Posts tagged as “President Biden”

A Ukrainian military victory, not Western legal action and a negotiated settlement, is what is needed now.

The gruesome images of mass graves and murder coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, have inspired calls for war criminal investigations and war crimes tribunals.

This is, obviously, necessary and appropriate. But what is conspicuously missing are calls for Russia’s military defeat and expulsion from Ukraine.

President Biden, for instance, called Putin a war criminal, who needs to stand trial; however, he did not call upon the West to redouble its efforts to ensure a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. Instead, the President was silent and noncommittal about Western war aims in Ukraine.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stolenberg, likewise, said that “targeting and murdering civilians is a war crime. All the facts must be established and all those responsible for these atrocities must be brought to justice.”

True, but how can justice be served if Putin wins the war? Russia, obviously, must be defeated first before any war crimes tribunals can be convened.

Yet, like President Biden, in the wake of Bucha, NATO had nothing to say about altering the military balance of power to ensure Putin’s defeat.

Unfortunately, this is part of a troubling pattern or trend. Since this conflict began in February, Mr .Biden and his counterparts in Western Europe have been more worried about provoking Putin than in ensuring a Ukrainian win.

Consequently, they have been slow-walking military aid and assistance to Ukraine, while denying Ukrainian requests for heavy military equipment: tanks, armored vehicles, artillery systems, anti-ship missiles, military aircraft, et al.

“The [Biden] administration is not moving quickly enough,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, in an interview with Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot.

There is more we can do to help [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and put him in the strongest possible position going forward…

[But] the administration just continues to be guided by a fear of provoking Putin. That’s really what’s guided their efforts from the start. I think that’s why we’re somewhat behind the curve.

“The concern among Ukraine’s supporters on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon,” reports the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

is that the Biden Administration doesn’t want Ukraine to go on offense. It wants a negotiated settlement as soon as possible.

France and Germany, the doves in the NATO coalition, are in a similar place. They worry that if Russia suffers even greater losses, Mr. Putin might escalate again and perhaps in more dangerous ways that drag NATO directly into the war.

In a sense, Mr. Putin with his threats is defining the limits of U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

‘World War III’. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin sums up the conventional wisdom: “The bitter truth is that we will not risk a third world war to insist Russia fully retreat from all of Ukraine and purge itself of Putin.”

In truth, though, a wider war and a more dangerous conflagration—in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East—is more likely if Putin wins in Ukraine.

Dictators and bad actors—including China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and Iran’s Ali Khamenei—will learn that the West can be rolled and that aggression pays.

An emboldened Putin, meanwhile, will continue to threaten nearby NATO countries, such as Poland and the Baltic states, but from a far stronger military position in Ukraine.

The bottom line: war crimes can be punished only after a war ends, and only after those responsible have been defeated on the battlefield.

Calling Putin a war criminal and insisting that he and his generals be tried in a war crimes tribunal is all well and good, but it mustn’t obscure the more immediate and pressing wartime exigency, which is to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.

Bucha should stiffen the spines of Western leaders to ensure that Ukraine wins and Russia loses. Punishing Putin and his generals for war crimes is no substitute for military victory and is impossible in any case without a military victory.

Feature photo credit: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, grief stricken after seeing the carnage caused by Russian war crimes in Bucha, courtesy of the New York Post.

Biden never called for “regime change.” Instead, he acknowledged an obvious truth: that real peace in Ukraine and Eastern Europe necessitates a new Russian leader.

During his speech in Warsaw, Poland, yesterday, President Biden never called for “regime change” in Moscow.

Yet, this hasn’t stopped the peanut gallery, in the media and on Twitter, from insisting that he did. Nor has it stopped the critics from clucking over the President’s alleged gaffe.

“For America,” wailed AllahPundit,

it seems, the endgame isn’t an independent Ukraine but the decapitation of Russia’s government. The whole premise of the conflict, that NATO is a defensive alliance whose members pose no threat to Moscow, has been undermined.

Biden’s comment, agreed Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), “plays into the hands of the Russian propagandists and plays into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”

And this “may well make it harder to negotiate with Mr. Putin over Ukraine or anything else,” warned the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.”

“At a time of war, with WMDs in the hands of our foe, this kind of gaffe—massively altering war aims in an aside—risks millions of lives. It’s a huge unforced error,” cried Andrew Sullivan.

But this outcry from the critics reflects a willful misreading of the President’s speech.

Moreover, it attributes to Russian leaders an inability to think and act rationally; and it presupposes that America and NATO ought to aim to accommodate Putin through a compromise agreement in Ukraine.

If, however, you believe, as I do, that the West ought to defeat and discredit Putin in Ukraine, then Biden’s comment is hardly a gaffe.

Instead, it is an explicit acknowledgement of a hard political truth: that Putin has no interest in peace; and that, therefore, a real peace in Ukraine and Eastern Europe necessitates a new Russian leader who respects international law and the territorial integrity of Russia’s neighbors.

‘Regime Change’. A peaceful Russia can be realized in myriad ways, but “regime change”—meaning a Western attempt to topple Putin from Power a la the 2003 Iraq War or the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—which is, obviously, what “regime change” connotes—that has never been under consideration, and Putin knows it.

He knows this because again, Biden never called for “regime change.”

Here’s what the President actually said at the very end of a long speech on the need to defend NATO against Russian aggression while standing with Ukraine in its fight against Russia

For God’s sake, this man, [Putin], cannot remain in power.

When coupled with Biden’s oft-repeated insistence that American troops will never step foot in Ukraine, let alone Russia, and that America will not risk any sort of military confrontation with Russia, it becomes blindingly obvious that a Western military-forced “regime change” is not a policy option in the Biden administration.

Russian Realism. For this reason, as even the dovish Tom Nicholas admits:

So far, the Russians seem to have taken Biden’s remarks more calmly than the American media.

Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson who never misses a chance to castigate the United States said only that this was a question for the Russian people, and not for Biden.

The Russian people, of course, have no say in who rules them, but Peskov’s answer amounted to a shrug.

Ironically, albeit not surprisingly, Russian leaders are more sanguine and realistic than hyperbolic American commentators and politicians. They realize that of course America and NATO are opposed to Putin and would like to see him gone.

But they also realize that America and NATO have absolutely no intention of invading Russia; and that, regardless of what Western leaders think about Putin, the hard realities of nuclear deterrence still apply and constrain the behavior of Russia and the West.

In short, Biden was right to acknowledge that Russia needs a new political leader, and the critics are wrong to fault him for saying so.

The President’s “gaffe” was “undeniably morally true and the implications are inescapable anyway,” explains Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey). “No president can have a normal relationship with Putin ever again,” he told the Washington Post.

Biden’s “gaffe,” obviously, won’t incite Putin to react wildly and irrationally. He still must contend with hard political and military realities.

However, by publicly calling out the Russian dictator, as he did in Warsaw, the American President may well have hastened the day when Putin is ousted from power, by Russians and from within Russia, and a new Russian leader takes the helm. Then and only then can a real peace ensue.

Feature photo credit: Screenshot of President Biden delivering an historic and consequential speech in Warsaw, Poland, March 26, 2022, courtesy of Sky News.