There has perhaps been no president in U.S. history who has been more unprepared for the foreign challenges of the presidency than Joe Biden.
Entering a world that looked with a skeptical eye on the country after the previous administration, Biden has inspired no confidence in the days and months since he took office. In particular, his hasty decision to withdraw all American military presence from Afghanistan with no clear exit strategy took an absolutely brutal toll on American credibility and more than likely gave Putin all the confidence he needed to go ahead with his plan to invade Ukraine.
Biden’s speech and follow-up answers to reporters’ questions yesterday did even less to inspire confidence at home. While many across the country are watching another sovereign country be invaded by a known dictator, Biden admitted that his sanctions weren’t ever really meant to stop Putin’s invasion, despite his administration pretending they were.
For weeks, the Biden administration said that the threat of sanctions on Russia were meant to deter a possible attack on Ukraine.
On Thursday, President Biden said the sanctions were not meant to prevent an attack.
pic.twitter.com/g54vZKSJKQ— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 25, 2022
And then, when his administration is asked how far the U.S. sanctions will go to try and dissuade Russia from continuing its invasion, the response is that they don’t want to actually disrupt one of the biggest and most lucrative exports from Russia.
Reuters’s @SteveHolland1: “Targeting the Russian energy industry is totally on the table? is that what you are saying, Daleep?
WH’s Daleep Singh: “What I’m saying that our measures were not designed to disrupt–in any way–the current flow of energy from Russia to the world.” pic.twitter.com/IqkxZTGaKp
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 24, 2022
This is all on top of the Biden administration once again doing very little to work to get Americans out of another warzone.
One of the biggest failures of the Afghanistan withdrawal was there having been no real plan to get Americans and American allies out of the country. There are still people trapped in a country that fell to a terrorist-supporting regime within days. The U.S. left them weapons and left the previous government no real means of fighting them off. It was a total failure.
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In the absence of military rescue efforts, several private groups stepped up and worked overtime to get as many Americans as possible out of Afghanistan. Now, it looks like the same is happening in Ukraine.
A private volunteer group from Florida said it has launched an attempt to usher about two dozen Americans out of Ukraine in the first evacuation of U.S. citizens since the country came under Russian military attack on Thursday.
The rescue operation by the Tampa-based nonprofit Project Dynamo began in Kyiv as Russian air strikes on the Ukrainian capital were starting in the predawn darkness early Thursday local time, the group’s spokesperson, James Judge, told Reuters.
He said the evacuees, numbering 23 or 24 U.S. citizens and legal U.S. permanent residents, met at a pre-determined rendezvous point and left Kyiv in three vehicles bound for an American embassy in an undisclosed neighboring country.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is silent, focusing on sounding stern while admitting they aren’t actually going to do anything about Russia’s aggressive violation of international agreements and Ukraine’s sovereignty.
When the dust settles, the Biden administration will have solidified its only major legacy of his (hopefully) one term: Abandonment.
Biden abandoned Afghanistan. It was not a strategic withdrawal but a depressing cacophony of failures in planning and leadership, all because he wanted to say he was the one who ended a 20 year war.
Biden abandoned Ukraine, and European allies, over fears of disrupting energy flow out of Russia – energy flow we as a country now rely on because the Biden administration also abandoned energy independence over climate change concerns – and what impact it might have on the world (and gas prices at home).
This is the same Biden that claimed he was the only candidate capable of going toe-to-toe with Vladimir Putin, but when the time to do so actually came, the Biden administration was worried about how even higher gas prices and another foreign entanglement might affect his poll numbers. It’s an absolute shame.
And, again, it’s not as though we’re actually looking to get into another armed conflict. But there are several tools available at our disposal that can disrupt Russia’s invasion to the point that they back off at least a little bit. But what Biden proposed yesterday simply isn’t enough.
It’s also not as though Europe is actually asking (or, frankly,) deserving of help. They helped create this mess when they decided that climate change was a greater threat than Putin, relying on Russia to produce the energy for them all so they can reduce their carbon footprint. They have vetoed every real sanction possibility that would cripple Russia enough to get them to back off.
This is what happens when an unserious administration is faced with serious crisis after serious crisis.
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