Posts tagged as “President Biden”

Biden Erred by Diplomatically Engaging Putin

Biden Erred by Diplomatically Engaging Putin

By John R Guardiano on January 27, 2022

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.

Why Is Russia Now Threatening Ukraine?

Why Is Russia Now Threatening Ukraine?

By John R Guardiano on January 14, 2022

Biden’s weakness gave license to Putin’s aggression.

When, last August, Joe Biden abjectly surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, he and his administration said this was necessary because the United States has no strategic interests there and must pivot, instead, to confront a rising China.

Never mind that, as William Lloyd Stearman points out, Bagram Air Base is strategically located “about 400 miles west of China and 500 miles east of Iran.” This, Stearman writes, is obviously “a good place to have American assets.”

U.S. Surrender in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the President opted to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and abandon Bagram to the Taliban. Mr. Biden pretended that his decision to surrender would not have deleterious and far-reaching strategic consequences.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has proven Joe Biden wrong. The Russian dictator has amassed more than 100,000 troops and advanced military equipment along the Russian-Ukraine border, while demanding hegemonic control over Ukraine and other neighboring countries.

“We are concerned,” says White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “that the Russian government is preparing for an invasion in Ukraine that may result in widespread human rights violations and war crimes should diplomacy fail to meet their objectives.”

Indeed, not since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 has the world seen such a brazen assault on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of an independent nation-state.

Why now? Because Putin has taken the measure of Joe Biden and realizes that our President is unwilling to protect the American national interest in Afghanistan or Europe.

In fact, Biden has pledged not to deploy U.S. ground troops or military advisers to Ukraine, and he has been reticent to arm the Ukrainian military for fear of provoking Putin.

As Bret Stephens observes, Putin and other anti-American dictators watched the American debacle in Afghanistan and concluded that “the United States is a feckless power.

“The current Ukraine crisis,” Stephens writes, “is as much the child of Biden’s Afghanistan debacle as the last Ukraine crisis [in 2014] was the child of Obama’s Syria debacle.”

In short, weakness is provocative. Weakness begets aggression. Weakness courts disaster. And weakness can have deleterious strategic consequences as we are now learning in Ukraine.

Featured photo credit: Joe Bidden and Vladimir Putin, courtesy of Fox News.

Bernie Biden and Joe Warren

Bernie Biden and Joe Warren

By John R Guardiano on May 2, 2021

Biden’s moderate public persona channels the political agendas of socialist Bernie Sanders and government-knows-best enthusiast Elizabeth Warren.

Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate who pledged a “return to normalcy.” But what’s become frighteningly clear during his first 100 days in office is that, despite his relatively relaxed and reassuring public persona, Joe Biden is no moderate, and what he is pushing legislatively is the antithesis of normal.

Mr. Biden seeks the biggest and most far-reaching expansion of the federal government in American history.

The dollar figures alone are staggering and defy all historical precedent: some six trillion dollars in new spending and an additional $3 trillion in new taxes, including a near-doubling of the capital gains tax for successful investors.

In short, the American people may have voted for normal and moderate Joe Biden, but what they got instead, policy-wise at least, was socialist Bernie Sanders and government-knows-best enthusiast Elizabeth Warren.

If Mr. Biden simply were proposing to spend a lot more money, that would be bad but reversible. Unfortunately, what he is trying to do is much worse.

The president seeks to legislate a slew of new entitlements that will exert government control over parts of our lives which, heretofore, have been relatively and blissfully free of state manipulation—pre-school education, childcare, and community college attendance, for instance.

As the Wall Street Journal editorial board explains:

The cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life.

The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.

The problem is that entitlements, once established, become ticking financial time bombs that are immune to reform and modernization. Witness Social Security and Medicare, two badly-designed programs which consume an increasing share of the federal budget, and which are now politically sacrosanct and, sadly, untouchable.

“The Biden administration and President Biden have exceeded expectations that progressives had,” exulted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) during a virtual town hall. “I’ll be frank. I think a lot of us expected a lot more conservative administration.”

So, too, did many Biden voters—especially middle class wage earners. They, ultimately, will bear the brunt of Biden’s entitlement burden through fewer jobs, slower economic growth, higher taxes, and less opportunity.

Feature photo credit: Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders: three Democratic peas in a socialist pod, courtesy of Florida Politics.

Biden, Afghanistan, and the U.S. Military

Biden, Afghanistan, and the U.S. Military

By John R Guardiano on April 25, 2021

No to ‘Forever Wars,’ but Yes to ‘Forever Forward Deployed’

“It’s time to end the forever war,” declared President Biden in his Apr. 14, 2021, announcement that he is withdrawing all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan.

No one wants to say that we should be in Afghanistan forever, but they insist now is not the right moment to leave…

So when will it be the right moment to leave? …War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking.

Of course no sane American wants to fight a “forever war”—that is, an indeterminable conflict with no end in sight, only a mounting list of U.S. casualties. But the President is wrong when he argues that the only alternative to “endless war” is military retreat and withdrawal.

In fact, there is a third and much better option: forever forward deployed as a garrison force, in country, that works closely with our allies—in this case, the legitimately elected government of Afghanistan—to protect vital U.S. interests in the region.

This was the option strongly recommended to Mr. Biden by his own military advisers, as well as the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group.

A small residual force of 4,500 U.S. troops, they argued, would be enough “for training, advising, and assisting Afghan defense forces; supporting allied forces; conducting counterterrorism operations; and securing our embassy.”

U.S. troops, after all, have been forward deployed in Germany, Japan, and South Korea for more than half a century. True, Afghanistan is a far cry from being remotely like any of these three countries; it remains wracked by armed conflict and civil war.

Progress. Nonetheless, with American military help, Afghanistan has made tremendous strides forward—socially, politically, economically, and militarily. U.S. casualties, meanwhile, have steadily and precipitously declined. As the New York Times’ Bret Stephens reports:

Millions of girls, whom the Taliban had forbidden to get any kind of education, went to school. Some of them—not nearly enough, but impressive considering where they started from and the challenges they faced—became doctors, entrepreneurs, members of Parliament.

“There have been no American combat deaths in Afghanistan since two soldiers were killed and six wounded on Feb. 8, 2020, in a so-called insider attack in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province,” reports the Desert News.

“The U.S.,” Stephens notes “has lost fewer than 20 service members annually in hostile engagements in Afghanistan since 2015. That’s heartbreaking for those affected, but tiny next to the number of troops who die in routine training accidents worldwide.

“Our main role in recent years,” he adds, “has been to provide Afghan forces with effective air power. It is not an exorbitant price to pay to avert an outright Taliban victory.”

Strategic Ramifications. And preventing the Taliban from winning matters for reasons that extend far beyond Afghanistan. It matters in China, Taiwan, and the South China Sea. It matters in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, and Iran. And it matters in North Korea, Europe, and the Middle East.

“Our enemies will test us,” warns Bing West.

After Saigon fell [in the Vietnam War], Russia and Cuba supported proxy wars in Latin America and Africa, while Iranian radicals seized our embassy in Tehran.

The Biden administration will face similar provocations. Already, China is threatening Taiwan, Russia is massing troops on the Ukraine border, and Iran is increasing its enrichment of uranium.

“The theory of deterrence relies not just on the balance of forces, but also on reserves of credibility,” Stephens explains. “Leaving Afghanistan now does next to nothing to change the former while seriously depleting the latter.”

Diplomatic Leverage. The President disparages the notion “that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage.” Yet, he offers no evidence to refute this commonsensical and well-proven truth.

Instead, he blithely asserts:

We gave that argument a decade. It’s never proved effective—not when we had 98,000 troops in Afghanistan, and not when we were down to a few thousand.

But the failure to win in Afghanistan is a reflection of an intractable war in an antiquated tribal society; it is not an indictment of the necessary nexus between military and diplomatic power.

Recognizing that the U.S. military has failed to achieve victory in two decades of conflict and likely will never achieve victory in the classic sense does not mean that we must reject wholesale the use of military power in Afghanistan.

This is a colossal blunder and unforced error by Mr. Biden.

The President compounds his error by arguing that “our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm’s way—U.S. boots on the ground. We have to change that thinking.”

In fact, we need to understand that a forward-deployed U.S. military presence overseas is a stabilizing force for the good and a critical component of American diplomacy.

False Choice. The bottom line: the choice between so-called endless war and abject withdrawal and retreat is a false choice. We do not have to accept either of these two badly mistaken and extreme options.

Instead, we should choose to be forever forward-deployed militarily in small but strategically significant numbers to protect our interests and put America First. The President’s failure to do so in Afghanistan jeopardizes our national security.

Feature photo credit: President Biden announces that he is withdrawing all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, courtesy of ABC News.

Biden’s Call for Unity Puts America First

Biden’s Call for Unity Puts America First

By John R Guardiano on January 20, 2021

How can we reconcile the President’s call for unity with the need for robust and contentious political debate?

Joe Biden’s inaugural address—and the speeches, prayers, and musical renditions that surrounded it—beautifully met the historical moment. Our new president paid homage to American democracy and the peaceful transfer of power with a solemn and heartfelt call for unity.

But what exactly, does the President mean by unity?

Surely not unanimity of opinion: because in any real democracy—and certainly American democracy—we prize argument and debate. We vigorously protect the rights of dissenters who beg to differ, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

That is why, after all, our founding fathers bequeathed to us the First Amendment, which expressly protects freedom of thought and freedom of speech. As Americans, we believe that only though robust and contentious political debate will the best ideas emerge and prevail.

As Mr. Biden put it:

If you still disagree [with me], so be it. That’s democracy. That’s America. The right to dissent, peaceably—the guardrail of our republic—is perhaps this nation’s greatest strength.

Yet hear me clearly: Disagreement must not lead to disunion.

Americans First. In other words, we Americans can disagree and argue, but we should always do so as Americans first—as a people with a shared history, a common set of ideals, and a singular devotion to liberty and justice for all.

We can see each other not as adversaries, but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature…

Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.

And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.

Truth and Lies. Mr. Biden’s point about manipulating and manufacturing facts was a well-deserved rebuke of President Trump, who has been a habitual liar throughout his presidency.

Trump’s most damning lie, of course, was his fabricated notion that the election was stolen from him through voter fraud. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yet it was this lie that inspired the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by deluded Trump sycophants.

Bald-faced lying matters because it debases our political culture and corrupts and distorts our policy debates. And, inevitably, this leads to calls for censoring and squelching free speech, as we’ve seen recently with Twitter and Facebook.

As Mr. Biden explained:

Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson: there is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit.

And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders—leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation—to defend the truth and defeat the lies.

Surely, no conservative—and certainly, not this conservative—can disagree. The search for truth, not power, must always and everywhere guide us.

Republicans. The problem for Republicans and conservatives in the age of Trump is that too many of them allowed their quest for political power to override their commitment to truth—the truth about Trump and the truth about their political opponents. And, as we saw Jan. 6, this too often led to disaster.

We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural vs. urban, conservative vs. liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.

If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment, stand in their shoes.

Because here’s the thing about life: There’s no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days when you need a hand. There are other days when we’re called to lend a hand. That’s how it has to be. That’s what we do for one another.

And if we are this way, our country will be stronger, more prosperous, more ready for the future. And we can still disagree [emphasis added].

Yes, we can, and we should (argue and disagree)—now more than ever.

Civility. Look, I’m a conservative Republican. Joe Biden is a very liberal Democrat. I fully expect to vigorously oppose many, and perhaps most, of the policies that he will champion over the next four years.

But I thank God we have a President who recognizes that we Americans can and should disagree and argue, but as Americans first, with a commitment to what is right, true, and just.

Amen, Mr. President, and Godspeed.

Feature photo credit: Screenshot of President Biden delivering his Inaugural Address.