Why Joe Biden's White House Can't Be Trusted To Defend Ukraine

It's unimpeachably true that the Kremlin is populated by shameless liars. But Washington has its own "credibility problem."

Mar 31, 2022

It only occurred to me after I filed my National Post column (in print today) that you'd have to go all the way back to George W. Bush for a president who could be trusted to make even the worst decisions for the right reasons. Ukrainians now know what the Syrians and the Afghans know about American presidents: You really need to watch your back.

In my column I go into the reasons why nothing the Russians say can be trusted. Absolutely nothing. I leave it to Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, to sum it up: "To put it mildly, the Russians have a credibility problem,” Rae told the CBC two weeks ago. “We know they're lying because their lips are moving."

But what I’m going to set out in this newsletter is the reason Ukrainians are coming to understand that U.S. President Joe Biden can be and has been, in his way, every bit as duplicitous as Russian mob boss Vladimir Putin. At the very least, whether that’s fair or not, the Americans are not what you could call the most trustworthy or reliable friends of the Ukrainians, and it’s high time we all recognized this.

But first, to get some business out of the way.

I’m not going to go into the Trudeau government’s preening irrelevance in all this. I mean, seriously, let the headline on this Globe and Mail editorial tell the whole story: From fiasco to debacle and back to fiasco. If you can bear the latest news of the Ukrainian agonies, the Washington Post is covering it all, live, right here.

Also: I have another Real Story special weekend newsletter lined up with some truly gobsmacking backstory about foreign-influence intrigues in Canada. A lot like last weekend’s, but way crazier. So keep an eye out, and subscribe for goodness sake. Make it a paid sub: You won’t be disappointed, and you’ll get backstory and inside stories not otherwise available to free subs or blow-ins.

Anyway, this newsletter will have to draw attention to some surprisingly not-nice things about the American role in the current horrors, so in fairness I should point out right here that the United States has sent Ukraine or has at least promised to send an arsenal of more than $1 billion in serious kit since the Russian invasion began. Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin missiles, AT-4 anti-tank systems, drones, grenade launchers, rifles, pistols and shotguns. And the Ukrainians really do need loads of gear.

Also, President Biden does seem to be a very nice man. Perhaps his unscripted and unguarded remark about Putin last weekend (“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”) came from a deep-down identification with the suffering of the Ukrainian people that former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta explained this way: “Joe Biden, you know, he’s Irish.” And perhaps Panetta was just channelling his inner Italian.

Or perhaps Biden’s hurt feelings were more to do with the painfully awkward position Putin has now put him in by engaging in such barbaric warfare in Ukraine.

Whatever will become of the American collaboration with Russia on “over the horizon” counterterrorism capacity in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan? It seems like only yesterday that Putin was being a perfect gentleman, offering to host American counter-terrorism command centres in Russia’s Central Asian military bases. Okay, that wasn’t yesterday. It was last August.

And however will Russia be induced now to acquiesce to its formerly useful role in the Biden administration’s determination to revive the squalid folly of Barack Obama’s nuclear arms deal with Iran? It seems like only yesterday that the Kremlin was being wonderfully helpful in the negotiations in Vienna. Okay, that wasn’t quite yesterday either. Things were going swimmingly until just three weeks ago.

It’s not as though the Americans would be so venal as to betray the democratic aspirations of millions of Ukrainians standing up against a tyrant just for a vanity “legacy” trophy, would it? Mind you, that’s exactly what Barack Obama did to the Syrian people when Iranian officials told Obama’s negotiators in Oman that any chemical weapons “red line” vigilance would cause Tehran to walk away from the talks for good. But come on, man, that was nine years ago.

This brings us back to the hullabaloo Biden’s anodyne remark in Warsaw set off in the American foreign-policy establishment last weekend. The furor might say less about Joe than about all the talking heads whose names show up on CNN’s weekend rolodexes and the Fox News’ shout-show lineups. The chorus: “Oh my God, not regime change!” They should all take a pill. The Americans are so done with regime change, and Dubya is still in retirement, devoting himself to uplifting folk-art portraiture down in Texas, bless his heart.

The point you shouldn’t miss here is that there was something far, far worse that was unambiguously telegraphed to Vladimir Putin and to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in last Sunday’s blizzard of official communiques from Washington to “walk back” what Biden had said. As in this White House circular: “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

So there it is. The American end-game to this globe-shuddering catastrophe envisions Vladimir Putin carrying on in Moscow, no matter what happens. Bygones and all that. President Biden has all that unfinished and untidy but otherwise cordial business with Putin to attend to, after all.

There was a hint of this American policy even in the earliest days of Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine. You could read it between the lines of Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1 - and even though I was reluctant to be that pessimistic, I read it exactly that way - only a week after Putin ordered his armoured battalions to cross the border into Ukraine.

“While he may make gains on the battlefield, he will pay a continuing high price over the long run,” Biden said. That was not an unguarded, unscripted remark. It was a carefully considered articulation of policy. It meant that the G7 and European Union sanctions will cause Putin to pay dearly for the crimes against humanity he’s committing in Ukraine, but no worries. The United States is prepared to allow Putin to amortize his debt over time. Over the long run.

Three days after the State of the Union address, Biden’s White House stuck another knife in. At the March 4 gathering in Brussels, the U.S. saw to it that NATO would refuse Zelenskyy’s request for a NATO-enforced humanitarian No Fly Zone in Ukrainian skies. Zelenskyy had been begging for a NATO NFZ, and when the answer was no, he was crushed: “All the people who die from this day onwards will also die because of you, because of your weakness,” he told NATO’s leaders.

If not a No-Fly Zone, Zelenskyy said: ”Then give me the planes.” And the Polish government stepped up with an offer of its entire armada of 28 MiG-29s. At the time, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was positively exuberant about the Polish plan: “We very much support them, providing MiGs. . . planes that Ukrainians can fly, to the Ukrainians.” Blinken went even further, on March 6: “But we also want to see if we can be helpful, as I said, in making sure that whatever they provide to the Ukrainians, something goes to them to make up for any gap in the security for Poland that might result.”

This was great news in Kyiv, where Zelenskyy’s government had already been led to believe that Bulgaria and Slovakia were also ready to send MiG-29s. In the case of Slovakia, the idea was that Bratislava would send Slovak MiGs to Ukraine, and Poland would patrol Slovakia’s skies in the interregnum. In the deal Blinken endorsed, Poland would send its MiGs to the U.S. airbase at Rammstein, Germany, the U.S. would transfer the planes to Ukraine, and the U.S. would then send Poland an airfleet of F-16s.

Then the White House put another knife in.

“We do not support the transfer of the fighters to the Ukrainian air force at this time and have no desire to see them in our custody either,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters. The White House objection was the plan would draw NATO too directly into Ukraine’s resistance against Russia.

That was the same reason the White House had given weeks earlier, last December, when senior American military officials said they were ready to send several hundred special-operations advisers to Ukraine to help prepare for the Russian invasion that U.S. intelligence officials were warning was imminent. Putin had already mobilized about 100,000 Russian troops to within spitting distance of the border with Ukraine.

The Russians hadn’t invaded yet, and the worry even then was that sending special-ops teams to Ukraine would be “escalatory.” This is a term in the dictionary of fancy new euphemisms for “things we really should do, but we really don’t want to do.”

By last summer, Biden had already concluded an agreement with Angela Merkel in the twilight days of her 16-year-run as Germany’s chancellor, to clear a path through sanctions to allow for a doubling of European dependency on Russian natural gas, via the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal. The Biden-Merkel arrangement would have allowed Moscow to bypass the existing pipeline through Ukraine and filch the Ukrainian treasury of $2 billion in transit fees in the bargain. A win and a win and a win for Putin.

It’s not as though Zelenskyy didn’t notice Biden’s duplicity last summer. Mind you, at the time, Biden was rather busy inventing excuses for presiding over the worst American foreign-policy catastrophe in decades, the chaos of his decision to proceed with the plans his predecessor Donald Trump had laid for NATO’s abject capitulation and surrender of Afghanistan’s embryonic democracy to the Taliban and their sponsors in Islamabad.

So whatever Biden might do in the matter of Ukraine, it’s not like he hasn’t done these kinds of things before.

The $11 billion Nord Stream 2 deal was eventually scrapped after Merkel’s departure, but not because of anything Biden did on account of his inherently Irish identification with the put-upon and the persecuted. It was Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, who finally pulled the pin.

American flaccidity and Biden’s own liberties with the truth will come as no shock to the Ukrainians. There has been nonetheless a tone of surprise in the coverage of President Zelenskyy’s apparent concession this week, as his officials were going into talks in Istanbul, that Ukraine was prepared to offer Moscow neutrality and give up its fervent wish to be accepted as a NATO member in full standing.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Back on March 9, after a conversation with Biden, Zelenskyy told ABC News: "Regarding NATO, I have cooled down regarding this question long ago after we understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine." He added: "The alliance is afraid of controversial things and confrontation with Russia. I never wanted to be a country which is begging something on its knees. We are not going to be that country, and I don't want to be that president."

So, you can read that as a concession to Putin’s morbid paranoia about NATO’s mythical encirclement of Russia, if you like. You can just as easily read it as a concession to the NATO capitals, and specifically to Washington, that Ukraine will no longer expect the US to live up to its 2008 offer of NATO membership - an offer Ukrainians weren’t even particuarly interested in until Putin’s initial invasions of 2014. It’s just not going to happen now, so NATO is off the hook. Zelenskyy: “We have heard for years that the doors were open, but we also heard that we could not join. It's a truth and it must be recognized.”

It’s Zelenskyy’s concession to reality, then. And I’m afraid Joe Biden isn’t quite the champion of the downtrodden Ukrainians in their heartbreaking hour of resistance that he’d like you to think he is.

That’s a truth, and it must be recognized.