President Biden Outfoxes Himself on Ukraine

During the 2020 election campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden suggested that he alone was prepared to go toe to toe with Russia’s President Putin. But reality is quite different from either Biden’s muscular campaign rhetoric or the land of make-believe occupied by his current national security advisers. This is so because, as David Harsanyi notes, President Biden’s appeasement strategy has been years in the making.

President Biden’s strategy of talking big and fleeing at the sound of a windblown leaf has been aided by the usual Left-wing commentators who have been tweeting strenuously about Biden’s strength and gloating about the fact that President Trump is no longer in the White House. Such gloating ignores the fact that none of the world dictators from China to Russia to Iran and beyond were prepared to engage in the kind of misconduct and saber rattling that the world has experienced ever since President Biden decided to open America’s southern border to both illegals and potential terrorists, a disaster that was followed quickly by his disastrous and cowardly withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, leaving hundreds of Americans behind enemy lines.

Now with President Biden in charge, America faces the prospect of another defeat of its interest even though it is clear that Ukraine is not a democratic country. After last month’s flurry of diplomatic activity by a clearly overmatched U.S. State Department and national security officials, President Biden made an announcement that Russia’s President Putin and the entire world could see: First, any form of NATO military deterrence was essentially off the table; and second, a minor incursion into Ukraine by Russia would allow the West to turn a blind eye to aggression. Although U.S. policy could change in the coming days with the possibility of stronger sanctions, so far the White House has responded to President Putin’s acceptance of President Biden’s invitation to invade with what some lawmakers are calling the very “definition of impotence” by imposing minor sanctions. (More on that in a forthcoming post.)

The weakness of such moves recalls then-Vice President Biden’s 2009 Munich speech “arguing that it was ‘time to press the reset button’ after eight years of purported American antagonism toward Russia.” Reset inevitably led to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

At the same time, of course, legitimate questions arise regarding how far the United States should go in defending Ukraine’s border without first defending our own. Two answers present themselves. First, we should always put America’s interest first, meaning that President Biden needs to replace his entire national security and diplomatic staff with competent officials who are unwilling to subvert U.S. interests to a progressive globalist agenda led by intellectual mediocrities who offer little more than incoherence as a strategy. Globalist incoherence is now on full display by Canada’s decision to send troops to eastern Europe to secure freedom for Europeans located near Russia, while simultaneously imposing a rather thuggish police state on its own citizens.

Second, we should note that firm demonstrations of national strength like those America saw under the Trump Administration are rewarded with respect by nations throughout the world. This signifies that if President Biden had been a stronger leader and had insisted on putting the interests of America’s working people first, we would never be in this situation in the first place; and additionally, Biden needs to recover sufficient spine and follow his predecessor’s successful policies.

Instead, ever since his inauguration, President Biden has signaled his surrender to appeasement rather than strength by engaging in international talks that, once again, place the interests of Iran and China ahead of our own. Perhaps most significantly, President Biden has presided over the largest trade deficit with Russia since a similarly disastrous period in 2011 during the Obama-Biden presidency.

Currently, while U.S. energy prices are exploding, while the prices of oil and transportation are exceeding wage increases, and while the nation faces historic levels of inflation on food and clothing, Americans are buckling under the weight of the Biden Administration’s deliberate decision to give Russia leverage. This is illustrated by the fact that America’s trade deficit with Russia has risen almost 94% since 2020. The rising U.S. trade deficit with Russia makes the former Soviet Union richer and thus provides funds to finance military aggression. As a result of the Biden Administration’s decision to forego United States energy independence in order to appease the President’s Left-wing base and their infatuation with the Green New Deal, President Biden has exposed American consumers to explosive price increases in oil, with the average price of a barrel of oil up from $40 per barrel at the end of 2020 to about $100 per barrel today, an increase of 250%, or the highest prices per barrel since 2014 when Russia took over Crimea.

This means that America is weaker and poorer under the Biden Administration. It also allows President Putin to press his advantage in eastern Europe while President Biden continues to outfox himself as he shows the world and the American people just how incompetent he truly is.

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