The Ukraine War isn’t going well for anybody, but it seems like the country making the biggest mistakes is the biggest country not even fighting there.
Yeah, that’s the United States, led, as it were, by Presidentish Joe Biden.
There’s also an undercurrent of progressives hellbent on starting World War III, but we’ll get to them shortly.
Before even the start of the Ukraine War, Biden was pinned down (willingly) on his left flank by his party’s “green” interests.
Case in point: Biden’s ban on Russian oil imports.
Oil is a commodity, which means that if we don’t buy Russian oil, somebody else will. The way to hurt Russia financially would be to do everything in our power to lower the price of oil. Everything Biden is doing (or not doing) will keep prices high or even raise them further.
That’s money in Vladimir Putin’s pocket, and money taken out of yours.
The alleged American president’s response to the Ukraine War has been so detrimental to America’s own interests that everyone sees him as weak. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that two of the Middle East’s richest petrostates wouldn’t even take Biden’s call:
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticisms of American policy in the Gulf.
“Hi, it’s the leader of the world’s most powerful nation and I was wondering if … Hello? Hello?”
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A radicalized segment of the American Left has gone from being peaceniks to demanding that Biden elevate the Ukraine War to World War III. Witness the insanity from last weekend at [checks notes, nearly goes into shock] the Guggenheim:
#NewYork artists hold a campaign with a request to make a no-fly zone over #Ukraine️ Paper airplanes, calling to stop Putin, were thrown from all the floors of @Guggenheim museum ✈️ #UkraineRussianWar pic.twitter.com/Qrq5IKbCtd
— Worldnews_NWS (@WorldnewsNws) March 6, 2022
It’s one thing when the embattled president of Ukraine asks for a U.S./NATO no-fly zone. It’s quite another when thousands of Americans demand that we start shooting down Russian warplanes.
“The Air-to-Air Missiles of March” doesn’t have quite the same ring as The Guns of August, but the result would be the same.
So we have Democrats refusing to prick the oil price bubble and leftists leading war chants … surely things couldn’t get worse than that, right?
Wrong.
The prevailing cancel culture makes it easy — almost mandatory — for companies large and small to punish “the other” for no good reason.
That’s just one example out of many: Russian citizens who had nothing to do with this Ukraine War losing their livelihoods so that their employers can signal all their virtue.
When McDonald’s closes all 850 locations in Russia, does that hurt Putin and the oligarchs? When Coca-Cola stops sales in Russia, who does that hurt? When a Russian mom can’t use her Visa card to buy groceries, that’s not Putin’s concern.
By all means, sanction the ever-loving hell out of Putin and his coterie of thieving cronies. But leave the Russian people alone.
The Russian people are not our enemy. This Ukraine War is the work and decision of just one man: Vlad Putin. But by weaponizing cancel culture against an entire people — while wrecking their domestic economy — we play right into Putin’s propaganda efforts.
The West, he says, wants to destroy Russia. That was never true before, but Biden and the American Left are making it true now.
I don't know what other fallout there might be but it will come.
But fear not! Putin is doing pretty much everything wrong in his Ukraine War, too.
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Putin’s first mistake was going to war in the first place, even though he likely felt he had no choice.
ASIDE: Can anyone tell me the last time an offensive war ended in victory for the aggressor? The most recent example I can think of is the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. And that one was completely overmatched on our side, fighting to take parts of Mexico that had hardly any Mexicans in them.
Putin apparently believed his top general — “who has never been a professional soldier” — that the Russian Army was up to the task of quickly defeating Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was supposed to flee or be killed/captured — not lead a heroic resistance. Ukraine’s kleptocratic government was supposed to collapse. Putin seems not to have had a Plan B, aside from the old Russian habit of firing artillery and rockets at stuff until even the rubble stops bouncing.
Putin failed to heed the lesson of Grozny: That even a besieged city, cut off from all reinforcement, can hold out for weeks. Kyiv is neither completely under siege nor cut off from reinforcement.
Putin also seems to have badly underestimated the West’s willingness to put the screws to the Russian economy, even though we’re putting the screws to ourselves, too.
If the war continues going badly for Russia, it ought to be remembered not as the Ukraine War or even the Russo-Ukraine War.
It ought to be called Putin’s War.
But at the rate Joe Biden is going, the Ukraine War might end up being known as the Putin-Biden War, and we all get to pay for it.
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