Joe Biden’s administration is bracing itself for a protracted war in Ukraine with some confidence despite the suffering and people fleeing gunfire, artillery fire and missile attacks. When history is made about the “completely unjustified war,” Russia will be weaker and the rest of the world stronger, the president assured in his Ukraine address. As in Europe, calls for more weapons for Ukraine are increasing in the United States. The Russian President must pay for his war of aggression like the Soviets did in Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Antony Blinken announced over the weekend that he had just approved $350 million in “security aid” for Ukraine. Congress is still deliberating on far-reaching measures.
Joe Biden remains cautious nonetheless. Even if he declares that Putin is the aggressor and must bear the consequences, his promise that US forces will not intervene in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is paramount. Harrowing images of the war are shown to Americans on the screens while the President reassures the population that he will take care to “limit the pain of the American people at the gas pump”. For several weeks, Biden barely got through his alarm calls about Ukraine in the US public. Right-wing media said he wanted to distract from his problems and falling polls. And if Putin should dare to attack, it would only be possible because of Biden’s weakness. Some ex-peace activists were skeptical, recalling the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the countless untruths about the progress of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All of this obviously misjudged Vladimir Putin. Russian attacks and rolling tanks in a European capital, where people use public transport to get to work on normal days or sit in cafés with laptops and cellphones, this was hardly imaginable in the USA before February 24th. The justification in Moscow that they want to “denazify” Ukraine is too bogus to have any traction.
A plan for afterwards
Now the mood in US politics is changing. Military thinking can triumph across the board in Washington. In an interview with the magazine Foreign Policy said Democratic MP Ro Khanna, 2020 Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser during the election campaign: He used to be skeptical about arms sales to Ukraine. But “now that Putin has started the war, I am open to what the government might propose in terms of assistance to Ukraine.” And Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote that sanctions against “Putin and his oligarchs” are justified. “Any military action must take place only with the approval of Congress.”
Thinkers with a clear image of the enemy set the tone. Hints that things might have turned out differently if the West had responded to Russian security concerns are no longer needed. The prevailing view in the White House and in think tanks seems to be that Putin made a big mistake in the long run. Ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calls it a historic mistake. As a former CIA official who “managed counterinsurgency operations in Central Asia,” intelligence expert Douglas London notes in the journal Foreign Affairs, he assumes that Putin would not have attacked without a “reliable end scenario” in mind. But even the best of plans could quickly be destroyed in the face of national opposition and insurgency. In the event of the fall of the government in Kyiv, a secret program already exists to support the resistance, London suspected. Supporting Insurgency is “in the DNA of the CIA”.
Republicans are torn between entrenched hostility toward Russia and the Soviet Union, respectively, and the Trump wing’s respect for the autocratic leader in Moscow. Ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said a week before the invasion that Putin was a “very capable politician” and that he enjoyed “enormous respect”. Trump himself said at a fundraiser in Mar-a-Lago shortly before the invasion that Putin was pretty clever. He’s taking possession of a vast country with only minor sanctions, literally “$2 worth of sanctions.”
Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican with his troubled relationship with Trump, has called for military aid to Ukraine. Putin is “evil and dangerous,” says Kevin McCarthy, spokesman for the Republicans in the House of Representatives. But the world of Donald Trump has never forgiven Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky for being responsible for months of ultimately inconclusive investigations into Trump’s impeachment. Zelenskyy did not comply with his request to announce investigations into the son of then presidential candidate Biden, who was active in the Ukrainian energy business.
Fox News and other right-wing media have sympathies for strongmen like Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. They are seen as custodians of traditional values that are in danger in the United States. Once again the ex-CIA man Douglas London: Great powers have often waged war against weaker ones and then got stuck. The US in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Soviets also in Afghanistan. Security expert Bruce Riedel emphasized in the democratic think tank Brookings Institution: The USA and NATO should support the resistance in Ukraine, but keep an eye open for possible costs and risks. The invasion could become “another geopolitical catastrophe for Russia,” but only “if we help the Ukrainian resistance.”