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.