As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, President Joe Biden has authorized up to 8,500 troops that can be deployed to assist possible NATO actions if the Russians invade Ukraine. Russia now has more than 100,000 troops amassed at their shared border, and U.S. military leaders have concluded Russia is now capable of invading Ukraine with “very, very little warning.”
To understand how we got here, we must examine the decisions Biden made that emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin. On his first day in office, Joe Biden signed an executive order to end the Keystone XL pipeline. While touted as a response to climate change, Biden’s executive order strengthened Putin’s hand, cutting off critical access to North American oil sources and potentially forcing the United States to import more crude oil from Russia and Venezuela. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Union imported sixty percent of its energy resources – including a third of its natural gas, coal, and other fossil fuels. Russia provided the largest share of these imports. President Donald Trump, recognizing the geopolitical risk of Europe’s growing dependence on Russian energy, imposed sanctions to block further construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The pipeline would allow Russia to double the volume of natural gas flowing directly to Germany and bypass an existing route through Ukraine. As the Wall Street Journal put it last July, “Rendering the existing pipeline superfluous could offer Russia a freer military hand on Ukrainian territory, Ukraine advocates fear.” But once Biden took office, he lifted the Nord Stream 2 sanctions.
Biden’s reign of weakness was most apparent to Putin (and Xi Jinping in China) in our disastrous flight from Afghanistan, gifting billions of dollars in U.S. weapons and Bagram Airfield to our Taliban enemies and fleeing Bagram in the dead of night. Among the results: our adversaries smell timidity and incompetence; our allies wonder if we will stand by our commitments to them.
I’m not going to suggest that our challenges with Ukraine and Russia began with President Biden’s inauguration. Russia is a militarily powerful nation whose adversarial relationship with what is now Ukraine goes back some 400 years, long before Ukraine won its independence from the faltering Soviet Union in 1991. My position is clear. On a Congressional trip to Ukraine in December, my colleagues and I met with the Ukrainian defense minister and other officials. The U.S. delegation condemned Russia’s provocative troop buildup on Ukraine’s border, and we expressed our continued support for aiding the defense capabilities of the Ukrainian military.
Biden’s policies have emboldened Putin, and Biden’s words have exacerbated the situation. Last June, while in Putin’s European backyard, Biden identified “global warming” as “the greatest threat facing America.” Last month, he told reporters that if Russia’s military conducts only “a minor incursion” into Ukraine, rather than a full invasion, NATO nations would be divided over how to respond. What signals do Biden’s words send to Putin? Many of the Biden Administration’s problems, in Ukraine, and elsewhere, stem from a consistent failure to consider the downstream effects of its policies. Biden wages war on domestic energy sources, such as closing the Keystone XL pipeline, then faces roaring inflation and must beg OPEC to pump more oil. He green-lights the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that weakens Ukraine’s economy and regional leverage, then faces a Russian troop buildup on Ukraine’s border. The list goes on. Perhaps we need less fundamental transformation, and more basic competence.
