What Biden’s Done Right with Ukraine

[homersapien 11,431]

19 hours ago, autigeremt said:

Neither do the Democrats so stop while you are "ahead"... Recognizing the rule of law is foreign to the political class until they need it to advance an agenda. 

Example?

[TexasTiger 13,004]

“

Joe Biden hasn’t received the full credit he deserves for his statecraft during this crisis, because he has pursued a policy of self-effacement. Rather than touting his accomplishments in mobilizing a unified global response to the invasion, he has portrayed the stringent sanctions as the triumph of an alliance. By carefully limiting his own public role—and letting France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz take turns as the lead faces of NATO—he has left Vladimir Putin with little opportunity to portray the conflict as a standoff with the United States, a narrative that the Russian leader would clearly prefer. He’s shown how to wield American leadership in the face of deep European ambivalence about its exercise.”

“His handling of the domestic politics of the crisis has been just as savvy. Although he could justifiably have portrayed Republicans as the party of Putin apologists, he refrained from dinging his political enemies. During his State of the Union address, he actively encouraged Republicans to feel as if they were his partners in a popular front.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/biden-answered-3-am-call/626976/?utm_source=msn

[icanthearyou 4,463]

16 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

“

Joe Biden hasn’t received the full credit he deserves for his statecraft during this crisis, because he has pursued a policy of self-effacement. Rather than touting his accomplishments in mobilizing a unified global response to the invasion, he has portrayed the stringent sanctions as the triumph of an alliance. By carefully limiting his own public role—and letting France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz take turns as the lead faces of NATO—he has left Vladimir Putin with little opportunity to portray the conflict as a standoff with the United States, a narrative that the Russian leader would clearly prefer. He’s shown how to wield American leadership in the face of deep European ambivalence about its exercise.”

“His handling of the domestic politics of the crisis has been just as savvy. Although he could justifiably have portrayed Republicans as the party of Putin apologists, he refrained from dinging his political enemies. During his State of the Union address, he actively encouraged Republicans to feel as if they were his partners in a popular front.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/biden-answered-3-am-call/626976/?utm_source=msn

I don't think he gets enough credit for getting out of Afghanistan as quickly as he did.  The slow play would have almost certainly resulted in more lost lives and, a higher financial cost.

Edited March 9, 2022 by icanthearyou

[AUFAN78 3,926]

3 minutes ago, icanthearyou said:

I don't think he deserves enough credit for getting out of Afghanistan as quickly as he did.  The slow play would have almost certainly resulted in more lost lives and, a higher financial cost.

Swiftness, slow play wasn't the issue. The catastrophic withdrawal is ultimately why he is criticized. Politics aside, the criticism was appropriate and notably bi-partisan. 

[autigeremt 6,666]

On 3/5/2022 at 10:47 AM, homersapien said:

Example?

I don't have enough time...and you know I'm right or you continue to dunk the head in the sand for the sake of the left. 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

On 2/26/2022 at 7:13 PM, TexasTiger said:

 

The oversimplified critique is that Putin invaded Ukraine on Biden’s watch so he must be to blame or it wouldn’t have happened had Trump been if office. Of course, there’s no evidence it wouldn’t happen if Trump had been in office.

 

Do you have any meaningful argument(s) that this would’ve happened under Trump? 

[homersapien 11,431]

On 3/12/2022 at 5:20 PM, NolaAuTiger said:

Do you have any meaningful argument(s) that this would’ve happened under Trump? 

Do you have any meaningful argument(s) that Trump would have responded as forcefully as Biden has with sanctions, military aid and diplomacy? 

Any indications from prior Trump behavior suggesting that?

Edited March 14, 2022 by homersapien

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

5 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Do you have any evidence that Trump would have responded as forcefully as Biden has with sanctions, military aid and diplomacy? 

Any indications from prior Trump behavior suggesting that?

A “no” in response to my question would’ve been much more straightforward than the above deflection.

P.s. - hope all is well brother Homer, and I’ll do my best to keep with the forums.

[TexasTiger 13,004]

9 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

Do you have any meaningful argument(s) that this would’ve happened under Trump? 

Putin wanted to do it. He’s undeterred by what the West thinks. What did Trump ever meaningfully do to indicate he would have taken military action to stop Putin? What did Trump ever do to show he could rally NATO? His own sec of defense says Trump told him he’d withdraw from NATO after being re-elected. Trump won’t even critique Putin now. Called the invasion “brilliant.”

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

1 minute ago, TexasTiger said:

Putin wanted to do it. He’s undeterred by what the West thinks. What did Trump ever meaningfully do to indicate he would have taken military action to stop Putin? What did Trump ever do to show he could rally NATO? His own sec of defense says Trump told him he’d withdraw from NATO after being re-elected. Trump won’t even critique Putin now. Called the invasion “brilliant.”

Can you water it down for me more? And why didn’t Putin invade Ukraine when Trump was in office in your opinion? I am interested in your assessment.

[TexasTiger 13,004]

1 minute ago, NolaAuTiger said:

Can you water it down for me more? And why didn’t Putin invade Ukraine when Trump was in office in your opinion? I am interested in your assessment.

Trump was actively weakening the NATO alliance— why not let that continue before pulling the trigger? If the US left NATO think how little threat to Putin it would be?

Okay— I’ve answered you — tell me, do you think Putin leaves Ukraine alone during a second Trump term? If so, on what evidence would you base your argument?

[homersapien 11,431]

11 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

A “no” in response to my question would’ve been much more straightforward than the above deflection.

P.s. - hope all is well brother Homer, and I’ll do my best to keep with the forums.

I seriously doubt a "no" would have sufficed. 

No "deflection" intended.  It was clearly a hypothetical question which I felt begged a hypothetical response.

(And I trust you have better things to do than keep up with the forums.)

 

 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

On 3/12/2022 at 4:46 PM, TexasTiger said:

Trump was actively weakening the NATO alliance— why not let that continue before pulling the trigger? If the US left NATO think how little threat to Putin it would be?

Okay— I’ve answered you — tell me, do you think Putin leaves Ukraine alone during a second Trump term? If so, on what evidence would you base your argument?

Now that he has already invaded them? I honestly don’t know. 

[SaltyTiger 7,854]

On 3/13/2022 at 8:02 PM, NolaAuTiger said:

Now that he has already invaded them? I honestly don’t know. 

Interesting article. Don’t know what to think but Biden’s to deal with now.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/14/biden-support-ukraine-russia-trump-00016882

Trump and his allies have argued that none of the current conflict would have taken place had he been in office, resting their case on the fact that Putin both got along with Trump and feared his unpredictability. Those close to the former president believe that if Trump had been allowed to bring Russia closer into the global fold — he wanted Moscow allowed back into the G-7, returning it to the G8 — that would have quelled Putin’s ambitions. And they assert, without evidence, that Putin would have dared not defy Trump.

But the Biden administration sees it as just the opposite. It has been unsparing in its assessment that Putin was emboldened after watching Trump strain relations with fellow democracies, threaten to leave NATO and largely let Moscow’s malfeasance go unchallenged. Stavridis, who spent four years as the NATO commander in Europe, said Putin also likely misjudged the United States’ willingness to engage on the world stage after two years of being battered and distracted by Covid-19 while still grappling with the divisions that Trump fostered.

[SaltyTiger 7,854]

On 3/12/2022 at 4:46 PM, TexasTiger said:

Okay— I’ve answered you — tell me, do you think Putin leaves Ukraine alone during a second Trump term? If so, on what evidence would you base your argument?

Are you saying second term in 2024 or if he had succeeded in 2020? Asking because this thing could continue for years from my understanding.

[TexasTiger 13,004]

1 hour ago, SaltyTiger said:

Are you saying second term in 2024 or if he had succeeded in 2020? Asking because this thing could continue for years from my understanding.

Had there been a second term starting in 2021.

[homersapien 11,431]

Regarding the MAGA argument that this wouldn't have happened under Trump, here's a perspective of someone who was actually "in the room":

 

John Bolton’s crusade to debunk Trump’s revisionist history on Russia and Ukraine

By Aaron Blake, 3-15-22

When former president Donald Trump hasn’t been praising Vladimir Putin’s strategic savvy in invading Ukraine or conspicuously and repeatedly declining to morally judge Putin for it, he’s generally fallen back on one big talking point: that this wouldn’t have happened if he were still in charge.

It carries the benefit of both being plausible to the legions of Trump supporters who have believed far-less-plausible things involving Trump, as well as being largely unfalsifiable.

And yet all along, one of his top former foreign policy aides has sought — with increasing gusto — to make sure this claim doesn’t go unchallenged.

Yes, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has turned on Trump like many others in Trump’s inner orbit have. His version of events is therefore understandably uncharitable. But if there were one thing that would seemingly earn the gratitude of an uber-hawk like Bolton, pretty high on that list would be Trump’s supposed success in keeping Putin in check.

Bolton has now said repeatedly that this simply isn’t how it went down. And he’s made quite the opposite case: that Putin didn’t do stuff like this during Trump’s presidency because Trump was already doing the work for him — specifically, by undermining NATO. And it’s a case that tracks with plenty of what we already knew, even as few Trump allies-turned-critics have seen fit to weigh in publicly of late.

“Donald Trump cared one thing about Ukraine, which was how does it affect his political future? And I can say that every other senior national security adviser–Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper at Defense– all of us felt that we needed to bolster Ukraine security, and were appalled at what Trump was doing… In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.” – John Bolton (Washington Post Live)

In late February, Bolton appeared on Trump-friendly Newsmax and told a host who was pushing the Trump line that it was “just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”

“In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard,” Bolton retorted when the host suggested that it was unthinkable that Trump would’ve handled the situation worse than President Biden has. Bolton added that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was.”

He would add later that Trump only cared about Ukraine insofar as it impacted him politically. (That’s a statement that certainly tracks with Trump’s attempts to withhold aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to try to get Ukraine to launch a politically expeditious — for Trump — investigation of Hunter Biden. Republicans have pointed out that Trump ultimately released the aid, but he only did so when the gambit became untenable.)

In a pair of interviews over the past week, Bolton has expounded.

Last week on Sirius XM, Bolton told host Julie Mason that Putin didn’t need to act against Ukraine because Trump was presenting him with another route: the dismantling of NATO.

“I think one of the reasons that Putin did not move during Trump’s term in office was he saw the president’s hostility of NATO,” Bolton said, adding: “Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him, and thought, maybe in a second term, Trump would make good on his desire to get out of NATO, and then it would just ease Putin’s path just that much more.”

Bolton then went even further in an interview on Bill Press’s podcast Monday.

Asked whether we should believe this wouldn’t have happened on Trump’s watch, Bolton said, “Certainly not.” Bolton added that, in a second term unencumbered by future electoral considerations, Trump would’ve been even more freed up to potentially take the United States out of NATO.

“And so Putin would’ve gotten what he wanted in Ukraine for a lot lower price than he’s paying now,” Bolton said.

Then Bolton added, in perhaps his most unvarnished comment to date: “The Leninist phrase is ‘useful idiot,’ and they haven’t forgotten that in Moscow.”

Exactly whether and how much Trump ultimately weakened NATO during his term is a reasonable topic of debate. NATO funding did increase during Trump’s presidency — something he was keen to take credit for as he attacked allies for not ponying up — but it did so on a trajectory similar to the one that predated Trump’s presidency. (The turning point for this was Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.) What’s more, most of the administration’s biggest moves to counter Russia did indeed come over Trump’s objections.

But Bolton’s claim that NATO faced highly uncertain prospects in a second Trump term — and even a possible U.S. exit — is one backed up by years of reporting.

In their book last summer, Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that Trump privately indicated that he planned to pull out in a second term. Advisers cautioned him against doing so in his first term, to which Trump replied, “Yeah, the second term. We’ll do it in the second term.”

Former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly also told people that stopping Trump from ditching NATO was one of his most difficult tasks, according to a 2020 book by the New York Times’s Michael S. Schmidt.

And even setting aside NATO, Bolton argues that Trump’s attempts to leverage Ukraine had a lasting impact on preparedness for just such a situation as we now find ourselves in.

“From the summer of 2019 forward … Ukraine was the subject of debate in American politics and had no chance whatever to establish a normal bilateral relationship that could build confidence in Ukraine, and show the Russians that our relations were growing closer and that we very much had Ukraine’s security in mind,” Bolton said Monday.

Bolton said, as he did in a previous interview with Vice News, that this in some ways greased the skids — that “it was one of the reasons Putin didn’t think that we were ready.”

You can mine the comments of many of Trump’s friends-turned-foes for half-measures and ulterior motives. But in contrast to many others and those like Kelly who have chosen to remain largely quiet these days — to play this off as the largely inconsequential rantings of a president out of power — Bolton isn’t mincing words here. And he has long made clear the one thing that motivates him, perhaps above anything else, is combating the likes of Russia. That he would so forcefully and repeatedly take exception to this Trump talking point would seem to say plenty about what it really looked like behind the scenes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/15/john-boltons-crusade-debunk-trumps-revisionist-history-russia-ukraine/

 

 

Thank God - and the majority of American voters - Trump is not POTUS today.

 

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by homersapien

[I_M4_AU 7,958]

Anybody remember this?

WASHINGTON — Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials.

By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital. President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/us/politics/afghanistan-biden-administration.html

And after the evacuation was complete:

Biden administration officials consistently believed they had the luxury of time. Military commanders overestimated the will of the Afghan forces to fight for their own country and underestimated how much the American withdrawal would destroy their confidence. The administration put too much faith in President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul as it fell.

And although Biden White House officials say that they held more than 50 meetings on embassy security and evacuations, and that so far no Americans have died in the operation, all the planning failed to prevent the mayhem when the Taliban took over Kabul in a matter of days.

Only in recent weeks did the administration change course from its original plan. By then it was too late.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/us/politics/biden-taliban-afghanistan-kabul.html

Fast forward to 3 weeks ago and we have a Ukrainian President that “does not need a ride, I need ammunition” and his people that has demonstrated their willingness to fight for their country and Biden is uneasy about providing the necessary equipment for them to fight.

Is it no wonder the world, especially Putin, sees this administration as weak?

Can anybody defend Biden other than the *nuclear war* threat?  I can’t wait to see what he will do and say in Brussels in a week or so.  He destroys confidence in the free world daily.

ETA: Trump in no longer the President, its up to Joe.

Edited March 16, 2022 by I_M4_AU

[Leftfield 2,651]

It's amusing and sad to hear some Trump supporters brag that Putin wouldn't have done this if Trump was still in office, due to the fact that Trump is "unpredictable." As if that should be a compliment. When the best thing you can say about a person is that nobody wants to provoke them because they might go Leroy Jenkins, that's not a particularly flattering statement.

[I_M4_AU 7,958]

9 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

It's amusing and sad to hear some Trump supporters brag that Putin wouldn't have done this if Trump was still in office, due to the fact that Trump is "unpredictable." As if that should be a compliment. When the best thing you can say about a person is that nobody wants to provoke them because they might go Leroy Jenkins, that's not a particularly flattering statement.

And yet we cower because we believe Putin is *unpredictable*, makes sense.  Have you measured Putin’s stick with Biden’s?

For the record, I am not one that has touted Trump would not have been in this conflict because we are where we are and it doesn’t matter at this point.

[Leftfield 2,651]

25 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

And yet we cower because we believe Putin is *unpredictable*, makes sense.  Have you measured Putin’s stick with Biden’s?

For the record, I am not one that has touted Trump would not have been in this conflict because we are where we are and it doesn’t matter at this point.

For the record, my post showed up at the same time as yours. It was not in response.

Having said that, it's equally amusing how you often describe risk avoidance as cowardice. You seem to equate taking steps to avoid catastrophe as abject fear. I wonder if your stick would be as big if the lives of billions were at stake?

[I_M4_AU 7,958]

3 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

For the record, my post showed up at the same time as yours. It was not in response.

Having said that, it's equally amusing how you often describe risk avoidance as cowardice. You seem to equate taking steps to avoid catastrophe as abject fear. I wonder if your stick would be as big if the lives of billions were at stake?

My response to a lot of Covid issues was the same, so I am consistent. If you weigh the risks and act it is much better than just sticking your head in the sand without evaluating the risk.

It appears, since Putin put this troops on nuclear high alert, we were just holding on to the status quo.  Russia has escalated the war, Ukraine is holding on and we are watching without any escalation.  Ukraine is treading water.   A life line would be nice.

Biden had more trust in the Afghan Army than he does in Ukraine’s resistance.

 

[Leftfield 2,651]

1 minute ago, I_M4_AU said:

If you weigh the risks and act it is much better than just sticking your head in the sand without evaluating the risk.

So your contention is that Biden, his administration, and the rest of NATO is acting purely out of fear and not even bothering to evaluate actual risk.

Also that if you weigh the risks, it's obvious anyone would act.

Got it.

[I_M4_AU 7,958]

1 minute ago, Leftfield said:

So your contention is that Biden, his administration, and the rest of NATO is acting purely out of fear and not even bothering to evaluate actual risk.

Also that if you weigh the risks, it's obvious anyone would act.

Got it.

No, its my opinion, just like its your opinion is I should reevaluate and let a bully succeed in this mission.

It is my contention Biden is weak and Putin is playing him.  NATO is even weaker because they won’t do anything unless Biden gives the OK.  NATO is an alliance that is as weak as its weakest link.  Guess who that is.

[Leftfield 2,651]

2 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

It is my contention Biden is weak and Putin is playing him.  NATO is even weaker because they won’t do anything unless Biden gives the OK. 

 

3 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

NATO is an alliance that is as weak as its weakest link.  Guess who that is.

Anyone else want to tell him?