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Topic:

Moral Paralysis

Country:

USA & Europe

Issue:

Appeasement

Article ID:

80

Title:

How Biden Made a Mess of Ukraine

Author:

Phillips Payson O’Brien

Date:

November 30, 2024

Source:

The Atlantic

Reference:

Summary:

Quotes:

The Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but also throwing away a remarkable chance to improve America’s global standing and democratic powers’ position in the world. In defending themselves far more effectively than expected, the Ukrainians showed a capacity to deal Russian President Vladimir Putin a major military defeat, but again and again, Biden and his experts have constrained Ukraine’s ability to fight until it was too late. Just recently, only after his party lost the presidential election, Biden finally gave Ukraine the tightly limited ability to use American weapons on military targets in a small part of Russia. The president’s decision comes after 33 months of war, during which Russia has launched long-range attacks anywhere in Ukraine it wanted, in many cases using Iranian-made weaponry. Biden has promised the Ukrainians that he will stand by them “for as long as it takes”—but he has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to. A far harder call was what would happen when an invasion began, and in that respect, the Biden administration didn’t understand what it was looking at. U.S. officials assumed that if Putin went ahead with his plans, Ukraine would stand no chance and the Russians would prevail in short order..Meanwhile, the Ukrainians showed themselves to be far more resilient, adaptable, and willing to fight than the Biden administration had understood. At that point, the U.S. could have capitalized immensely on the Ukrainians’ spirited resistance and on Russian weakness. I struggle to think of another time when unexpected events offered a U.S. president more favorable conditions to remake the geopolitical landscape…If the U.S. had helped Ukraine win in 2022—which is to say, liberate its own internationally recognized territory—and then join NATO, it would also have protected the security of countries to Ukraine’s west…the world would have been much safer and stabler. However bold the president’s promises to stand by the Ukrainians, though, his administration seemed cowed by Russian threats that Putin would use nuclear weapons if the U.S. assisted Kyiv too much. Moreover, an ingrained fixation on seeking stability in Russia seemed to make the White House nervous about doing anything that would threaten Putin’s rule too much or yield chaos in Russia. In a Foreign Affairs essay last fall, Sullivan boasted multiple times that the Biden administration was helping Ukraine defend itself. The problem is that defensive tactics alone will never be sufficient to allow Ukrainians to defeat an invasion by a much larger power. Even so, Biden and his aides pursued a Goldilocks strategy, hoping to help Ukraine fight without provoking Putin too much. They provided very limited types of military equipment to Ukraine and even then made sure to restrict what Ukraine could do with it. At first, the Biden administration seemed terrified to give Ukraine anything that could hit more than 30 miles or so from the front lines—so the U.S. supplied only short-range weaponry. It certainly didn’t want Ukraine to be able to target Russian military assets in Crimea, which is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine and has been illegally occupied by Russia since 2014. So for the rest of 2022, when Russia’s initial invasion faltered and then went into reverse, Ukraine was deprived of any ability to hit Russian targets far in the rear, even if those targets were within Ukraine’s own territory. And the battlefield results that followed were predictable. Although Ukraine made some deep advances in the fall, the Russians were always able to recover, having a broad sanctuary where they could regroup and supply their forces. When the U.S. eventually got over its reservations and provided the requested systems, albeit in limited numbers, Putin always backed down. The standard Russian strategy was to downplay the arrival of the new equipment and go out of its way to assure the Russian public that it would make no difference in the war. And in fact, those Western weapons had significantly less impact than they would have if the U.S. had transferred them earlier and in greater quantity. An inability to learn became a major, repeated failure of the Biden administration’s overall strategy toward Ukraine. In practice, the Biden administration has treated the Ukraine conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won. The administration doesn’t seem to understand that Russia can be beaten. The administration has dithered, looking more and more powerless as Ukraine has suffered and as an emergent anti-Western alliance that includes Iran, North Korea, and China has come to Russia’s aid. Biden could have helped create a better, more secure world than the one that existed in February 2022. Instead, he’s ushered in a much more dangerous one.

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