What Happens Now That Putin Has Crossed Biden’s Navalny Red Line?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 16, 2024

 

It was in June of 2021 that Joe Biden promised that the “consequences” if opposition figure Alexi Navalny died in Vladimir Putin’s custody “would be devastating for Russia.” Biden didn’t qualify his statement. Rightly enough, he made no bones about how Russia’s foremost opposition figure would have to succumb to trigger an American response. Only that Moscow must take the utmost care of Navalny while he was in their custody, or else. Well, on Friday, following several years of imprisonment, mistreatment, and conspicuous poisonings, Russian authorities revealed that Navalny had mysteriously died. So, now what?

 

There aren’t many tools available to the president to increase the pressure on Russia to which he hasn’t already appealed. As recently as December, the administration tightened the sanctions regime around Moscow by applying additional leverage on third parties “supplying goods or processing transactions that materially support Russia’s military industrial base.” Perhaps the administration could augment efforts to police restrictions on foreign financial transactions involving Russian funds and impose additional costs on institutions that try to circumvent U.S. sanctions. As Seth Cropsey posited last year following Russia’s violation of an agreement that allowed Ukraine to export grain abroad through its Black Sea ports, the president could employ additional measures along with its allies to imperil Russia’s Black Sea fleet and, in concert with Turkey, menace Russian forces in Syria. But those are riskier propositions.

 

Of course, the United States could redouble its commitment to support Ukraine’s defense against unprovoked Russian aggression, but that ball is now in Congress’s court. A Senate-passed bill that would replenish U.S. ordnance stocks and provide Ukraine funds to purchase American ordnance for use in the American platforms already active in Ukraine languishes in the House. On Friday, lawmakers revealed an alternative, slightly slimmer proposal to shore up America’s embattled partners abroad while also strengthening border protections. But even if something like that legislation meets with the approval of a divided Congress, it will not find its way to the president’s desk with due alacrity.

 

Congressional lethargy might provide Biden with a facially plausible way to explain his own inaction, but federal lawmakers didn’t draw a line in the sand. Biden did. Like Barack Obama before him, Biden can attempt to weasel his way out of his own commitments for the benefit of a domestic audience, but America’s adversaries abroad will see only presidential weakness. Neither Congress nor Putin put Joe Biden in his current unenviable position. The president pushed his own chips in on the bet that rhetorical toughness would stay the Russian autocrat’s hand. It didn’t. Now Biden must follow through, somehow, lest he further degrade America’s already strained credibility.