Now, when the crisis that Vladimir Putin has been building toward for years has finally hit, there are limited tools with which to respond—and there's little hope of shaping a better outcome than the violent dismantlement that Ukraine seems doomed to face.
The war, not yet a day old, seems sure to transform Biden’s Presidency. In many ways, it already has. It presents a generational challenge to the United States at a time when this superpower has become weary and increasingly unable and unwilling to bear the burden of global leadership. In an angry, divided capital that is struggling to preserve its own democracy, the President is now being called upon to rally not only the American people but the world against Putin’s aggression.
At the least, the start of the war quickly clarified previously murky aspects of the situation: the two decades of failure by Washington to understand Putin, or to counter his revanchist designs; the bizarre transformation of large swaths of the Republican Party into the party of Putin apologists; the smug back-patting of diplomats and politicians who congratulated themselves on maintaining allied “unity” while delivering little but reassuring words and several hundred million dollars’ worth of...
On Wednesday, hours before the invasion began, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called out Putin’s “very evil” aggression toward Ukraine and compared it to Hitler’s swallowing of the Sudetenland, in 1938—a tragic precursor, unanswered by European powers, that presaged the broader world war. “You cannot ignore what Putin is doing,” she said, as close to an inarguable truth as Congress gets these days.
As for other punishments that await Russia—whether they be global condemnation or Putin’s inner circle of oligarchs being forced to give up their London apartments and super-yachts—Putin expected all of them, and he proceeded anyway. Biden ruled out American military intervention in Ukraine from the start, and, in any event, Putin very explicitly threatened extreme—potentially nuclear—retaliation should the U.S. change course.
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