Underestimating the threat

Biden was elected partly because of his long foreign policy experience, and his promise to bring stability back to US international relations after the volatility and isolationist tendencies of Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ manifesto. After Trump’s bombastic posturing, trigger-finger social media activity and unpredictable outbursts, Biden – now 79, and an older, seemingly more serious, considered politician – was, despite his advancing years, seen as being a safe pair of hands.

But the Ukraine crisis has highlighted Biden’s role in the failure of US policy on Russia since the end of the Cold War. And his weakness on Russia goes back years.

When he was Barack Obama’s vice-president, the idea that Putin could be cajoled and reasoned with prevailed, and the administration consistently underestimated the threat from the Kremlin.

In the 2012 election, Obama lambasted his Republican opponent Mitt Romney for saying Russia was America’s “number one geopolitical foe”.

“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” jeered Obama during a television debate.

Two years later, as the crisis over Putin’s annexation of Crimea unfolded, former senior national security official Brett Bruen was in the Situation Room with Obama and Biden. “I distinctly recall President Obama in the Situation Room saying we need to de-escalate and offer him [ Putin] an off-ramp,” Bruen recounts. “The fact is, Putin never wanted an off-ramp. He wanted to escalate. All of our efforts at appeasing and engaging have only served to embolden him.

“We’ve seen various administrations really fail to take account of what Putin was capable of. This includes the administration I served in.”

Biden appears to have not learnt the lessons of 2014 and Crimea, however. Once again, he has looked to provide Putin with “off-ramps”, instead of recognising that he was never interested in a diplomatic solution.

“Biden did not lay out strong enough deterrents,” says Bruen, suggesting that the President’s sanctions thus far have been like “issuing a parking ticket in the middle of a riot” – and that future measures should include the release of embarrassing intelligence about Putin personally. But “he [Biden] is one of the most crucial pieces of [solving] this puzzle. He has to step up in a bigger way to rally the world, rather than finding the lowest common denominator among our allies.”

‘War Through Weakness’

In Biden’s defence, the failure of America’s policy on Russia, now manifest, had been a long time coming, and was partly fuelled by an inevitable shift of focus at the State Department and Pentagon towards the looming threat of China.

Since the Berlin Wall came down, Western governments have taken their eye off the ball, winding down defences dramatically and looking for the “peace dividend”. They assumed Russia would become, ultimately, just like them. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher hailed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and implosion of communism, as a victory for market capitalism, which would then prevail. But Russia developed very differently, with high-level corruption and a strongman taking the reins of power.

The strategic mistake of ignoring the Russian threat in favour of the Chinese one is one thing, but tactical errors are another – and this is where Biden, and other Democrat administrations before him, have been found most wanting.

It is Democrats, and chiefly Biden, who, since the Iraq war, have come to accept an orthodoxy that force leads to failure. He was vice-president when Putin moved into both Crimea and Syria.

In a play on Reagan’s ‘Peace Through Strength’, Republicans have dubbed Biden’s policy ‘War Through Weakness’.

The Trump question

And what of Trump? How different might things have been had he won a second term in last year’s presidential election?

Like Reagan before him Trump also espoused Peace Through Strength. In 1980, Reagan declared that containment of the Soviet Union, and his approach to the Cold War, would be simply: “We win, they lose.” When the forces of freedom were weak, “tyrants are tempted”, Reagan said.

Trump poured money into the US military, and regularly issued bombastic warnings – such as threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea – all with the intention of forcing others to back away from conflict.

This unpredictability, say some, means that, had Trump still been in the White House, Putin would not have launched an attack this week, or at least would have thought twice about doing so.

“If it were Trump or Reagan, [the Ukraine invasion] wouldn’t have come up, because I don’t think the Russians would have seen vulnerability,” says James Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation think tank. “Reagan or Trump would identify our interest, state the willingness to protect it, and the odds are the other guy [would have] backed down and done away.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump also supports this analysis. In his estimation, this is why Putin waited until he was out of office before invading Ukraine.

Last week, Trump said he “got along great” with Putin, and that he knew the Russian leader wanted Ukraine, but he told him: “You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it.” Trump also described as “genius” Putin’s tactic of recognising the independence of the separatist enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Such comments by Trump in the past have fed a narrative of him being overly friendly to Russia, which he rejects, saying “no one was tougher” on Putin. But, certainly, there has been a split in the Republican Party, with many leading figures consistently denouncing Putin as a “thug” and “gangster”, while some of Trump’s America First-inclined supporters adopted a more laissez-faire stance on Ukraine before the invasion.