Dear readers, US President Joe Biden has discovered the fountain of youth! Let’s hope whatever new substance he started ingesting last month will soon be made available to all of us. Consider this flurry of activity by the newly energized 82-year-old:
- October 22: The US announces it will finance the drone bombing of western Russia
- November 8: The US announces it will deploy military contractors to Ukraine
- November 18: The US announces it will support long-range strike into Russia with US-provided missiles
- November 19: The US announces it will start giving Ukraine anti-personnel landmines for the first time
Joe Biden has turned what it means to be a lame-duck president on its head. On their way out his team is pulling the trigger on everything Ukraine-related they previously considered, but ultimately balked at.
The approval of technical, intelligence, and planning support for a missile strike campaign into Russia is the big one, especially if it will come to include strikes on economic targets, simply because Putin has defined it as such, and we thus know it is a big deal to him. (In a war where very little else has moved him.) But I think appreciating there has been a whole flurry of decisions that get the US deeper into the war and will heighten the enmity for the US in Russia is also important.
That’s dramatic framing that’s good for clicks. but what if the reality is more mundane?
And it raises the question of what Trump thinks about all of this. In one view Trump is a Ukraine War dove who is very motivated to settle the war quickly, and the Biden people are making these calls to complicate his agenda. On the other end of the spectrum would be the view that Trump is quite happy with these decisions and in the loop on them.
Having seen his cabinet appointments I’m personally closer to the latter view. I think these are Biden admin decisions, but Mike Waltz is kept in the loop and nodding along. Trump is someone who is obsessed with deals and dealmaking but specifically he is obsessed with deals that can be realistically presented as him having “won” the deal, and his approach to negotiations is crude.
These Biden team decisions turn the temperature to the “max pressure” setting Trump likes to start his negotiations at, while keeping him from having to pay the political price at home for enacting them, and even keeping his hands clean before Moscow.
There’s a lot of continuity here, and Trump will be happy that if these backfire Biden will get the blame, but if they enhance the US position (as the neocons he nominated are telling him they will) it’s he who will benefit.
And if he doesn’t deliver the promised peace his allies and backers have the first ready-made excuse: “Biden sabotaged it”, it wasn’t Trump’s fault.
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