How Biden Made a Mess of Ukraine
He treated the conflict as a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien
Nearly three years in, the conflict is becoming ever more grotesque, and the number of war crimes keeps rising. The conflict has also become more global in nature, as Russia, by economic and military necessity, deepens its alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea. When Putin was gathering his invasion force in late 2021 and early 2022, the United States had good intelligence and tried to warn Ukraine about Russia’s plans. A far harder call was what would happen when an invasion began, and in that respect, the Biden administration didn’t understand what it was looking at. U.S. officials assumed that if Putin went ahead with his plans, Ukraine would stand no chance and the Russians would prevail in short order. Stung by the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan just months earlier, Biden reacted to the new crisis with self-pity: According to the journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, War, the president complained, “Jesus Christ! Now I’ve got to deal with Russia swallowing Ukraine?”
When the U.S. eventually got over its reservations and provided the requested systems, albeit in limited numbers, Putin always backed down. The standard Russian strategy was to downplay the arrival of the new equipment and go out of its way to assure the Russian public that it would make no difference in the war. And in fact, those Western weapons had significantly less impact than they would have if the U.S. had transferred them earlier and in greater quantity.
An inability to learn became a major, repeated failure of the Biden administration’s overall strategy toward Ukraine. Extreme caution about provoking Putin was perhaps understandable in early 2022. American defense planners had for years played numerous wargames that resulted in nuclear weapons being used if some imagined Russian redline was crossed. Both Woodward and The New York Times have reported that, as Ukraine was taking back territory in the fall of 2022, the Biden administration believed—based on intelligence that likely will never become public—that there was a 50 percent chance that Putin would use nuclear bombs. Even so, the administration should have adjusted its thinking after Russia’s military weakness and its tendency to bluff on nuclear matters became clear.
The war has now gone on so long that Biden won’t figure in its ending. Ukrainians can still fight on with Europe’s help. Perhaps President-Elect Donald Trump will confound his allies and detractors alike by standing with Ukraine instead of indulging Putin. What’s clear is that Biden missed the moment. The administration has dithered, looking more and more powerless as Ukraine has suffered and as an emergent anti-Western alliance that includes Iran, North Korea, and China has come to Russia’s aid. Biden could have helped create a better, more secure world than the one that existed in February 2022. Instead, he’s ushered in a much more dangerous one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/biden-ukraine-policy-failures/680834/