On Thursday night, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will face each other in the first ever debate between a sitting president and a former president. Given their past performances, there are many questions each should have to answer. Here are four topics on the war in Ukraine that Biden should have to address.
You Knew, So Why Did You Do It?
Biden was aware of warnings from people who knew best that encouraging NATO expansion east was provocative and a dangerous crossing of Russia’s reddest of red lines. He knew because he knew the people who gave the warnings. Robert Gates said that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching” and that it was “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.” Gates was Secretary of Defense when Biden was vice president and busily midwifing the coup in Ukraine. William Burns said, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite” and warned that, if NATO expanded to Ukraine, “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.” Burns is the former ambassador to Russia and currently Biden’s Director of the CIA.
More reckless still, Biden didn’t need to be told by the Russia experts. As the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he already knew of the dangers of NATO’s continued eastward expansion. In a 1977 speech, Biden said, “I think the one place that the greatest consternation would be caused in the short term…would be to admit the Baltic States now in terms of NATO-Russian, U.S.-Russian relations. And if there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance…in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction in Russia—I don’t mean military—it would be that.”
Since Biden knew how seriously Russia viewed NATO expansion eastward as a threat, why did he so uncompromisingly insist on endorsing NATO’s 2008 promise to one day admit Ukraine into NATO and on enforcing NATO’s open door policy? Why, in the weeks before the war, when Russia delivered proposals on security guarantees to the United States demanding no NATO expansion into Ukraine, did the U.S. refuse to even put it on the table for negotiations?
Why Not Even Try to Negotiate?
That prewar refusal to negotiate would not be the last time Biden would refuse to negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine. He would refuse to negotiate, not only in the days leading up to the war, but in the first days after the invasion, before all the horrific loss of life and land. The Biden administration would go on encouraging Ukraine to fight Russia, instead of finding a lasting peace, in defense of the “core principle” that, like every country, Ukraine “has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances.”
When talks between Russia and Ukraine came tantalizingly close to a diplomatic settlement in Istanbul in the early days of the war, the U.S. chose, not to encourage and nurture them, but to discourage them. There is now an overwhelming chorus of first hand testimony that the U.S. and its allies discouraged, and even blocked, the diplomatic process instead of midwifing it. The chorus includes participants in the talks like former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Turkish officials and Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team, as well as reporting on the intervention of then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. A recent article in The New York Times adds that “American officials were alarmed at the terms” and patronizingly asked the Ukrainians, who had agreed to the terms, whether they “understand this is unilateral disarmament.” America’s Polish partners moved to derail the talks because they “feared that Germany or France might try to persuade the Ukrainians to accept Russia’s terms.”
Even now, when Russian President Vladimir Putin is offering to “immediately…cease fire and begin negotiations” on terms not very different from the terms that the two sides were so close to finalizing in Istanbul, the Biden administration refuses to explore the possibility as Ukraine continues to lose kilometers of land and thousands of lives.
What is the Endgame?
Biden insists on keeping NATO’s door open to Ukraine, and he has discouraged negotiating an end to the war. So, with Russia seemingly winning the war, with Ukraine losing land and running out of men, what is the endgame?
When interviewers from Time asked Biden that very question on May 28—”So what is the endgame though in Ukraine and what does peace look like there?”—Biden gave the shocking answer that the endgame is not NATO membership for Ukraine: “We have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in the future.” But that relationship, he explained, “doesn’t mean NATO.”
The truth is that, since the war began, no one has been willing to offer Ukraine the NATO membership that they were promised and that they are fighting for. Despite the war for “core principles,” the U.S. continues to offer only that “Ukraine will become a member of NATO when all Allies agree and when conditions are met.”
In the most recent edition of NATO’s promise to the Ukrainians who are dying for NATO’s open door policy, the upcoming NATO summit in July will offer Ukraine only “a bridge to their membership.” Ukraine will be offered an “irreversible path” to NATO without “bringing Ukraine any further along the path” to NATO.
Biden should be asked again what the endgame is if he will neither negotiate away Ukraine’s NATO membership nor grant it.
Superpower Responsibility in a Nuclear World
Biden keeps encroaching closer and closer to Russia’s red lines made bold by the belief that Putin is only bluffing when he threatens to enforce them.
Recently, the Biden administration extended the permission “to use American air defense systems, guided rockets and artillery to fire into Russia only along Ukraine’s northeastern border, near Kharkiv,” which is already encroaching on Russia’s red lines, to firing American weapons “anywhere that Russian forces are coming across the border from the Russian side to the Ukrainian side to try to take additional Ukrainian territory.”
Biden had long insisted that American missiles will never be fired into Russian territory because “the idea—the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment…and American crews, just understand… that’s called ‘World War Three.’ Okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys.” “We will not,” he has insisted, “fight the third world war in Ukraine.” Nonetheless, the latest encroachment on Russia’s red lines, is “the first time an American president had allowed the limited use of American weapons to strike inside the borders of a nuclear-armed adversary.”
It is reckless to base America’s military policy on the assumption that Putin is bluffing about the enforcement of red lines. The invasion of Ukraine itself was the enforcement of Russia’s “brightest of all red lines.” But even if Putin had not yet enforced a red line, it is reckless to act provocatively on the assumption that the leader of a nuclear power will not enforce his red lines if existentially threatened.
Leaders of superpowers have a responsibility to the world they lead. Biden seems to have forgotten what American statesmen have remembered since the beginning of the nuclear cold war. Nuclear powers possess nuclear weapons for a reason. And remembering that reason, and gravely doing everything you can to not trigger that reason, is what allowed the two superpowers not to blow up the world in the first Cold War.
Biden’s Russia policy irresponsibly ignores the leader of a superpower’s responsibilities in a nuclear world. And that policy is based on the weak foundation of the calculation that Putin is bluffing when he says he will enforce his red lines. In the debate, Biden should be asked about that responsibility of the leader of a superpower.
These questions—why Biden insisted on promising NATO membership to Ukraine when he knew Russia would “fight back hard,” why he discouraged a peaceful resolution to the war that satisfied Ukraine’s terms, what is Biden’s endgame, and why is he pushing red lines and risking nuclear war—are just four of the questions that Biden should have to answer in Thursday’s debate.
