The View from Right Field

Who Is President? – Ukraine Edition

Ukraine’s strike into Russia has been amazing – not just for its success but also for its surprise.  What was particularly interesting, however, was not that the Russians were surprised, but that the Americans were apparently surprised, too.  Obviously, things like this need to be kept as secret as possible in order to work.

But I wonder if the reason the Ukrainians apparently did not tell the Americans was to maintain the element of surprise – or because they figured that, if they told us, we would have told them not to do it – for fear, once again, of provoking Putin.  Putin invaded Ukraine, and yet the Biden administration seems more worried about the Ukrainians somehow provoking Putin than what Russia does

Which makes you wonder, as I asked in this post, who is running American foreign policy?  And whether anybody really cares that much about what the people running American foreign policy say or think?

Joe Biden’s Priorities: Gasoline Prices > Ukraine

The Financial Times reported on Friday:

“The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warming that the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. …

Washington is also concerned that if Ukraine keeps hitting Russian facilities, including many that are hundreds of miles from the border, Russia could retaliate by lashing out at infrastructure relied on by the west. …

Joe Biden: Getting Foreign Policy Wrong for 50 Years

In 2014, a former cabinet official from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations wrote that Joe Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."¹  Even though this official likes President Biden as a person and has said President Biden “a man of integrity,” he reaffirmed his statement in an interview in May of 2019. 

And President Biden has continued his string of mistakes and bad decisions since he got into office.  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.  President Biden was left with a terrible situation by Donald Trump.  The Trump administration signed what was basically a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.  While President Biden has said the Trump agreement left him no choice but to go forward with the withdrawal/surrender, that’s not true.  President Biden reversed all kinds of Trump administration decisions.  He could have changed this one, too, but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so we did.  It was the Biden administration that organized, or rather didn’t organize, the withdrawal.  If the withdrawal was a disaster, and if it has damaged the United States’ reputation for reliability and competence abroad, then that was on President Biden and his administration.

“If you want to be good at this kind of job, you have to be willing to lose it”

Paul Ryan said this in 2011 when he was trying to reform entitlement spending.  Ultimately, he couldn’t get it done, though he tried and he didn’t let the possibility of losing his job stop him from trying.  He did get significant tax reforms passed in 2017, maybe not as many as he would have liked, but a lot more than anybody else had accomplished in a long time or has accomplished since.  In 2018, then-House Speaker Ryan decided to retire.  Perhaps he felt he couldn’t “be good at this kind of job” anymore. I don’t know.  In any case, he was good at it while he was there.

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough people in the Republican Party like this anymore.  Instead, they are voting against aid to Ukraine, which would help our national security, too, and voting for silly motions to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security because they don’t like President Biden’s border policies.  It doesn’t matter whether they are doing this because they are scared of Donald Trump or because they think they would lose a primary to the people who tend to vote in primaries.  If they are more worried about losing their job than they are about being good at it, then maybe they should find a new job, which they could be good at.

Who Lost Ukraine? While Biden Isn’t Good, Republicans Seem to Be Worse.

Back in the 1950s, one of the big political issues was “Who Lost China?”  The Chinese Communists had won the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949 (Chiang Kai-shek retreating to Taiwan), and then North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950.  The Republicans spent a good part of the 1950s accusing Harry Truman (and Dean Acheson, George Marshall, et al) of “losing China”. 

I am not going to go into that debate.  What I am going to do is suggest we think about what the answer to “Who lost Ukraine” might be if we don’t start getting weapons and ammunition to Ukraine and, ultimately, they can’t hold on.  President Biden started out pretty good, but he hasn’t been nearly as good as he could have been.  We have wrung our hands about fears of escalation way too much,\; we have not delivered the weapons we needed to as quickly as we should have; and we have put too many limits on the use of the weapons we have delivered.

Biden’s Foreign Policy Just Isn’t Working – And It’s Not Deterring Anybody

At one point during the first Trump administration¹, I gave up (or at least cut back) on complaining about what he was doing both because it was becoming too time consuming and because the Democratic alternatives weren’t any better.  Well, I think I am just about there on Joe Biden’s foreign policy.  It’s bad, and I have no reason to think Trump 2.0 would be any better.

It has now been four days since an Iran proxy group killed three U.S. soldiers with a drone attack on a base we have in Jordan.  It may be that the Biden administration already has an appropriate response in process, and we don’t know about it yet.  I hope so.²  Because, if we want these attacks to stop, we need to respond in a really big way.  Iranian proxies, and others, have been attacking us for months.  Before Sunday, we were able to knock the drones or missiles down or they only injured people, they didn’t kill them.  So we didn’t respond (at least very much).  We just said: (i) if you kill any of our people (as opposed to merely injuring them), we’ll respond; (ii) we don’t want to escalate or to widen the war/conflict/tensions; and (iii) we don’t want World War III.  Which apparently didn’t scare anybody and probably encouraged some groups to keep attacking us  - because they did.

If We Really Care About Ukraine, Why Not Do What Teddy Roosevelt Did

According to last Monday’s Wall Street Journal:

“The Washington stalemate over U.S. policy at the southern border is beginning to reverberate on the Ukraine battlefield, where Kyiv’s troops are running out of ammunition and the Pentagon says it can’t provide more without emptying its own arsenal. …

Short of congressional approval of more funding, the White House can either dip into the Pentagon’s arsenal with no guarantee the gear will be replaced, or leave Ukraine to rely on its own growing but still small arms industry and European allies.”

The Washington Post Discovers the Hunter Biden Scandal – Of 2014

So, nine and one-half years later, The Washington Post says that Hunter Biden’s hiring by a Ukrainian energy company in 2014, when he had no qualifications for the job and his father was Vice President with special responsibility for policy toward Ukraine, “should have been a scandal”.  Yes, it should have been.  But the Obama administration told us, in effect, “move along, nothing to see here”; Joe Biden effectively told us much the same; and the MSM did the same.

I noticed it when it was first reported in May of 2014 (see here).  It was obvious something was wrong, but the Obama administration turned its eyes away.  Then-Vice President Biden turned his eyes away.  And Hunter Biden just used his father’s name to make lots and lots of money.  Which he continued to do in Ukraine and, it seems, just about any place else that would think they could get in good with Joe Biden by giving money to his son.

The Senate Is Playing Chicken – And Kiev Might Lose

Of course, I mean Kyiv, but I couldn’t resist a “Chicken Kiev” reference.  Except it’s not a joke.  Republicans in the Senate are saying that they won’t vote for aid to Ukraine (and Israel, etc.) without changes in our border security laws and procedures.  Democrats are saying that they want to vote for aid to Ukraine (and Israel, etc.) but they won’t agree to the changes the Republicans want in our border security laws and procedures. 

In other words, Democrats would rather not provide aid to Ukraine than to agree to the border policy changes the Republicans are demanding, and Republicans would rather not provide aid to Ukraine than to not get the border policy changes they think are necessary.  And Kyiv may wind up losing in the Senate’s game of chicken.
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Are We Going to Help Ukraine Win? Or Will We Quit Because It’s Too Hard or We Don’t Care Anymore?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “[t]he U.S. fears Iran is preparing to provide Russia with short-range ballistic missiles for its military campaign in Ukraine”.  At this point, we don’t know if Iran is going to do this, but every expectation is that Russia is planning on another winter of attacks on Ukraine’s cities and power plants; i.e., on its people, its women and children.  This past weekend, they hit Kyiv with the biggest drone attack since the war began.  The addition of Iranian ballistic missiles would only add to the danger.

The problem is that, while the United States, and other countries, have provided Ukraine with a lot, we haven’t provided them with enough weapons and with the right weapons to beat Russia and get this thing over with.  I understand the concern.  Russia has nuclear weapons, and Vladimir Putin has, at times, threatened to use them.  As Constance Stelzenmüller noted in last Wednesday’s Financial Times: “[H]ow can one not empathise with [Jake] Sullivan’s [, Biden’s National Security Adviser,] conviction that he has ‘an obligation to the American people’ to prevent escalatory scenarios?”¹