Rebecca Grant, DC-based national security analyst, had some for President Joe Biden (D) vis-à-vis Russian President Vladimir Putin on the subject of the latter’s threatened invasion of Ukraine. The venue for that advice is the summit between the two men that occurred yesterday.
Grant is naively optimistic, though.
The 30-nation Euro-Atlantic alliance is primed to deter and counter rash Russian actions.
No, it’s not. Johnson is just posturing, and the UK, a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum (as is Russia), already has betrayed Ukraine by acquiescing to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine rather than enforcing the Memorandum. Beyond that, Germany is already in the bag for Russia, and France is carefully quiet.
America is already involved.
Indeed, we are. We’re also a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, and under the Obama-Biden administration, we’ve also betrayed Ukraine by declining to enforce that memorandum. Beyond that, ships in the Black Sea are ducks in a pond for any force on the shores.
Biden and NATO can do more to deter Putin. Start with immediate air exercises in Ukraine with US and NATO aircraft.
It’s a start, did Biden have the integrity and moral courage to do so, but more is needed, a yet sterner test of Biden’s…strength. Economic sanctions are insufficient and unlikely to be enacted, anyway. The more that’s actually needed is moving US (because we can’t count on a NATO whose European members won’t even honor their own commitments to fund and equip the alliance) troops into Poland, south toward Ukraine and north toward Kaliningrad, and moving US naval forces to within air strike range of Kaliningrad.
Grant closed her advice with this:
Heat up one tank engine and we’ll know about it.
Certainly. But what will Biden do about it? Grant opened her piece with this:
Ukraine’s borders are a parking lot for Russian tanks, trucks, and artillery ready for a three-pronged blitzkrieg.
Even after that first tank has lit off and crossed the border, that parking lot, for the next number of days, will remain a parking lot of targets. Von Moltke learned that problem in 1914, and even though Putin’s generals likely will have learned from that, the same or worse bottlenecks exist in western Russia and eastern Ukraine.
Biden is unlikely to do any of that, though. He got his marching orders from Putin via Colonial Pipeline, and he already has kowtowed to Putin via Nordstream 2.
Biden will only kowtow again.
In any event, we’ll be hearing, today and in the coming days, the claims of the two participants. We’ll learn empirically, in the coming weeks and months, the outcome of the summit.