Ukraine and the Biden Doctrine

A couple of years ago I wrote a post called, The Trump Doctrine. Although I don’t usually do this, I recommend giving this a re-read or first time read before continuing as it informs the basis for this post.  However, my basic argument was that in this period of history, a Realpolitik foreign policy agenda makes more sense than a moralistic one.  Although I wouldn’t have called Trump a deep thinker of foreign policy, his instincts were of the Realpolitik variety; American interests should be the basis of prioritizing foreign policy goals.  In other words, America first.

The establishment, the media, and the Democrats (all the same thing) hated that, and they couldn’t wait to turn the foreign policy direction of the United States around once they had a Democrat in charge.  So, most of the old Obama hands are back in some capacity or other, doing what they do best, creating worldwide chaos.

As an example, a Realpolitik foreign policy wouldn’t be interested in lengthening the war, or getting involved in it.  If anything, it would be interested in calming things down.  Maybe by trying to negotiate a cease fire.  What has the Biden Administration been doing?  According to The Washington Post:

“Communications between the United States and Russia have been much more sparse since the war began last month. The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, has met with Russian officials most frequently with on and off visits and calls in Moscow. President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, spoke to his counterpart, Nikolay Patrushev, last week for the first time since the start of the conflict. Some U.S. and Russian military officials met last week at the Russian Ministry of Defense, CNN first reported.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials.”

It’s almost unbelievable that during a European war, the Secretary of State would seem to have zero interest in communicating with Russian Foreign Minister.  This would be a major scandal of course if the President had an R by his name, but that’s not even the point.  This seems intentional, as was noted in The New York Times:

“The White House will commit no American or NATO planes to the skies above Ukraine, a move American officials fear could risk turning a regional war into a global conflagration, but it is providing Ukraine with missiles that could accomplish the same task of destroying Russian aircraft.

Such is the tenuous balance the Biden administration has tried to maintain as it seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation.“

Uh OK…how does that serve the United States to keep the “Russia in a quagmire?”  That means continuing the war.  Why is it in our interest to keep the war going, while costing thousands of lives?  Simply to “own” Putin?

Yeah.  Under the “moralistic” type of foreign policy the United States is practicing, Putin is a bad guy, he’s evil, he’s Hitler II, heck he’s Hitler I.  Therefore, we have to “get him.”

This leads up to idiocy like this:

“Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.””

This sounds like regime change to international ears, and I’ve no doubt that’s how it sounded to Putin’s ears.  How are you going to negotiate with a man that you’ve targeted?  Yes, yes, I know the White House has walked this back.  Given how often the White House has to walk back Biden’s statements, they no doubt have a whole system set up to roll them out almost as soon as Biden flaps his aged gums.  But who doubts this doesn’t represent the planning in the White House and the State Department?  They think it’s within their prevue and power to replace the leader of a nuclear power.

A most dangerous game.

The truth is that replacing dictators and then waiting for democracy™ to flourish has a bad track record, but if you operate from a moralistic view of foreign policy, you don’t care about either track records or consequences, you just want to get the bad guy, no matter the cost.

The truth is most of the world isn’t made for democracy and I wouldn’t bet that it has much of a future in the US, but that’s why we need to learn to live with these “evil” dictators.  They will still be around long after we’re gone.  We need to dump our current foreign policy direction and go back to Realpolitik.  Sure, we had bad tweets, but no wars.

Kabul Spoofs Saigon

Gee, this looks familiar…

Something, something…Saigon?

No matter, it will come to me. Besides the stunningly retro Kabul evacuation images I was very much of two minds, and two hearts about the stunningly swift fall of the US supported Afghan government and the placement of the new (again) Taliban one.

On the one hand, I supported leaving Afghanistan.  I supported it when Trump proposed it (and the National Security establishment went crazy) and I supported it when Biden executed it (and the National Security establishment went quiet).  In my view, the war was lost, and had been lost for a long time.  There was no path to what I would call victory.

On the other hand…I despised that my country was, once again, facing a humiliating defeat.  For all of our technology and superior military, we were beaten by primitive tribesmen who herded goats by day and by their persistence, defeated the most powerful military the world has ever seen at night.  More than half the world is cheering tonight at that, but I’m mourning.

President Biden’s stupid arrogance in a press conference last month is coming back to bite him, but this is a defeat for the entire country, not just that of sundowning grandpa Simpson.  Biden’s stupidity didn’t make me angry; his stupidity was baked into the cake, but NPR did.

But not for the reasons you may think.

I happened to turn in to NPR Friday evening on the way back from doing errands and caught this interview with former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, also a former commander of US forces in Afghanistan.  I urge you to read or listen to the interview in full (available at the link).  One of the things I noticed is that in usual NPR interviews with establishment figures, the interviewer “questions” are really prompts to allow the establishment figure to deliver their talking points.  I’m not sure that happened this time.

DAVID PETRAEUS: Good to be back, Audie. Thank you.

CORNISH: What is your reaction to kind of the collapse of the Afghan army in the face of the Taliban in so many of these provinces?

PETRAEUS: Well, it’s disastrous. It’s tragic. But sadly, I tend to think that it was somewhat predictable. And I noted months ago that when we pulled out our 3,500 troops that led the coalition, 8,500, to go home – and perhaps most importantly, just at the time that we were withdrawing the air support on which the Afghans always relied, we also withdrew about 18,000 contractors who were there to maintain the sophisticated U.S.-provided helicopters and planes that provide the resupply, additional forces, air medevac and close air support, all of which are critical, especially when your forces come under attack simultaneously in multiple locations in a huge country that is very mountainous and has very limited ground lines of communication, decent roads

I immediately became curious.  There was no plan to replace the 18,000 contractors with Afghan nationals?  Contractors should have been a temporary solution to get locals trained up to take over the maintenance. Why was there no plan?

CORNISH: …Were you saying that there was no way for the U.S. – was – you were in charge – right? – of supporting the training and building up of this force? Did you know that it was not capable of surviving a U.S. withdrawal?

PETRAEUS: Well, we weren’t contemplating a withdrawal when I was doing this. We had 150,000 coalition forces when I was privileged to command, U.S. and all other forces in Afghanistan.

CORNISH: What were you contemplating? Did you think there would be an indefinite sustained presence?

I congratulate the Nice NPR lady for actually asking a good question. The answer?

PETRAEUS: No, not at all.

This is a lie by the way.

CORNISH: But are you saying all of this is – this has all happened after you’ve left? Like, what responsibility do you bear for how this is playing out now? Was this ever a mission that could have been successful?

PETRAEUS: Well, I think you have to understand that you could never win in Afghanistan.

OK full stop, because this is important.  “You could never win in Afghanistan.”

So what the hell was the military doing there all these years?

CORNISH: We heard from the White House saying today that they would be focused on doing that. And I think – in the time left, I want to understand this. You are – it sounds like you’re saying that this was always militarily impossible to win. Now that the Taliban have momentum on the battlefield…

PETRAEUS: But you could manage. There’s a huge difference.

Manage. 

As I pointed out earlier in the interview, when Nice NPR Lady asked Petraeus if there would be an indefinite sustained presence, he replied, “No, not at all.”  But here he’s admitting that an indefinite sustained presence was always the plan, they just never told anyone.

And that’s when I got really angry.

It’s obvious to me that the decades of having generals come to Capitol Hill to ensure us that things were improving, and things were getting better was really code that we’ve achieved stability and it can only be maintained by a consistent US military presence. I know Congress in its silliness is too busy investigating a riot by MAGA folks, but if they were interested in investigating a real crime they should investigate all of the generals who’ve testified under oath that Afghanistan was doing just fine instead of not doing at all.  In my opinion, these guys have lied to Congress and have committed felonies.  Although something should be done about this, sadly, nothing will be done about this. Because doing nothing in the face of this kind of corruption is the thing that declining nations do; nothing.

The Impeachment Shoe Dropping

At the beginning of the year I made my annual list of predictions, and included by prediction of impeachment for some time this year, “The House Judiciary Committee will vote on articles of impeachment this year. I’m not going to guess whether there will be enough votes to bring the issue to the floor of the House, but the Judiciary Committee will for sure be voting on it.  It’s too tempting to leave that candy in the pantry.” Of course, we already had a vote on impeachment back in July so this isn’t all that new.

Apparently that candy looked really good, and as the number of Democrats who were in favor of impeachment slowly rose throughout the year, it became apparent that eventually Nancy Pelosi would have to either go along or get left behind. She decided that she would rather drive the train than get run over by it, and so announced an impeachment inquiry, a made up thing that has no constitutional or legal basis.  However it does announce the official beginning of the Impeachment Bowl, “play ball!”

This trigger, the outrage over the President’s call to the Ukrainian President, hasn’t caused such uproar since…a few weeks ago during the Scottish Airport scandal, when Trump was allegedly directing military flights to his resort.  That scandal turned out to be fake as I suspect this one will be, although the difference is that the impeachment machinery of investigations will remain. After all, Pelosi announced her inquiry yesterday before either the whistleblower’s complaint or the contents of the phone call transcripts were known.  So it didn’t matter what the actual accusation was or what the content of the transcripts were, impeachment ho!

Reading the transcript, I was surprised at how banal it was, not at all the snarling Trump threatening the President of Ukraine to bring him Oppo research on Biden or no aid, as I had been prepped by MSNBC to expect.  So…no quid pro quo for military aid.  Like every other fake crisis about Trump over the past two and a half years; a nothingburger.

Meanwhile, three Democratic Senators wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor urging him to reopen investigations involved with the Mueller probe and of course, good old Sleepy Joe himself successfully got the investigation of the company Burisma shut down.  As Marc Thiessen noted in The Washington Post:

“And then there is Joe Biden. In 2016, the then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine if the government did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. According to the New York Times, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.” The Post reports that it is “unclear how seriously Shokin — who was under fire by U.S. and European officials for not taking a more aggressive posture toward corruption overall — was scrutinizing Burisma when he was forced out.” But what is clear is that Biden bragged about getting him fired, declaring last year: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b—-. He got fired.””

Well there is some quid pro quo right there! It would be hilarious if the Democratic Congress, in attempting to smear Trump with yet still more nonsense, actually drops a ton of crap on Joe Biden.  Then again, maybe that’s their plan after all…