Miranda Devine: How Joe Biden’s ‘climate crazies’ emboldened Putin
US President Joe Biden’s kowtowing to fringe groups was a green light for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has showcased the self-indulgent follies of the West.
Whether it is climate policies which have made Europe dependent on Russian energy or woke-fying the US military, we are signing our own death warrant.
On climate alarm, Europe has been heading down the path to green oblivion for some time, but just two years ago America became energy independent for the first time.
In a salutary tale for resources-blessed Australia, all that changed when Joe Biden became president last January and immediately set about pleasing the climate crazies in his party and de-Trumpifying America’s energy policy to make it more like Europe’s.
On his first day in office, he rejoined the Paris climate agreement, cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline that was to bring in Canadian oil and dramatically increased the theoretical estimate for the cost of carbon dioxide emissions, aka the “social cost of carbon”, from $7 to $51 per ton.
A week later he banned new leases for oil and gas drilling and fracking on federal lands and waters and his “climate tsar”, John Kerry, declared with great excitement, in the middle of a pandemic, that “climate change is the most significant public health challenge of our time”.
Petrol prices at the pump have been rising ever since and have helped drive inflation to its highest point in 40 years.
High oil prices enriched Russia, the world’s second largest oil producer, and emboldened Vladimir Putin to take advantage of a weak US president and European nations beholden to him for a good chunk of their energy needs.
Now, under pressure to ban Russia’s oil imports, Biden is going cap in hand to Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia for oil, instead of attempting to regain energy independence by tapping into America’s plentiful oil and gas resources.
Hard as it is to believe, in the middle of Putin’s war, the Biden administration still is determined to restart the Iran nuclear deal - and Russians are helping with negotiations.
In a video posted on the Islamic Republic News Agency on Saturday, Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s envoy to the Iran nuclear talks, boasted that “Iran got much more than it could expect” in the Vienna negotiations with the US and Europe last week.
Russia and China teamed up to deliver Iran “more than frankly I expected, or others expected … Iranian colleagues are fighting for Iranian national interests like lions … They fight for every comma, every word.”
He added that “our Chinese friends also very efficient and useful as co-negotiators”.
Moscow also wants to align with Tehran, he said: “Russia and Iran are neighbours … [Iran] is a neighbour with whom we want to develop active trade and economic relations.
“On international arena in multilateral form, Russia and Iran are natural allies on a big number of different issues.”
So, there you have it.
Right under the nose of America, Russia is boasting about strengthening ties with Iran and China using the Iran nuclear deal which Biden has made his prime foreign-policy goal in the Middle East.
On Monday, China joined in the “up yours America” love fest. Foreign minister Wang Yi called Russia his country’s “most important strategic partner”, the Associated Press reported. Chinese ties with Moscow constitute “one of the most crucial bilateral relationships in the world”.
Now, Californians are now paying as much as $US7 a gallon for petrol - which is almost $AU2.50 per litre, a lot more than Australians pay, quite some turnaround. The rest of the country is fast catching up.
So, the Biden administration is trying to offload blame onto Russia for soaring inflation, despite the fact prices had increased for months before Ukraine, in large part due to Biden’s big spending policies.
Instead of acknowledging the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal last year was a flashing neon sign of America’s weakness under Biden, the Democrats are trying to blame Trump for Putin’s aggression.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, opined Democratic congressman Adam Schiff in Rolling Stone on Friday, “hammers home how despicable an act it was [for Trump] to treat Ukraine as a political plaything”.
But treating Ukraine as a political plaything has been a reckless Democrat obsession for a long time, not least when Schiff, the powerful chair of the House Intelligence Committee, led the impeachment of then President Trump over a phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky when he asked for dirt on Biden’s wayward son Hunter.
Do Democrats think Americans have forgotten Biden’s boast that he withheld $1 billion in aid from the Ukrainians unless they fired the prosecutor who was investigating Hunter’s oligarch boss at the corrupt energy company Burisma?
This was the scandal that Trump, in his clumsy fashion, was trying to get to the bottom of. He was impeached for pressing Zelinsky to look into Biden’s quid pro quo. But Biden’s bullying of Ukraine was far more sinister and consequential.
Trump got nothing. The Biden family got millions of dollars from Ukraine.
Biden was Obama’s point man in Ukraine when he was VP and often flew into Kyiv to deliver lectures about corruption, at the time his son was earning $83,333 a month on the Burisma board.
As he is wont to do, Biden made lots of empty promises to Ukraine, giving them the impression that joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation would be good for the country, not a fatal provocation to Putin.
Oxford historian Robert Service points to another provocation for Putin last year.
“It was the last straw,” when the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership on November 10, declaring America’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, Service told the Wall Street Journal last week. After that, Russia began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border.
Then, four days before Putin invaded Ukraine, US vice president Kamala Harris was dispatched to a security conference in Munich where she told the world’s media: “I appreciate and admire President Zelensky’s desire to join NATO”.
Biden spoke with Zelensky on Saturday night. The next day Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS that NATO members have the “green light” to send fighter jets to Ukraine.
This would be a major escalation, with Russia’s Defence Ministry warning that any countries hosting warplanes which attacked Russian forces “could be considered as those countries’ engagement in the military conflict”.
In comments widely interpreted as threatening a nuclear strike if NATO imposed a no-fly zone over Ukraine, Putin also warned of “colossal and catastrophic consequences not only for Europe but also the whole world”.
Frightening times.
But while Putin was preparing to recreate the Soviet empire, what was the US military doing? Forcing officers to undergo mandatory training on gender pronouns and how to offer soldiers sex change surgery, according to documents provided by a whistle-blower to the Washington Free Beacon.
No wonder Putin regards the West as so decadent and weak that he could stroll into Ukraine with impunity. The fact he met such fierce resistance is due to the courage of the Ukrainians, not fear of the West.
Miranda Devine is in New York to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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