Six months after the acrimonious exit from Afghanistan, Russia’s threat to Ukraine has left Joe Biden with yet another foreign crisis to deal with, when his main foreign interest is challenging China and his greatest urgency, advancing his agenda. internal politics. The president has chosen to tone down any optimism and expose stark prospects: he has shared intelligence information on the Kremlin’s alleged maneuvers to create a pretext to justify an invasion, he has expressed his conviction that Vladimir Putin wants to intervene as soon as February, and has threatened to respond with unprecedentedly harsh economic sanctions.
Opposite, it has run into complaints from the Kiev Government itself, which warns against alarmism; against the most progressive flank of his party, which opposes Russia’s maneuvers but questions the heavy hand in the conflict; the scourge of the Trumpist Republicans, who criticize US involvement and with the task of winning the trust of European allies after the tensions created as a result of the Kabul disaster and the defense agreement with the United Kingdom and Australia. Washington finds itself in the crossfire of various interests. The crisis provides the president with the opportunity to achieve a significant diplomatic victory, and thus polish his long-standing experience in foreign policy, but also the risk of carrying another failure.
“After what happened with Afghanistan and with the agreement on submarines [pacto de defensa con Reino Unido y Australia] and how it angered the European allies, the Biden Administration has made a lot of effort to share information and plans with the Europeans, to achieve a common diplomatic front, and I think they have achieved it to a large extent, ”says the analyst by telephone. Michael Kimmage, historian specializing in the Cold War and in relations between the United States and Russia. Even so, he adds, “it is very difficult for Biden to balance the concerns of the Baltic republics, Poland and Sweden, which feel directly threatened by Russia’s military moves in Belarus and Ukraine, on the one hand; and at the same time, those in Germany and Western and Southern Europe, who do not want to see an excessive militarization of this conflict”.
Within the United States, Biden also moves between different sensibilities, despite the fact that the bulk of the population agrees, regardless of the party they vote for, that Vladimir Putin is the villain of this story. In a Pew Research poll conducted between January 10 and 17, up to 41% see Russia as an enemy (39% for Republicans, 43% for Democrats) and 49% as a competitor (50% for Republicans and 49% for Democrats). Russian military reinforcement in Ukraine is considered a major threat by 26% (27%-26%) and a minor threat by 33% (36%-33%).
Among the political class, the Republicans face the Ukrainian crisis divided: on the one hand, the traditional hawk who asks Biden for a tough hand in the face of the Kremlin’s challenges; on the other, the new batch of acolytes of Donald Trump and his doctrine, who question the interventions of the United States abroad and even sympathize with the figure of Putin.
JD Vance, Ohio Senate candidate and author of the famous book Hillbilly, a rural elegy, who has decided to take all the flags of Trumpism, summed up in a Twitter message: “Do you hate America unless you want to send our best people to die in a war that has nothing to do with us?” “It bears repeating: our leaders care more about the border with Ukraine than ours,” he noted at another point.
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Tucker Carlson, the great conservative television star of the moment, one of the most influential voices for the American right, asked a Republican congressman, Michael Turner, on the air: “Honest question, why should we side with the Ukraine in this and not on the side of Russia? Turner replied that Russia “is an authoritarian regime” that wants to impose its will on “a democracy” like Ukraine and that Americans tend to “side with the democracies.”
The left flank of the Democratic Party has also expressed misgivings. The leaders of caucuses Congressional progressive Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee issued a joint statement this week warning: “We are deeply concerned that further troop deployments, indiscriminate sanctions and a multi-million dollar surge in lethal weapons will only increase tensions and increase calculation errors. The United States and NATO must not play with this strategy.”
Neither the United States nor NATO have yet talked about deploying soldiers inside Ukraine, a country that is not part of the Atlantic Alliance, although they do help with weapons and deploy troops in the region. Biden confirmed on Friday afternoon that he would send troops to eastern Europe and the Baltic countries in the short term, although he added that they would not be “too many”.
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