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As President, you have lots of jobs to do. It’s like playing a combination of Jenga and poker all at once (try it at your Christmas dinner), and Biden keeps pulling awkward bricks and showing his hand. While most people can appreciate a subtle tip of the hand, this man is showing that his deck is missing some cards, and he’s holding 9-King offsuit, and the whole world knows he shouldn’t be going in.
His ‘lady luck’ comes in the form of the US military and all her might. The Queen of Battle is ready to go at a moment’s notice, and the rest of the military is as well. However, he showed he doesn’t have that card in the deck anymore with one stupid statement. “If in fact he invades Ukraine, there will be…economic consequences like none he’s ever seen…His immediate response was he understood that…The idea the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not in the cards right now.”
President Biden…Have you gone, mad Sir? You never tell an ally everything, and you never tell an enemy your moves. Yes, he could be pulling the old ‘oh I would NEVER’ bit, however, if you’ve been paying attention to him for 10 minutes in the last 20 years, you’ll know he’s not with it enough to pull such a maneuver. Instead, he is telling Russia that the help he’s going to provide Ukraine is basically in name only, and no actual help will reach them.
Russia is big enough a developed enough that any sanctions Biden would impose won’t change much if anything for the Russian people or the government. It’s akin to telling a kid ‘Don’t you get that ice cream, don’t you touch that spoon, don’t you take that lid off’, etc.; nothing is learned other than how far you can push before anything will happen.
Considering Biden followed up this statement by also telling Russia that he wanted to find an ‘accommodation’ but left that rather ambiguous. The Associated Press reported that “Administration officials have suggested that the U.S. will press Ukraine to formally cede a measure of autonomy to eastern Ukrainian lands now controlled by Russia-backed separatists who rose up against Kyiv in 2014. An undefined “special status” for those areas was laid out in an ambiguous, European-brokered peace deal in 2015, but it has never taken hold.”
This suggestion would make the most sense in a Biden-led idea, yet it does nothing but make Ukraine look weak and it makes the idea of war even more likely. It’s easy to find ‘provocation’ in a country you’ve already taken over, and that could be exactly what Russia is after in the long run. Russia’s military has no fear at this point. It would be a long time until the American military could be there in force, and Russia is one of the few countries with a truly elite group of soldiers who could pose a great challenge to our own. Especially with their numbers versus what we could send immediately.
Tough talk works against people who have a lot to lose by going to war. Sanctions work when you have a country that is dependent on foreign trade. Russia is neither of those. Russia also realizes that there isn’t much that would stop China, North Korea, and Iran from acting up if they do as well. America cannot fight a war on that many fronts, and their neighbors would be unable to adequately protect themselves. This puts America and our allies in a tough situation. It becomes even tougher when one of those allies is the very country Russia is trying to intimidate now.
