The American president has chosen to treat the Kremlin as a power. The aggressive use of intelligence acted as a deterrent
FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON. If the breach in Putin’s “niet” wall were to widen a little further and give further space to diplomacy, American President Joe Biden, trained at the time of the Cold War, became an influential senator at the time of US global supremacy and president over the years of the return of the spheres of influence, he could claim the success of his strategy: a hybrid between dialogue with the “enemy” and constant calls for a muscular deterrence, in the form of sanctions, intelligence revelations and troop deployments.
Biden moved step by step, compacting the European allies, re-establishing the preferential line of dialogue with London, strengthening NATO and giving it a mission with defined and traditional outlines and even finding the support of the notables of the Republican Party, something not to be taken for granted in the America torn by deep internal wounds.
Biden knows Ukraine well, its internal dynamics – between imprecise reforms and oligarchs who have returned to raise their heads despite the promises of President Zelensky – and the external threats linked to Russian intrusiveness. As vice president he went there six times and had been among the supporters of the Maidan uprising when figures such as Victoria Nuland – now professor of the Russian dossier at the State Department – supported the demonstrators in the square in Kiev.
This knowledge enabled him to avoid two mistakes that cost his predecessors dearly. The first was that of George W. Bush who too lightly sponsored Tbilisi’s accession to NATO; the second was the relegation of Moscow to a “regional power” certified by Obama who in the name of the Asian pivot and the attention to be paid to China at first left the field open to the Russians only to find them more assertive than ever in many crisis scenarios.
Biden has chosen to treat the Kremlin as a power and to consider its security concerns. By doing so, he pampered Putin’s ego with a summit in June in Geneva and several phone calls. He brought him back to a first-rate dimension with the aim of disarming him. And by doing this Biden himself put himself on a terrain more congenial to him, that of the ancient language of the Cold War made up of containment, deterrence. And special relations with the European allies thus giving way to that “America is back”, proclaimed with emphasis at the 2021 Munich Security Conference.
In Washington, the NATO policy of “open doors” is a totem pole, but the Biden administration has never made it clear – with a strong sense of realism – that it wants Ukraine into it “immediately”, nor that it has invited it. That’s why if the hypothesis of freezing his membership in the Alliance were to pass, Biden would have no problem claiming it as an acceptable solution.
Biden can also boast of having compacted NATO around the American moves, denying with the facts that the definition of “brain death” given to him by Macron in 2019 was improper. It was Washington that accelerated military deployment and increased armaments to protect the Ukrainians and the Alliance’s Eastern Front. The other countries followed, also aligning themselves with the intelligence information that America fed into the media circuit with the aim of unveiling Russian moves in advance. Biden has shown that American leadership is steadfast and decisive and that without the US, security in Europe is uncertain by brushing up on Bob Kagan’s old saying that “America comes from Mars, Europe from Venus.”
And here paradoxically lies the stain for the White House, namely the inability to get out of the opposition with Moscow and let the Europeans manage it from a position of authority. Biden overwhelmed Scholz in the White House, silenced him on Nord Stream 2 and “America’s ability to keep him from starting.” Washington does not trust all the European heads: the guarantees on hard and severe sanctions are fine – this is the reasoning they do in diplomatic circles – as long as they need to be used as a deterrence. The fear is that in the event of deterioration, the alliance would also collapse in the face of the response to be given to Moscow between distinctions, fears for gas and accelerations. And that’s the red line that Biden doesn’t want to cross. For the sake of Ukraine and the stability of the US-Europe pact.
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