AMERICAN DIPLOMACY MATTERS. American resolve matters. Putin’s latest attack on Ukraine was premeditated and unprovoked. He rejected repeated efforts at diplomacy.
He thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready.
I spent countless hours unifying our European allies. We shared with the world in advance what we knew Putin was planning and precisely how he would try to falsely justify his aggression. We countered Russia’s lies with truth. And now that he has acted, the free world is holding him accountable.
So said President Joe Biden on Tuesday night in his first State of the Union address, which reportedly underwent a massive edit in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In many ways the speech, a significant event on the civic calendar in the United States, was overshadowed by what Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has described as “perhaps the biggest crisis Europe has seen in decades”.
I will return to the ramifications of the Biden administration’s reaction to Vladimir Putin’s reprehensible incursion and the appalling scenes in Ukraine. But it also is worth considering the other notes the currently beleaguered president – a new poll reveals that only 41% of the American people approve of how he is performing – struck in his remarks to both houses of Congress at this fraught juncture.
Although the contents of President Biden’s State of the Union had to be radically recalibrated, it was his comments on domestic topics that most Americans were paying closest attention to. Indeed, nearly 2/3 of viewers asked in a CNN survey immediately afterward indicated that what he had to say about their inflation-plagued economy was more important to them than the tragic situation in Ukraine.
Rebutting the critics who allege that the America Rescue Plan exacerbated inflation, Biden defended the legislation he barely got through Congress early last year, which ramped up vaccination programmes and provided financial relief in the form of stimulus cheques to struggling Americans.
He asserted that the infrastructure law, which was passed by a solid, bipartisan majority, will create millions of good-paying jobs while ensuring long-overdue building and maintenance projects are finally completed. And he outlined the potential for the stalled, mammoth Build Back Better initiative to transform the economy.
Further, he introduced some proposals to reduce costs. Beyond this package of measures intended to combat inflation, Biden raised issues that are key priorities for progressive stalwarts who Democrats will be relying on to avoid a meltdown in November’s midterm elections – LGBT rights, preserving Roe v Wade, gun control, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants – and cited his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who would be the first African American woman to sit on the US Supreme Court.
Yet on the other hand, clearly posturing toward the crucial constituency of independent or moderate voters who have become disenchanted with him and are open to Republican messaging that he is captive to his party’s left flank, Biden posited that “the answer is not to Defund the police. The answer is to FUND [all in capital letters in the printed version] the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”
71% of the television audience received the State of the Union positively, though ample historical research shows that those who tune in tend to be supportive of the sitting president. In short, while he certainly did not put a foot wrong, Biden probably did not shift the political needle much, or even at all, with his words. And his task on the home front remains daunting.
Post-American
But it is his administration’s approach to the first major war in Europe in a long time that the rest of the world is keenly monitoring. The Russian assault on Ukraine is unfolding against the backdrop of what could arguably be called a “post-American” era, when the presumption that the US would more often than not take the lead role in trouble spots no longer stands. Its soldiers will not be going into Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Biden declared that America has played a prominent part in recent weeks. It has.
The US alerted everyone who would listen to what its intelligence agencies had discovered about Russia’s movements; the US listened to the concerns within the European Union and from other allies and they stand together; jointly, they have implemented crushing economic sanctions and brought about the disintegration of the ruble; the US has implemented a no fly zone for Russian planes; and the US has mobilised its ground, air and naval forces to safeguard NATO countries.
Still, some lament that the country that was once a global policeman isn’t doing more. They should reflect upon the devastating consequences of US military interventions and the neoconservative philosophy that underpinned them since the 1990s.
It is welcome that, in 2022, America’s elected officials and diplomats, Republican and Democrat alike, acknowledge what flows from indulging a fantasy. Caution correctly prevails. Moreover, many experts summarily dismiss any questioning of NATO’s eastward expansion and deny that it may have motivated Putin to order the invasion.
As families are separated and innocent children, women and men die, this is not an appropriate moment to have this debate. But it is one that should soon be had, in my view, notwithstanding the apparent dogma within the “international relations establishment” that NATO membership should generally be granted to those who aspire to it. Lastly, in these dreadful days, a small consolation can be derived from the fact that Donald Trump – who has opined of late that Putin is “smart,” “very savvy” and “genius,” and that NATO leaders are “dumb” – was not re-elected.
Mitt Romney disgustedly retorted that it is “unthinkable” and “almost treasonous” for a former US president to employ such words in assessing a malevolent dictator. Trump simultaneously has been claiming that Putin never would have gone into Ukraine if he were in the White House.
Having someone so incoherent and unhinged as the commander-in-chief in this terrifying period doesn’t bear contemplating.
Geopolitics aside, as we look on aghast, let’s hope and pray that the killing in Ukraine comes to an end as quickly as possible. War is futile.
One can be forgiven for wishing, albeit naively, that even a depraved individual like Vladimir Putin would have recognised that truth by now.
Larry Donnelly is a Boston attorney, a Law Lecturer at NUI Galway and a political columnist with TheJournal.ie. His new book – The Bostonian: Life in an Irish American Political Family – is published by Gill Books and available in all bookshops.
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