Joe Biden's War in Ukraine

Jeffrey Sachs is not a conservative Republican. He is not running for Congress and is not angling for a job in the next Republican administration. He is normally considered a man of the left, though on the issue of funding for Ukraine he comes down against the administration and the Democratic Party. For now he is a professor at Columbia University.

Sachs does not link Ukraine funding to our own border security. But, he is persuaded that the Biden policy toward Ukraine is a calamity. He believes that the war ought to be stopped through a negotiated settlement.

Now that the United States Senate has passed a new bill, that funds military activity in the Ukraine and Israel, not to mention Taiwan, Sachs is rather sanguine about the whole project. Or should we say the Ukraine boondoggle.

Surprisingly, Sachs places blame for the situation in Ukraine squarely on the Biden administration, though he notes the connivance of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer:

President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and US taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election.

The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not "save" Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.

I will spare you the gory details, but the issue was whether or not Ukraine would be joining NATO. Here, the Biden administration showed its true ineptitude:

In 2021, after 7 years of fighting and more than 14,000 deaths in the Donbas, Putin called on newly elected President Biden to stop NATO enlargement and engage in negotiations with Russia over mutual security arrangements. Biden rejected Putin’s call to end the gambit of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

In February 2022, Putin launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) invasion to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called for negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality. Within a month, a framework agreement to end the fighting was reached between Ukraine and Russia, based on Ukraine’s neutrality and an end to NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine. Biden stepped in to stop the deal, with the U.S. informing Zelensky that the U.S. would not support neutrality.

The Biden administration was looking to engage in a conflict with Russia. It preferred that the war would be fought by Ukrainian proxies, with American funds. The Biden team would take up an economic war against Russia, because it wanted to show the world how macho it was:

Biden and team had still more failed tricks up their sleeve. They firmly believed that U.S. financial sanctions—freezing Russia’s assets and cutting it out of the SWIFT banking system—would cripple the Russian economy and cause Putin to relent. In fact, they expected that the ensuing economic crisis would topple him. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.

It became an enormous waste of human life and money:

Then they expected that NATO weaponry would trounce Russia on the battlefield. That too did not happen. Then they expected that Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” in the summer of 2023, backed by Pentagon and CIA planners, would defeat Russia. Instead, Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and wounded—its military hardware destroyed.

The entire war, including the loss of Ukrainian territory, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, and the utter waste of more than $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to date, could easily have been avoided.

At the onset of the conflict I joined those who suggested that the aggrieved parties sit down and negotiate a settlement. I do not pretend to superior foreign policy knowledge, but it felt right at the time.

Now, Sachs promotes the same diplomatic solution:

Now, Biden and Schumer want to throw more Ukrainian lives and more tens of billions of dollars at this glaring failure. They want to do this in a rushed vote, without any Congressional let alone public oversight, without hearings, and without any strategy. The fact is they want to save Biden from the embarrassment of a decade of puerile and failed plotting, at least until the November election.

There remains one answer for Ukraine’s security: diplomacy and neutrality. That solution doesn’t cost lives or money. It was Ukraine’s choice before the 2014 coup and again in 2022 until stopped by Biden. It is the path that Biden and the Senate Democrats still refuse to take.

Why do they not want to take that path? Perhaps because they feel compelled, all things considered, to show how strong and manly they are. Considering how much the Biden administration has projected weakness, it might feel the need to get involved in a fight, the better to erase the impression they have created.

While we all agonize over Joe Biden’s cerebral deficiencies, we do not pay enough attention to the appalling errors that Biden and Co. are making-- as a function of that deficiency.

Republicans, led by Sen. Mitch McConnell, are happy to fight to the last Ukrainian. Are they living their glory days of the Cold War? Whatever the case, the truth remains that this mess is Biden’s mess and that hundreds of thousands of people are dying-- for what exactly?

Note-- I now have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.