The first year of Joe Biden’s presidency has been taken up with the pandemic, trying to pass big spending bills through a very closely divided Congress, and an economy nobody expected (jobs going begging and inflation we were told couldn’t happen). There wasn’t much in it about foreign affairs, except the debacle that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But the Biden administration’s second foreign policy crisis is coming up this week, and it is unclear how prepared the Administration is.1 Russian President Vladimir Putin has assembled 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, a country Russia has already invaded and taken territory from. President Putin has also issued a series on ridiculous demands (no additional countries can join NATO, NATO can’t base troops in eastern NATO members, and more).
All in all, the inadequate preparation for the meeting by the U.S. and absence of any counterproposals by us bespeaks a lack of planning and situational analysis that could easily result in a result as bad, in its own way, as the disaster in Afghanistan.
--------
1 See, inter alia, Henry Foy. Polina Ivanova, and James Politi, “Moscow calls the shots ahead of US talks,” Financial Times, January 8, 2022.
2 There are plenty of issues we could have raised, but apparently we didn’t.
Comments