U.S. diplomatic efforts have helped Putin while doing little to deter him.
Theodore Roosevelt famously said American foreign policy should “talk softly and carry a big stick.” Unfortunately, President Biden has turned Roosevelt’s maxim on its head. He has talked loudly and carried a twig.
Case in point: Ukraine. Biden and his foreign policy team have raised the alarm because Putin has amassed troops and equipment along the Russian-Ukraine border and Russia seems poised to invade Ukraine.
As a result, Team Biden has engaged in direct, one-on-one negotiations with Russia. They also have agreed to Russian demands that we respond in writing to Putin’s request for “security guarantees” vis-a-vis NATO and Ukraine.
Of course, Russia’s bellicose and threatening behavior toward its neighbors—including several NATO countries—is alarming and needs to be forcefully addressed and confronted.
But Biden’s rush toward diplomacy and engagement with Russia ignores how this actually strengthens Putin politically and elevates his standing, both domestically and abroad.
Putin, as Russia expert Leon Aron explains in a recent Remant podcast with Jonah Goldberg, craves international recognition and status. He craves being treated as an international leader whom other great powers—especially the United States—must contend with.
The Russian people, too, Aron says, wish to see their country and its leader placed on a par with the world’s dominant countries—especially the United States.
So what Biden has unwittingly done, argues Aron, is to elevate and strengthen Putin’s standing domestically, within Russia, as well as his standing vis-a-vis other countries.
How should the United States have responded to Putin’s menacing behavior? With far fewer words and certainly no high-profile meetings and summits. Or, as Roosevelt put it, “talk softly and carry a big stick.” As Aron explains:
It would have been enough to issue a statement at the Pentagon or State Department level: We are monitoring the situation, but the Kremlin has the right to conduct maneuvers on Russian territory.
That would have taken all of the wind out of Putin’s sails. But instead, Putin was given exactly what he wanted: calls from the White House, emergency meetings, a NATO-Russia Council meeting, and so on.
Every meeting with the American president— whether virtually, by phone, or even better, in person—is a colossal domestic gain for any Russian leader: it has been like this since Stalin. Only one country matters to Russia, and that’s the United States.
In his first year alone, Joe Biden has taken part in seven or eight rounds of talks with Putin. This is unprecedented in history. An absolute record and a big mistake. The United States should have reacted differently.
What Biden should have done is quietly provide Ukraine with advanced military equipment for both offensive and defensive purposes.
He should have strategically embedded U.S. military advisers into Ukraine for reconnaissance and intelligence, while redeploying our 34,000 U.S. troops from Germany into Poland and the Baltic States: Latvia, Lithuanian, and Estonia.
And Biden should have done this last spring, when Putin first began amassing troops and equipment along the Russian-Ukraine border.
That would have been a Roosevelian “big stick.” That would have sent a loud and clear message. That would have helped to deter Putin while protecting Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
Instead, Biden dithered and delayed because of a misplaced fear of provoking and antagonizing Putin.
Moreover, Aron says,
the U.S. also made a strategic mistake right from the start when it announced that it would neither exclude Russia from the SWIFT Agreement nor impose an import embargo on Russian oil and gas.
Those would have been the only two sanction options that would really hit the Kremlin hard. And they are the ones that were ruled out straight away.
Unfortunately, in international affairs, talk is anything but cheap. Talk can be costly and talk can have deleterious strategic consequences. For this reason, as we are painfully learning through Biden’s belated and voluble response to Putin, it is far better to “talk softly and carry a big stick.”
Feature photo credit: Presidents Joseph Biden and Theodore Roosevelt, courtesy of the Associated Press via SkyNews and Pach Bros via Wikpedia, respectively.
