US president Joe Biden’s state of the union address on Tuesday night captured the weird mood of triumphalism that has gripped the West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week. As Ukrainians were being slaughtered by the invading Russians, the American president chose the moment to take an improbable victory lap for his diplomacy.
He told an audience of cheering, Ukrainian flag-wearing members of Congress how, over the last few months, he had “spent countless hours unifying our European allies”. Now, he said, those efforts were bearing fruit in a concerted barrage of economic and political sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“In the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.”
To be fair, the president spent only ten minutes of his 65-minute address talking about the first large-scale land war in Europe since 1945, before moving on to topics more important for his like-minded progressive ideologues, such as tax credits to weatherise homes and measures to end the supposed persecution of transgender Americans.
What Biden didn’t say
But those ten minutes were more than enough. Biden did not pledge to do what was necessary to roll back Putin’s aggression. He did not explain what the US and its allies expect to achieve in the coming weeks — and at what cost. Instead he just offered a sunny assurance that, in the end, thanks to American-led sanctions and the brave resistance of the Ukrainian people, everything would work out fine. “When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.”
I wish I could be as certain of future history as the president, but forgive me if I decline to join the celebrations for the unexpected outbreak of unity and purpose the West has shown in the last week.
While the belated acknowledgment of the threat that Russia poses and the scale of the measures announced so far are surely welcome, we need to be clear about what Putin’s war represents: a colossal failure of leadership by the United States, a failure that might be eclipsed only by the reckless fecklessness of Europeans.
There’s something nauseating about how, having watched as Russia did exactly what it had threatened to do, we now sit back and bless those brave Ukrainians for doing the fighting and dying for freedom, while we applaud ourselves for having the fortitude to tolerate higher oil prices, lost Russian buyers for Gucci handbags and a period of uncertainty for Chelsea football club.
For the last year the objective of policy of the US and its allies towards Russia has been deterrence. The aim of deterrence is to stop someone from doing something; if they go ahead and do the thing you were supposed to be deterring, it means your policy has failed. It’s not cause for celebration.
Putin showed his intentions
And why exactly did it fail? Because there was never any credibility to it.
Say what you will about Putin but if he had been standing at the podium of the United Nations for the last few years waving semaphore flags he could not have signalled his intentions any more clearly. If we had spent as much time listening to the revanchist threats of a territorially ambitious autocrat with nuclear weapons as we did to the holy rage of a secular girl-saint from Sweden, we might have avoided the carnage we see in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
The escalating violations are so familiar we can recite them by rote: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Donbas, Syria. The West’s response to each was narrow economic self-interest dressed up in wishful pacifism.
One of the Biden administration’s first acts on taking office was to remove sanctions that had been planned over Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline that funds Russia’s ambitions. Last July Putin laid out his theory that Russians and Ukrainians belong together. A few weeks later, Biden executed a chaotic retreat of American forces from Afghanistan, indicating precisely how much military commitment to the cause of freedom he was willing to make.
In case there was any lingering uncertainty in the Russian leader’s mind, Biden then said in December, as Russian troops were massing on the Ukraine border, that there would be no US military response. As Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, told me just before the invasion, publicly taking military options completely off the table was a mistake.
“Nobody really believes the US is going to go to war with Russia over Ukraine, but there are things we could do militarily,” Rice said. “For instance, we used destroyers in the Black Sea during the previous crisis over Ukraine. There are things you can do.” (By the way, those loud Donald Trump supporters who crow that Putin did not attack during their man’s presidency might want to ask themselves whether that might have been because he believed he would get exactly what he wanted without needing to resort to force.)
Now we are supposed to be shocked that Putin has invaded, and to explain away our own failure we speculate that it must be because the Russian leader has gone mad. On the contrary, in the face of such clear evidence Putin’s behaviour is the cold-eyed rationalism of a serial and opportunistic killer.
The accusation from some on the right is that it was our fault for pushing NATO too far east after the Cold War. The opposite is true. We encouraged Ukrainians to believe they belonged with the West but without having the guts to put our resources — or EU or NATO membership — where our mouths were.
Perhaps Biden’s confident assurances will be right. Perhaps Ukraine will be Putin’s Waterloo. We can hope. But you’d have thought by now we would have stopped letting our hopes triumph over our experience.
The Times
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