The COVID-19 pandemic was poised to define President Joe Biden’s administration, but two years into his term, foreign policy problems are looming large.
Now, after his deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, his judgment regarding international conundrums is being questioned again as Russian President Vladimir Putin launches a bloody war against neighbor Ukraine.
WHITE HOUSE PINS INFLATION BLAME ON RUSSIA-UKRAINE CRISIS
Events overseas, such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, have “thrown a wrench” into White House plans before, according to historian David Greenberg.
“Woodrow Wilson didn’t expect World War I. Lyndon Johnson was intent on realizing his Great Society when Vietnam intervened,” Greenberg told the Washington Examiner. “Biden is also discovering that world events demand his time and attention.”
His stalled Build Back Better agenda of $2 trillion in social welfare and climate spending aside, Biden was elected to return the country to some semblance of post-pandemic normal. And although many COVID-19 restrictions are still in place and the current 12-month inflation rate is at a record high of 7.5%, Putin announcing what he called a “special military operation” to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine is another test abroad that is distracting Biden from his onslaught of domestic challenges.
Even one of Biden’s biggest domestic political problems, the migrant surge at the border, has a large diplomatic and international component. Vice President Kamala Harris’s effort to address the “root causes” of migration has been widely panned.
Biden is “stuck with a bad hand” with Putin and Ukraine after his two predecessors scaled back U.S. global leadership, Greenberg contended.
“By acquiescing in the neo-isolationism of our times, Obama, Trump, and Biden himself helped create a climate in which Putin felt emboldened to invade,” Greenberg said of former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. “The question is whether it’s too late for Biden and our European allies to reinvigorate the sort of liberal internationalism that served America, Europe, and the rest of the world so well in the past.”
Putin’s attack on Ukraine, including an aerial assault near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, comes as Biden was beginning to regain his foothold at home thanks to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement. His nomination of the Supreme Court’s first black woman justice has preoccupied the political chattering class for the past month, instead of pundits focusing on his inability to unite congressional Democrats behind his legislative priorities.
Now critics are seizing on Biden’s decision to stagger the Russia sanctions and not target Putin’s finances directly. They have latched on to comments he made during an East Room address as well that downplayed the measures’ deterrent effects and the time frame in which they are anticipated to inflict economic pain.
“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said Thursday. “This is going to take time. And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them,” he added of Putin. “That’s what this is all about.”
“They are profound sanctions,” he continued. “Let’s have a conversation in another month or so to see if they’re working.”
Deputy national security adviser and Deputy National Economic Council Director Daleep Singh defended Biden’s Russia sanctions remarks shortly afterward. Singh predicted the measures would propel “an intensifying negative feedback loop in Russian markets.”
“This is going to atrophy Russia’s capacity to diversify outside of just oil and gas and to modernize the strategic sector that Putin himself has said he wants to develop,” he said.
Singh asserted, too, that severe Russia sanctions from the outset would have discouraged Putin from engaging in diplomacy. They could even have provided him with the rationale for war.
“Secondly, he could look at it as a sunk cost,” Singh said of Putin. “In other words, President Putin could think, ‘I’ve already paid the price. Why don’t I actually take what I paid for, which is Ukraine’s freedom?'”
Meanwhile, Republicans have amplified Obama-era Secretary of Defense Bob Gates ripping Biden’s global record despite the commander in chief being a self-proclaimed expert after years as the Senate’s committee chairman. Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
“Biden promised this wouldn’t happen — he promised a secure and peaceful world if elected president, specifically mentioning Russia,” Republican National Committee spokesman Tommy Pigott said. “However, the grim fact remains: When Biden was vice president, Putin annexed Crimea, and when Biden was president, Putin invaded Ukraine.”
Biden has not assisted himself by causing confusion over what specific Russian action against Ukraine would trigger a U.S. response.
“It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion,” he said last month.
Then senior administration officials were needled this week for their reticence to use the word “invasion” before Biden described Putin’s recognition of two Russian-backed separatist regions as independent as “the beginning” of an incursion.
The semantics disagreement, which occurred after the United States was scrutinized for terming a Russian offensive against Ukraine as “imminent,” is another example of Biden policy flip-flops.
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For example, Biden this week opted to sanction the CEO and corporate entity behind Nord Stream 2, a Germany-Russia gas pipeline that would have bypassed Ukraine and undercut its transit revenue.
