Above photo: U.S. President Joe Biden with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev on Feb. 20, 2023. White House, Adam Schultz.
With his party decisively beat at the polls, the rejected president is gambling with regional security to preserve his ‘legacy’.
And to saddle the incoming president, who wants to end the war, with a major new crisis.
As a parting shot to incoming U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the defeated Joe Biden has defied the Pentagon by risking European and U.S. security with his decision announced Sunday to allow Ukraine to fire U.S. long-range missiles into Russian territory.
Just two months ago, in September, Biden had bowed to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose allowing long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time in that British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine launching the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
That was a clear warning that British and U.S. targets could be hit. Biden thus wisely backed off.
It was the second time that Biden had sided with the Pentagon against the neocons in his administration when it came to avoiding direct war with Russia.
The first time was in March 2022 when his neocon Secretary of State Antony Blinken stepped out of line to announce that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft.
Members of Congress and the media then piled the pressure on Biden to approve it until cooler heads at the U.S. Defense Department, the greatest purveyor of violence in history, stepped in to stop it.
Biden ultimately sided with the Pentagon, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time backed him up, saying:
“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”
But now Biden has reversed himself on his sensible positions and is defying the Pentagon to roll the dice that Russia’s warnings, repeated on Monday by Putin’s spokesman, won’t lead to nuclear conflict.
While he previously would not even authorize British long-range missile attacks into Russia in September, let alone U.S. ATACMS, on Sunday he authorized the ATACMS, risking Russia taking direct action against U.S. targets.
So what changed Biden’s addled mind?
An Undemocratic Democratic System
First, the undemocratic U.S. electoral system gave Biden the opportunity. His party was voted out of office on Nov. 5, but though the demos rejected Democrats in the White House they get to hang on in power for another 11 weeks, enough time to do considerable mischief to tie up the incoming administration that the people chose. (In a parliamentary system the new prime minister takes office on the next day and names the new cabinet well in advance of the election).
After one-term president George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, Bush used those 11 weeks to invade Somalia, saddling Clinton with a foreign policy crisis that would bog him down and distract him from his agenda.
What’s happening now is something similar. Biden wants to undermine Trump’s effort to end the Ukraine war. The incoming vice president has floated the idea of Russia holding on to territory it has won in exchange for peace.
Biden staked his legacy on Ukraine. He was involved in the 2014 coup, in allegedly shady practices there with his son and then in provoking Russia to invade in 2022. He foolishly believed he would prevail in bringing down Putin with an economic, information and proxy ground war. [See: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War]
All three are now decisively lost as the U.S. — still under Biden — prepares for the end game. Biden’s only face saver is for Ukraine to get back some of its lost territory by trading for it with Russian territory it seized in Kursk this summer.
So he is authorizing U.S. soldiers to operate ATACMS missiles from Ukraine to beat back a 50,000-man Russian force seeking to take back all of that Russian territory. Part of that force, according to the Pentagon spokesman, is a contingent of at least 10,000 North Korean troops invited by Moscow, thus operating legally on pre-war Russian territory.
Yet the presence of these North Koreans has sent the Biden administration and its allied media into paroxysms of near insanity. The New York Times reported on Sunday:
“Officials said Mr. Biden was persuaded to make the change in part by the sheer audacity of Russia’s decision to throw North Korean troops at Ukrainian lines. He was also swayed, they said, by concerns that the Russian assault force would be able to overwhelm Ukrainian troops in Kursk if they were not allowed to defend themselves with long-range weapons.”
It is not like Biden doesn’t know the potentially grave consequences he is recklessly unleashing. He was already warned about the no-fly zone and said “that’s called World War III, okay?” He was then warned by the Pentagon against allowing the British missiles and acted like a responsible statesman.
But now, when it comes to his precious legacy, he doesn’t appear to give a damn about anything else. He was deprived of a second term (by traitors within his own party he no doubt thinks) and he will risk a NATO-Russia war to avoid the taint of utter defeat in Ukraine.
This is what he’s ignoring, according to the Times:
“Some of Mr. Biden’s advisers had seized on a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that warned that Mr. Putin could respond to the use of long-range ATACMS on Russian soil by directing the Russian military or its spy agencies to retaliate, potentially with lethal force, against the United States and its European allies.
The assessment warned of several possible Russian responses that included stepped-up acts of arson and sabotage targeting facilities in Europe, as well as potentially lethal attacks on U.S. and European military bases.”
Where it goes from there, nobody knows.
Thanks, Joe.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.