By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
The Ukrainian military says it carried out its first long-range strike in a border region within Russian
territory with a U.S.-made ATACMS missile.
Ukraine has had the ATACMS missile systems since early
April. Once the Russians knew the Ukrainians had these longer-range (about 190
miles), more precise, more-powerful missiles, they moved some of their
equipment, planes, drones, etc. further back, out of the missiles’ range, to
Russian soil. But this redeployment had only a limited effect on Russia’s
overall ability to launch attacks against Ukrainians, both military and
civilian targets.
Since at least early September, Ukraine has sought permission to use
ATACMS and other long-range missiles against targets in Russian. Once again,
President Biden and his advisers initially denied the Ukrainian request,
deeming it too escalatory.
Nearly three months and at
minimum 432 Ukrainian civilian casualties later, Biden changed his mind on
the use of ATACMS after North Korea sent 10,000 troops to assist the Russian invasion.
To the extent this development was noticed in the West — which wasn’t
much — this was seen as another Russian escalation and globalization of the
war, although some of us noticed North Korean active-duty soldier “combat
engineers” had been deployed to Russian-occupied Donetsk back in June (second item in that day’s newsletter).
Some of us have been banging the drum about the Axis of the Devils (or other terms) for a long while now —
Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah; you could even
throw in Syria and Venezuela — they’re all on the same side, a loose
affiliation of anti-American, anti-Western cooperation and provocation. The
Biden approach to fighting the Russians through proxies while waiving sanctions on Iran is like trying to buddy up with
one or two vipers when you’ve fallen into a snake pit. While all those regimes
are distinct, they are united in their pursuit of a world where the U.S. and
the West are weakened to the point of impotence, and they can indulge their
territorially aggressive impulses with impunity.
Biden is terrified of doing anything that Moscow will
perceive as an escalation, while Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are high-fiving
and throwing more troops into the front.
I don’t love the Biden administration waiting until after
the election to make this move, or the announcement that “President Biden has
committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be
pushed out the door between now and January 20,” as secretary of state Antony Blinken put it on November 13.
First, all this stuff they’re sending is long overdue.
Second, it makes it look like these were long-planned moves that had to be
hidden from the electorate, lest they make people less inclined to vote for the
president’s party. An incumbent administration’s foreign policy and
decision-making after Election Day shouldn’t look all that different than it
looked before Election Day.
I am not convinced by the
MAGA crowd’s claims on social media that Biden is attempting to “massively
escalate” the war in order “to hand Trump the worst situation possible.” First,
even this move by Biden comes with strings attached: “A second U.S. official said that
Biden’s approval of ATACMS ‘is going to have a very specific and limited
effect’ on the battlefield, designed to limit concerns about escalation.”
Second, while ATACMS strikes against targets on Russian soil will help the
Ukrainians, they’re not likely to dramatically alter the status of the war.
“It has been a top priority of my Administration to
provide Ukraine with the support it needs to prevail,” President Joe Biden boasted on September 26. Ha!
As Elliot Ackerman put it, the Biden administration’s
approach to Ukraine’s request for weapons systems has been an agonizingly
destructive “slow yes.” The Ukrainian government asked the Biden
administration to send some ATACMS at the beginning of the war. Biden finally
agreed to send the ATACMS in September 2023. The Ukrainians asked for Abrams
tanks in September 2022. The U.S. belatedly agreed to send 31, and the last one
in the shipment arrived more than a year later, in October 2023. Biden publicly
promised the Ukrainians, “America is united in our support for your country. We
will stand with you as long as it takes,” and then a week later privately told the Ukrainians that U.S.
support would not last forever. The Biden team boasted that they authorized
Ukraine’s use U.S. weapons to strike targets within a limited portion of
Russian territory with “lightning speed,” and by “lightning speed,” they mean 17 days.
Biden and his administration’s officials keep telling us
that supporting Ukraine and countering Russian military aggression is
preeminent priority, with far-reaching consequences for the U.S. and our NATO
allies, not just Ukrainians. But they rarely act like it. It
is difficult to persuade the country that Ukraine is a major U.S.
foreign-policy and national-security priority when the president and vice
president (also the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee) act like it’s just
another issue on the agenda, requiring no particular urgency.
Biden can go weeks without mentioning Ukraine, or at
least without discussing it at any length or with any specificity. Part of this
is because the president is, according to Axios reporting, is
only “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on
weekdays. He’s a 30-hour-per-week commander in chief, and as CNN put it in 2022, “famously indecisive.” (Great trait
to have in a president, where the job is nothing but making decisions, huh?)
Biden doesn’t talk about Ukraine often, but there are a lot of topics Biden
doesn’t talk about often. And after moments like “minor incursion,” “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” and “Armageddon,” maybe Biden’s staff doesn’t want him speaking
off the cuff about an ongoing shooting war featuring a lot of American-made
weapons.
The result is that NATO has been in a proxy war with
Russia for nearly three years with an American president who can’t communicate
effectively. Who’s going to pick up the slack? Keir Starmer? (He’s the current
prime minister of the United Kingdom, for those who tuned out.) Olaf Scholz?
(He’s chancellor of Germany.) Emmanuel Macron of France?
(You know who’s really slacked on aid to Ukraine,
considering its GDP and resources? Canada. Ninth-largest economy in the world, ranks 14th in total aid, 21st in humanitarian support, 21st
in military support. I’d say Justin Trudeau’s face must be red with
embarrassment over those figures, but we all
know it’s hard to tell.)
Kamala Harris didn’t mention Ukraine at all in her first eleven speeches as a
presidential candidate this year. She mentioned it twice, in two sentences,
in her convention speech. When the topic of the war came up in the debate, Harris spoke as if the work of
defending Ukraine was largely complete: “Through the work that I and others did
we brought 50 countries together to support Ukraine in its righteous defense.
And because of our support, because of the air defense, the ammunition, the
artillery, the javelins, the Abrams tanks that we have provided, Ukraine stands
as an independent and free country.”
Eh, about 80 percent of it stands, under fire, as an
independent and free country for now, but it remains in the fight of its life.
Harris did some campaign events with prominent hawk Liz
Cheney, and so I suppose if you squint, you could argue that Harris was
campaigning on continued support for Ukraine. The Harris campaign and the
candidate didn’t want to bring up the issue of the war in Ukraine — as Dan
McLaughlin observed, her abortion, birth-control, IVF, and gay-rights-focused
campaign made her “the sex candidate.” Tim Walz certainly wasn’t on the ticket
for his foreign-policy acumen.
Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and in the
process knocked Ukraine onto the U.S. foreign-policy back burner.
In the end, the Democratic ticket wanted to the issue of
Ukraine to go away.
That’s probably Trump’s attitude, too, although it was
somewhat encouraging to hear that he warned Putin in a post-election phone call
not to escalate the war.
We probably won’t know Trump’s true plans regarding the
war until he’s in office; as a friend of mine observed, both former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson and current Hungarian prime minister/Putin lackey Viktor Orban believe
Donald Trump agrees with him on Ukraine.
Johnson recently appeared on French television and said that
Trump’s pledge to end the war within 24 hours was “just rhetoric. . . . I
wonder how a guy like Donald J. Trump can inaugurate his mandate with a
capitulation, a humiliation of the West, for NATO and for himself if he gives
Putin the chance to defeat Ukraine. . . . He has his ego, he has his pride. I
hope he’ll never accept being beaten by Putin.”
Finally, a lot of U.S. media organizations are saying this is the war’s “1,000th day.” But ask a Ukrainian, and
they’ll tell you the war really began back in 2014, with the military
occupation of Crimea.
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