
No matter how badly the war goes for Russia, Putin doubles down. The Moskva, a Russian naval cruiser and the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, sinks, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting. The Crimean Bridge gets partially blown up, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting. An estimated 90,000 Russian soldiers have died, cannot be accounted for, or have suffered such serious injuries that they are unable to return to service, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting. Tens of thousands of Russian men flee the country to avoid conscription, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting.
It currently appears that the Russian army will continue to fight and bombard civilian targets in Ukraine until it has no more men or ammunition to throw at the problem. This is a formula for an exceptionally bloody stalemate.
Biden spent the 2020 campaign promising that he would stand up to Putin and “hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes.” In a cringe-inducing display of hubris, Biden boasted 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.”
We didn’t deter the Russian invasion. We haven’t deterred Russian attacks on civilians. We may have mitigated the worst effects of the invasion on world food prices, but the data is mixed and we’re not done yet. We may have deterred the use of tactical nuclear weapons so far, but that’s hard to tell; it’s difficult to know if Putin really was considering it or was simply saber-rattling for greater leverage.
Apparently, the U.S. strategy is to arm Ukraine — piecemeal and ploddingly — and hope for the best. Today on the website, Robert Zubrin urges the Biden administration to send American F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. You may notice this is very similar to the argument we had in the spring over NATO’s spare MiGs. And if we had sent those spare MiGs to them then, maybe the Ukrainians would be in better shape now. As Zubrin writes:
Fighters should be sent without further delay, starting with the MiGs that Poland offered to send Ukraine in March. That proposal was blocked by the Biden administration on the mistaken belief that Putin would be restrained by NATO restraint. If the MiGs had been sent, thousands of lives lost since that time could have been saved.
But there is no reason to limit the aircraft we send Ukraine to Soviet-era MiGs. America and its allies have more than 4,000 F-16s. While these are no longer the best fighters we have, they are pretty good, certainly much better than the legacy Soviet MiGs. They are also relatively easy to maintain. The United States has delivered F-16s to 25 countries around the world — NATO members and non-NATO countries — even including such questionable nations as Pakistan and Venezuela. We have so many of them that the U.S. Air Force uses them for target practice.
Putin has, at least in theory, more than 2 million former conscripts and contract servicemen he can mobilize. He thinks, with good reason, that his leverage will increase in winter if he cuts off energy supplies to central Europe. Russian military losses are, on paper, good for Ukraine and good for NATO — every Russian tank, artillery piece, plane, and other weapon destroyed is one less that can fire at Ukrainian civilians in cities. But every loss also makes Putin more desperate to show that this entire bloody endeavor was worthwhile. It’s conceivable that the worse it gets for Putin, the worse it will get for everyone else, too. Maybe this grim calculation is what spurred Biden to ramble about “Armageddon.”
But hey, Mr. President, you asked for this job. You spent two years telling us you could handle it. You specifically assured us you knew how to handle Vladimir Putin. (Apparently, Biden believed that the mere presence of himself in the Oval Office would intimidate Putin into good behavior. Go figure, it turns out everybody ‘[messes] with a Biden’ after all.)
If the turning-80-next-month president really finds the prospect of this crisis overwhelming, maybe he should step aside for someone who does feel up to the job.
ADDENDA: President Biden, licking an ice-cream cone, Friday: “Our economy is strong as hell.”
A US recession is effectively certain in the next 12 months in new Bloomberg Economics model projections, a blow to President Joe Biden’s economic messaging ahead of the November midterms.
The latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger forecast a higher recession probability across all timeframes, with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100 percent, up from 65 percent for the comparable period in the previous update.
Boy, this series of questions seemed to hit a nerve. . . .