President Biden's decision to supply long range missiles to Ukraine in its war with Russia is clearly a move toward an escalation of the conflict. The missiles, capable of hitting targets as far away as 190 miles, are a new provocation for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has already come forth with a harsh response to Biden's move.
By going for his missile decision, Biden has once more laid his administration open to charges of having been rather unsuccessful in its foreign policy, both in formulation and practice. In the nearly three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, the US President and his advisors have never striven for diplomacy to be the weapon in bringing an end to the conflict. On the contrary, Washington has been in lockstep with Nato in the latter's argument that Moscow needed to be checked and that Ukraine's independence required to be guaranteed in the face of aggression.
No one disputes the fact that Putin made a bad move by sending his army into Ukraine. It was bellicosity on the Russian leader's part which led him into such a reaction. Again, there is the other side of the story. The Russians had always been concerned about Nato moving closer to their borders. When Nato decided that Kyiv qualified to be part of Nato, it was the last straw for Moscow. The bottom line is thus obvious: while it is all right to blame Putin for the conflict, it is not wrong to suggest that the West played a bad hand in encouraging President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his belief that his country, sharing its frontier with Russia, could have a presence in Nato. Men like Jens Stoltenberg and other western leaders only stoked the fire.
Now this new move by President Biden only expands the nature of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. What is more surprising is that it is a lame-duck administration in Washington which has gone for a major move it ought not to have. By tradition, outgoing American Presidents have generally played low-key roles while they have prepared for their successors to take over. Biden does not appear to have had that tradition in mind even though President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to be sworn into office in January next year. Besides, one is not quite certain if prior to making his missiles-for-Ukraine move, Biden informed Trump or sought his opinion. Outgoing Presidents do not make things difficult for incoming Presidents but instead leave major policy decisions to be made by their successors.
Given Trump's scepticism about the conflict in Ukraine --- his friendship with Putin being a known fact and his opposition to arming Ukraine a component, so far, of his political platform --- the Biden decision promises to create difficulties for the incoming President. One does not expect Trump to call an immediate halt to all the moves Biden has made in support of Zelenskyy, but the fact that Trump is not kindly disposed toward the Ukraine leader is a reality one simply cannot avoid. There is too the hostility to Nato Trump demonstrated in his earlier administration, an attitude he will likely repeat over the next four years. How then will Trump, once he takes office, handle Biden's missile move?
So Donald Trump, whose cabinet picks have been focused on a hardline attitude to government, will need to pave his own path to handling international relations. The next four years will be decisive. But while that remains a question mark for observers of diplomacy, one is also tempted into an appraisal of the foreign policy the Biden administration has shaped and pursued in the four years in which it has presided over American fortunes. The precipitate withdrawal of American and other forces from Afghanistan in August 2021 not only pushed Kabul back into the hands of the Taliban but fundamentally condemned Afghan citizens to the medievalism one had thought had been ended twenty years earlier. It was a chaotic withdrawal, a pathetic commentary on the foreign policy of the Biden White House.
On the Palestine issue, especially in the aftermath of the crisis emanating from the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, the Biden administration has disappointed governments and people around the globe with its ineffectual attempts at diplomacy in the region. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made several trips to the region, all of which have been fruitless. Biden's appeals to Benjamin Netanyahu for a ceasefire in Gaza, where close to 45,000 Palestinians have perished in Israeli firepower, have fallen on deaf years. An Israeli government openly defying its ally was a sign of a US foreign policy which simply went awry. This failure was heightened at the United Nations, where American diplomats repeatedly exercised the veto to scupper resolutions toward a solution to the crisis.
Foreign policy under President Biden has been a non-starter in these past four years. Washington was unable to engage with Beijing over the ways and means of ensuring a proper and less than hostile relationship between the two countries. Trips by American politicians, including Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan to reassure Taipei's leaders of US support in the face of Chinese intimidation of what Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders have always maintained is a breakaway province have only hardened Beijing's position on the issue. On Iran, the Biden administration's failure to engage with the clerics in Tehran remains another gap not filled.
With America preparing for a second Trump presidency, worries assail governments around the world. It will be for the new President to reassure world leaders that while he aims to make America great again, a constant refrain with him, he will also ensure that Washington plays a constructive role in its practice of diplomacy. Trump has promised never to start a war but to end wars. His promise will be sorely tested over Palestine, Ukraine and other hotspots around the globe.
Meanwhile, President Biden should be reading from the pages of history. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy invited his defeated rival Richard Nixon to the White House to solicit his views on the situation. In late 1968, soon after his election, President-elect Nixon was briefed by outgoing President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam conflict.
President Biden should have kept President-elect Trump fully briefed on what his administration has been doing, and not doing, in its dealings with the outside world. Unfortunately, the missiles for Ukraine will be a sad denouement to the Biden presidency.
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