What Now, Ukraine?

“…The Western alliance had clearly lost any power of deterrence by February 24, 2022. The catastrophic rout and flight from Afghanistan and utter abandonment of an embassy, and billions of dollars in sophisticated weaponry to the Taliban, suggested to the Russians that the current U.S. military had adopted different objectives from its once feared past. It appeared to some in Moscow that the Pentagon was starting to resemble former Soviet armies, where ideology trumped military preparedness and lethality.

Biden enhanced that impression in so many ways.

He slow-walked initial shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine.

He asked Putin to tell his hackers to be more selective in their attacks on U.S. targets and begged him to pump more oil as the United States cut its own production.

Biden sort of, kind of suggested that an American response would hinge on the size of the supposedly inevitable Russian invasion. And when the invasion began, he immediately pulled out U.S. diplomatic personnel and offered Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a ride out of his own country.

He lifted sanctions on the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And in perhaps the stupidest foreign policy move of his administration, Biden sought to suspend the EastMed natural gas pipeline project into Europe, organized jointly by U.S. allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel. Apparently, he felt that Europe did not need more natural gas or that Cyprus, Greece, and Israel were enemies not friends, or that high natural gas prices in Europe would incentivize more windmills and solar panels.

Biden was a key player as vice president in the disastrous Obama Administration “reset” and “hot mic” appeasement of Russia. All that led to the 2014 invasions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, to the dismantlement of U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe, and the Hunter Biden syndicate’s interference in corrupt Ukrainian politics to leverage millions of dollars into Biden family coffers…”