By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January
24, 2022
While most of the country was enjoying the
wild ending to the Bills–Chiefs game, an unnamed “senior State Department
official” was offering a briefing with a thoroughly depressing sense of déjà
vu, explaining that the U.S. was evacuating the family members of American
diplomats from Kiev, Ukraine, and urging all
other Americans to leave the country:
First, as
you know, we’ve authorized the departure of some U.S. Government employees,
while we have ordered the departure of all family members of U.S. Government
employees at our embassy in Kyiv. The State Department has also elevated our
Travel Advisory for Ukraine to Level Four — Do Not Travel due to the increased
threat of Russian military action. I would note that the Travel Advisory was
already at Level Four — Do Not Travel due to COVID-19. These decisions were
made out of an abundance of caution due to continued Russian efforts to
destabilize the country and undermine the security of Ukrainian citizens and
others visiting or residing in Ukraine. We have no higher priority than the
safety and security of U.S. citizens, and this includes our U.S. Government
personnel and their dependents, and the security of our facilities overseas.
Why did we
make this decision now? Do we believe a Russian invasion is imminent? As
President Biden has said, military action by Russia could come at any
time. The United States Government will not be in a position to
evacuate U.S. citizens in such a contingency, so U.S. citizens
currently present in Ukraine should plan accordingly, including by availing
themselves of commercial options should they choose to leave the country.
A second senior State Department official,
representing the Bureau of Consular Affairs, added that, “Our recommendation to
U.S. citizens currently in Ukraine is that they should consider departing now
using commercial or privately available transportation options.”
The U.S. has a “Smart Traveler Enrollment
Program” that makes a traveler’s whereabouts known in case it is necessary for
a consular officer to contact the traveler in an emergency. When asked how many
Americans were in the country, the Bureau of Consular Affairs officer
responded, “U.S. citizens aren’t required to register with us, and so it’s not
a number that we are able to share because we don’t have a solid number, and
it’s not helpful to share estimated numbers with you. So unfortunately, I’m not
going to be able to give you a solid number.”
The U.S. has an embassy in Kiev, but no
consulates. The embassy is estimated to have roughly 180 staffers.
This is the second evacuation of a U.S.
embassy and declaration that the U.S. cannot guarantee the safety of U.S.
citizens in a foreign country in about six months. It is easy to envision a
rerun of the post-Afghan-withdrawal debate, where defenders of the
administration contend that any American still in the country deserves their
fate because they ignored the government’s warnings to leave.
Batten Down the Hatches; Some Serious
Cyberwarfare Could Be Coming
No one knows what Vladimir Putin wants to
do; many Russian experts think Putin might reconquer the eastern,
more-Russian-speaking provinces (oblasts) of Ukraine and call it a day. But Ukraine actually has the second-
or third-largest military in Europe, depending on how you count. (Russia’s is the largest, by a wide
margin.) Knocking out the Ukrainian command-and-control systems is going to be
a high priority for the Russian forces. And if the shooting starts, it won’t be
healthy to be standing outside the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense building, the
offices of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, the National
Defense University, or the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine. Depending
upon the reliability and precision of Russian weapons, it may not be safe to be
anywhere in Kiev.
Another reason it may be unhealthy to be
an American — or anyone else — in Kiev in the not-too-distant future is that
the whole country is likely to be hit with Russian cyberattacks, and it is anyone’s guess as to what
gets knocked out and for how long:
In 2007,
Estonia was the target of a large-scale cyberattack, which most observers
blamed on Russia. Estonian targets ranged from online banking and media outlets
to government websites and email services.
Shortly
thereafter, Russia again employed DDoS attacks during its August 2008 war with
Georgia. Although Russia denied responsibility, Georgia was the victim of a
largescale cyberattack that corresponded with Russian military actions.
Analysts identified 54 potential targets, (e.g., government, financial, and
media outlets), including the National Bank of Georgia, which suspended all
electronic operations for 12 days.
Russian
hackers have knocked out the power in Ukraine several times before. Now picture the power going
out, natural gas not flowing to heat homes, bank systems shutting down and ATMs
not working, making the entire economy dependent upon
cash because credit cards would no longer work. And that’s before Russia
goes to work on the air-traffic-control system, the rail system, hospital records and computer systems, pharmacies . . . Chernobyl’s
radiation-monitoring system.
All while Russian forces are advancing
from the east, and bombs are falling from the sky.
More U.S. Forces Headed to Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania?
The somewhat good news is that our
somnambulant president, who spent his first year in office strutting around and
boasting that “America is back!” might just be realizing that he’s about to
oversee the second American foreign-policy disaster in six months and is belatedly
realizing that Vladimir Putin has no interest in “stability” and will not be
deterred by speeches:
After
years of tiptoeing around the question of how much military support to provide
to Ukraine, for fear of provoking Russia, Biden officials have recently warned
that the United States could throw
its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Mr. Putin invade Ukraine.
And the
deployment of thousands of additional American troops to NATO’s eastern flank,
which includes Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Biden administration officials
said, is exactly the scenario that Mr. Putin has wanted to avoid, as he has
seen the western military alliance creep closer and closer to Russia’s own
border.
More U.S. troops in Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania will likely deter any Russian aggression toward those countries. But,
based on the current trajectory, that decision will likely be too late for
Ukraine — one more country that believed its relationship with the United
States would protect it from aggression and learned the hard way that whether
this country keeps its promises depends upon the decisions of the commander in
chief.
Look back to
Joe Biden’s foreign-policy address in July 2019:
We are
facing enemies — both without and within — hoping to exploit the fissures in
our society, undermine our democracy, break up our alliances, and return us to
an international system where might determines right.
The answer
to this threat is more openness — not less. More friendships, more cooperation,
more alliances. More democracy.
Vladimir
Putin wants to tell himself and anyone he can dupe into believing him that the
liberal idea is “obsolete” — because he’s afraid of its power.
No army on
earth can match — how the Electric Idea of Liberty — passes freely from person
to person, jumps borders, transcends languages and cultures — how it can
supercharge communities of ordinary citizens into activists and organizers and
change agents.
We must
once more harness that power and rally the Free World to meet the challenges
facing our world today. And it falls to the United States of America to lead
the way.
No other
nation has the capacity. No other nation is built on that idea – that promise.
And it’s
in our self-interest.
We have to
champion liberty and democracy. We have to reclaim our credibility.
In retrospect, Biden’s campaign-trail
vision for U.S. foreign policy amounted to a whole bunch of pretty words that
didn’t mean much. Once in office, Biden flinched on punishing Saudi crown
prince Mohammed bin Salman. He gave up on blocking the Nord Stream 2
pipeline, which strengthened Putin’s leverage over Europe. When push comes to
shove with Xi Jinping, the Biden administration backs down in the name of
“stability.” And the administration keeps letting the Iranians metaphorically
urinate on U.S. shoes while it’s inviting them to further negotiations about
their nuclear program.
And of course, we saw how Afghanistan
turned out. After ISIS killed 13 American servicemen, Biden stood before the
country and pledged, “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone
who wishes America harm, know this — we will not forgive. We will not forget.
We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
ISIS has yet to pay any price. Those were
just words on a teleprompter; they didn’t really mean anything.
And Vladimir Putin was watching.
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