Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized the opportunity to assert his nation’s position in Eastern Europe at a time when the United States is both mired in domestic division and fixated on challenging China.
Tied down at home and abroad, President Joe Biden has expressed an unwillingness to become embroiled in a long-term crisis over Ukraine, on whose border Moscow has amassed up to 100,000 troops while warning against Kyiv joining the NATO Western military alliance.
During a two-hour press conference on Wednesday, Biden got ahead of other administration officials in offering the prediction that Putin “will move in” on Ukraine, “he has to do something.”
And while he warned his Russian counterpart “will pay a serious and dear price for it,” Biden suggested a potentially measured response calibrated to the depth of the anticipated Russian action.
“I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades, and it depends on what it does,” Biden said. “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and not to do.”
The comments sparked an instant controversy both at home and in Kyiv, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken had just hours earlier offered underscored U.S. “commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity, to its sovereignty, to its independence” at a press conference alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki quickly issued a statement clarifying the U.S. leader’s remarks, stating that “President Biden has been clear with the Russian President: If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies.”
“President Biden also knows from long experience that the Russians have an extensive playbook of aggression short of military action, including cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics,” Psaki stated. “And he affirmed today that those acts of Russian aggression will be met with a decisive, reciprocal, and united response.”
Blinken doubled down on the commitment during a speech delivered Thursday in Berlin, a city that long symbolized Europe’s East-West divide.
The mixed messages, however, hint at divisions at the highest level of the U.S. government. The ensuing blowback only serves to fuel what Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, called an “emerging narrative of weakness for the Biden administration,” one amplified by Republican opponents stateside but also seized upon by rivals abroad.
“Russia believes that weakness narrative, and not just about Biden, not even primarily about Biden, about the West, about the United States and Europe,” Shapiro, who previously served as a State Department adviser on European and Eurasian affairs and later on the North Africa and Levant region, told Newsweek.
And though the Biden officials have fiercely rejected characterizations of the president or his administration as weak, the moment of truth comes at a particularly inopportune time for the White House after it set out a year ago to chart different priorities altogether.
“In the first instance, they wanted [Biden], like every president, at least as they claim, to be a domestic president, and, in the second instance, to the extent that they were going to do foreign policy, they wanted it to be about China,” Shapiro said. “So this is clearly a setback on both of those fronts.”
Russia, Putin, US, Biden, virtual, meeting
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with US President Joe Biden via a video call in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on December 7, 2021. Moscow has long raised concerns about NATO expansion into Eastern Europe as leading national security concern, while Washington has sought to shift policy priorities elsewhere.
While the U.S. has perpetually balanced domestic and foreign agendas, the sharp uptick in tensions between Russia and Ukraine has manifested just as Biden sought to intensify efforts to implement an ambitious domestic agenda to shore up the economy, suppress the pandemic and, most recently, push forward voting rights legislation — all endeavors with considerable partisan divides requiring the expenditure of substantial political capital.
“I think this is not what the Biden administration would have wanted to be spending time on, but it is an extremely serious crisis, and they’re devoting a lot of resources to it now,” Samuel Charap, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told Newsweek.
“Events happen in international affairs and often you don’t get to determine what the issues are that you’re going to prioritize,” said Charap, who previously served as a former senior adviser to the State Department’s undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security.
And when it comes to the longstanding attempt to shift the focus of foreign policy efforts toward the Asia-Pacific region, where top U.S. competitor China has been increasingly investing economic, political and military capital, a potentially explosive crisis in Eastern Europe has served only as an obstacle the administration sought to quickly overcome.
“I think you can’t really change the focus to the Pacific region if a major war in Europe is going on,” Charap said. “So in a way, diffusing this crisis, and putting a lot of effort into it upfront, is consistent with the prioritization of the Pacific, because if this war happens, it’s going to be very hard to maintain the focus on China.”
Should such a conflict erupt, however, the U.S. would most likely be on the sidelines. Biden ruled out military action months ago against a country that possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
“There’s never been a U.S. administration that has wanted to go to war with Russia over Ukraine,” Charap said.
“The bottom line is we want to avoid escalating every conflict that Russia has with third countries into a Russia-NATO conflict that could end in a nuclear exchange,” he added. “There has to be some line here between allies and partners. And that’s just the unfortunate reality of international politics.”
And in Europe, fear of conflagration is prevalent among NATO members.
“As the Secretary General has said, Russia’s continued build-up, combined with threatening rhetoric and disinformation, and Moscow’s track record of using force against its neighbours, means there is a real risk of renewed conflict,” one NATO official told Newsweek.
(Courtesy Newsweek)
