That silent blank stare, gnawing a fingernail, a roomful of journalist awaiting an answer from the President of the United States, any sign of intelligent engagement. This is the most telling picture yesterday of where the United States is headed in an engagement that could result in WW3. The United States is not Europe, the place and peoples that have the most to lose from whatever outcomes emerge in Ukraine and yet, short of miraculous events, the United States is or was the only deterrent left after Europe sold its soul to the gods of climate change, setting themselves up for energy blackmail. ‘What’s it to us’ now?
For several generations, as ‘leaders of the free world’ we accrued to ourselves numerous benefits and advantages that have been baked into our standard of living. Our time as a super-power is functionally over and with it, the material benefits that we accumulated along the way. We’re not undergoing a test of our resolve to help Ukraine, but rather, a test for our ability to back up the whole of Europe and beyond. Likely within a week, each of the sovereign nations around Ukraine will see their counterpart checkpoints occupied by Russian soldiers. The only variable after this is whether Putin waits or proceeds to a next country. He’s patient. He could easily sit in Ukraine and wait for the liberal governments of Europe to soften and waffle even more before his next move.
The mental function of Biden is a just as much a factor as Putin in the equation. As long as Biden sits in the Whitehouse, Europe has no further support; there is no strategic understanding or plan, no resolve of will. For NATO to function, it would have to be guided by a visionary leader. I don’t see one. Truth be told, in one day, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demonstrated far more courage and leadership than anything put up by NATO, the US, or Russia. This moment is the formal death of liberal world vision. Welcome back to what existed for much of history before that: brute force wins.
Our sanctions as presently construed will not stop the forceful expansion of Putin’s ambitions [the linked truth-telling article explains why]. Russia has been developing an alternate and fire-walled economy for years leading up to this. Sanctions will hurt but he now has alternatives. Biden has shown a knack for going through the motions of what needs to be done, days or weeks after it would have done any good. Other leaders begged him to act earlier. He didn’t. Metaphorically, he just sat there in arrogance, picking his teeth in silence, staring blankly at his peers.
I do see just two slim caveats: First, the limited sanctions against the entire Russian economy will inevitably fall short. If, however, sanctions or other ‘incentives’ are surgically precise enough to affect the players that might decide that Putin should be deposed, those would hold far greater leverage. The second is to not entirely write off the ability of the Ukrainian military to bog down the Russians in a guerrilla war. Short of this, by this time next week, Putin and Russia will be an existential threat to Europe, NATO and to the United States and not just a Ukrainian problem.