Biden’s Dangerous New Ukraine Endgame: No Endgame
With his strategy to “weaken” Russia, the U.S. president may be turning the Ukraine war into a global one.
In a dramatic series of shifts this week, U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO allies have escalated their policy of helping to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression into a policy of undermining the power and influence of Russia itself. In so doing, some observers fear, they are leaving Russian President Vladimir Putin little choice but to surrender or double down militarily, raising the possibility of widening his war beyond Ukraine.
On Thursday, Biden urged Congress to provide $33 billion in additional military, economic, and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine—more than double the previous amount—and said he was sending a clear message to Putin: “You will never succeed in dominating Ukraine.” Beyond that, Biden said in remarks at the White House, the new policy was intended “to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.”
That followed an equally clear declaration this week from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who after a meeting in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the U.S. objective is now to curtail Russia’s power over the long term so it does not have the “capability to reproduce” its military assault on Ukraine. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin said in a stopover in Poland.
The shift may have been what prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to declare afterward that Washington and the West had entered a “proxy” war with Russia, risking another world war that, Lavrov warned, could go nuclear. “The danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it,” Lavrov said. Putin also again suggested this week, as he has since the beginning of his invasion on Feb. 24, that he still had the option of using nuclear weapons against NATO, saying, “We have all the instruments for this [to respond to a direct threat to Russia]—ones nobody else can boast of. And we will use them, if we have to.”
The newly aggressive U.S. approach won plaudits from many quarters—in particular from current and former NATO officials who insist the Russian nuclear counterthreats are only empty rhetoric.
“It’s the only way to go forward,” said former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in an interview. “In Putin’s thinking it doesn’t make any difference, because he would only claim that the Western policy is to weaken Russia anyway. So why not speak openly about it? The mistake we made in the past was to underestimate the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, to underestimate his brutality. At the same time, we overestimated the strength of the Russian military.”
The new U.S. and NATO strategy is partly based on Ukraine’s continuing battlefield success against Putin, who has been forced to scale down his ambitions from a full takeover of Ukraine to a major new assault in its eastern and southern parts. NATO allies including Germany, which until this week had equivocated on sending heavy offensive weaponry to Ukraine, have ratcheted up their aid in response. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, under political pressure at home and abroad, announced earlier this week that his country would provide 50 anti-aircraft tanks to Ukraine.
Yet other Russia experts expressed worry that the United States and its Western allies are, in effect, crossing the very redlines they have avoided until now. For most of the two-month conflict, Biden has refused to authorize any military support, such as major offensive weapons or a no-fly zone, that might be perceived as putting U.S. or NATO forces in direct conflict with Russia. Now, some observers worry that with the additional aid and tougher economic sanctions, the U.S. president is forcing Putin into a corner in which he can only fight on or surrender. The latter course would mean relinquishing Putin’s career-long aim of strengthening Russia against the West. Yet Putin, who has long said the West’s goal was to weaken or contain Russia, has never been known to surrender during his decade and a half of aggressive moves against neighboring countries, mainly Ukraine and Georgia.
“In the Kremlin’s eyes the West is out to get Russia. It was unspoken before. Now it’s spoken,” said Sean Monaghan, an expert on Europe at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you combine this with Biden’s comments, at his summit in Poland last month, that ‘this man [Putin] cannot remain in power,’ all that turns this a territorial war into a wider confrontation and might make negotiating a settlement to end the war in Ukraine far more difficult or even impossible at the present.” (Biden officials later said that the president was not seeking regime change in Russia.)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/29/russia-ukraine-war-biden-endgame/
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