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| The White House / Flickr |
The time for pressuring Putin and imposing sanctions to deter Moscow’s designs on Ukraine has passed, and Biden is entirely to blame.
It’s hard to imagine a weaker, more impotent response to Moscow’s move against Ukraine than what the Biden administration announced Monday evening: an executive order imposing limited sanctions on two separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. The sanctions are a response to the Kremlin’s decision Monday to recognize these rebel-held regions as independent states. Early Tuesday morning, Russia deployed troops to these areas, calling them “peacekeepers.”
In a statement, the White House said the sanctions on Donetsk and Luhansk are separate from the “swift and severe economic measures” it would impose on Moscow, “should Russia further invade Ukraine.”
I’m sure Vladimir Putin is quaking in his boots. No further invasions, sir! That’s quite far enough.
More than anything, these incredibly unimportant sanctions from President Joe Biden underscore how the entire humiliating Ukraine crisis is a direct result of Biden’s weak foreign policy and feckless appeasement of Russia over the past year. A robust policy of deterrence, like maintaining the Trump administration’s sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Biden waived last May, might have prevented the crisis. --->READ MORE HERE
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| The White House / Flickr |
When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
Colonel Sloman’s Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of the L.S.E.?
Philip Larkin wrote this little couplet in a letter to a friend in May 1969, not long after seeing those very tanks roll into Czechoslovakia, decrying the fact that the British expenditure on education had surpassed the budget for national defense. It is perhaps less well known than “Homage to a Government,” which you may have read before, in which the government’s argument for bringing troops home is reduced to: “We want the money for ourselves at home/Instead of working.” Larkin made a distinction about the point of that poem that is important in context:
That poem [“Homage to a Government”] has been quoted in several books as a kind of symbol of the British withdrawal from a world role. I don’t mind troops being brought home if we’d decided this was the best thing all around, but to bring them home simply because we couldn’t afford to keep them there seemed a dreadful humiliation.
What is happening in Ukraine is indeed humiliating, and humiliating for a host of reasons and parties involved, but it is at the moment most humiliating for the L.S.E. school of foreign affairs represented by the likes of Jake Sullivan and the J.V. team of policy handlers who seemed to learn nothing from the red line experience in Syria. Their policy of deterrence seemed based on the idea that one can wait and wait and wait, without understanding the lesson that deterrence must come in advance of such movement, before the goal is obtained.
The timing of this move — coming as it does after the Olympics, and with the tacit approval of China — was also obvious. So steps should have been taken, in advance, to project strong deterrence if we as a nation and our allies in Europe didn’t want to see this happen. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories:
+++++4 Reasons Why Americans Should Care About the Situation in Ukraine+++++
Biden Reverses Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Waiver, Reverts To Trump's Sanction Policy
Watch: Biden in 2001 Praises Putin for Embracing the West, Compares Him to Peter the Great
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