› Actually said it...
And:
America hasn’t learned the grim truth of asymmetric warfare
By Melanie Phillips
The West’s nuclear knife is sheathed, but Russian President Vladimir Putin is brandishing his own in a menacing manner. As with Iran and the Palestinians, such disdain for human life gives fanatics the upper hand.
(JNS) In an interview about the war against Ukraine, the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli public figure, Natan Sharansky, made a key observation.
Commenting in Tablet that both Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, were far from the strongest in the world, Sharansky shared something he had learned from his time in a Soviet prison.
The ringleader in the cell, he said, wasn’t the one who was physically strongest but the one ready to use his knife. “Everybody has a knife, but not everybody is prepared to use it,” he said. “Putin believes that he is willing to use his knife and the West isn’t—that the West can only talk even if it is physically stronger.”
Of course, most people assumed that Putin would never use his knife. They thought he would never invade Ukraine and embark on a horrific campaign against its civilian population. Yet that’s exactly what he has done.
In a similar vein, no one apparently believed that Putin would ever deploy nuclear weapons. Yet with the Russian dictator issuing not-so-veiled threats about nuclear war, Britain and America are refusing to yield to the pleas by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fly bombing raids against the invading Russian forces for fear that Putin may do just that.
At a stroke, therefore, a key tenet of Western defense policy has been destroyed. For decades, Western leaders have told themselves that the principle of “mutually assured destruction”—under which any nuclear first strike would provoke a devastating nuclear counter-strike—is so obviously suicidal that no leader in his right mind would ever use nuclear weapons.
Yet what Putin is demonstrating is that this doctrine may not apply to him. The West’s nuclear knife is sheathed, but he is brandishing his own in a menacing manner and as a result, has the upper hand.
Once again, the West has made the false assumption that every world leader is fundamentally a rational actor acting in his own self-interest. But some individuals are driven by fanatical devotion to a cause which means they make an entirely different set of calculations.
This is one reason why the Biden administration is making such a catastrophic mistake over Iran.
The United States has reportedly reached a deal with the Iranian regime that will not only enable it to develop nuclear weapons at the end of mere two-and-a-half years, will not only facilitate its receipt of tens of billions of dollars to finance its attempts to annihilate Israel and its war on the West, but will also effectively de-list it as a terrorist state.
Currently, Putin, who is key to bringing Iran into the deal, is demanding that the United States lift its sanctions against Russia over Ukraine to allow it to trade with Iran.
Maybe America will capitulate over this, too. But how can one explain its astounding eagerness to empower the enemy of the West in Tehran?
A key reason is that, like former President Barack Obama who brokered the 2015 agreement, the Biden administration believes that if Iran is offered the prospect of substantial material benefit, it will put its knife away.
This is a really terrible mistake. For the regime is dominated by the Shia “Twelver” sect, which believes that bringing about an apocalypse will cause the Shia messiah, the “Twelfth Imam,” to descend to earth.
With the prize being the messianic end of days, the notion that short-term self-interest can tame Iran is risible. The fanatics in Tehran don’t care if a very large number of Iranians are killed in battle or die of privation. Vladimir Putin doesn’t care if a very large number of Russians are killed in battle or die of privation. The cause is everything.
The same is true of Islamic radicals who blow themselves up in order to cause the maximum possible loss of life among everyone else. “We will win,” they gloat, “because we love death while you love life.”
This is so chilling because it’s absolutely true. It’s the reason for what’s called “asymmetric warfare,” in which those who are relatively powerless in military terms can win against states bristling with the latest armaments.
If even a superpower like America is reluctant to use its weaponry against its enemies because it flinches from sacrificing any of its own people, then those enemies will win.
Israel faces this dilemma every day. The Palestinian Arabs are incited by an evil narrative that teaches them to hate and fear Jews, kill Israelis and steal their land. So they fire thousands of missiles from the Gaza Strip and repeatedly attempt murderous attacks from the disputed territories.
This is because they know that of all people, the Jews will go to the most extreme lengths in the world to avoid loss of life, even among their enemies.
Israel has the firepower to have disposed of the problem of Palestinian Arab violence once and for all. It has the military means to raze Gaza to the ground. It could also have expelled the Arabs from the disputed territories.
This is how other countries have always behaved against regimes and populations that attack them and show no wish to stop doing so. Yet having been under murderous siege for the entirety of its existence, Israel has chosen not to behave in this way.
It deals with the attacks on its population from the disputed territories through policing methods subject to the rule of law enforced by the human-rights-obsessed Israeli courts.
It goes to war in Gaza well after the severity of Palestinian missile attacks has become intolerable. It provides humanitarian assistance to those Arabs, who repay this by continuing to fire missiles at Israeli civilians.
When it eventually goes to war, it kills proportionately far fewer of its enemy’s civilian population than any other military in the world.
Remarkably, therefore, Israel takes significant pain to protect the life of its enemies. For this, the same Western world that is so admiring of the Ukrainians for dying gives it no credit whatsoever. Indeed, the West grotesquely accuses Israel instead of being an abuser of human rights.
The great challenge for the civilized world is how to defend itself while retaining its humanity. It needs to strike a difficult but essential balance between protecting itself against attacks and continuing to adhere to its core moral values.
Israel meets this challenge. America has stopped even trying. From the moment Obama went back on his pledge to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria, the United States started to signal to its enemies that it would no longer commit its people to fight and die for freedom.
Instead, America and the West have told themselves that war solves nothing. Against those who tell themselves that violence solves everything, this Western dogma enables fanatics to win while the innocent are killed or enslaved.
The same deluded Western world that is calling for more measures to protect the Ukrainians backs the Palestinian Arabs who slaughter Israelis. And that same Western world is currently indifferent to the assistance the United States is giving Iran that will facilitate its attempted nuclear genocide of the Jews.
Sharansky is teaching us that if a certain type of guy brings a knife to the fight, he has to be disabled before he can use it. Because otherwise, he will. It’s a lesson the West should have learned in 1939. And yet, it still hasn’t done so.
Ukraine is currently paying the price. Israel now urgently needs to ensure that it is not subjected to Iranian missiles raining down from Lebanon on Tel Aviv and Haifa while the West once again wrings its hands at the slaughter it has helped facilitate and looks on.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.
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According to Hanson, inflation has many arms:
The Biden Inflation Octopus
By Victor Davis Hanson
In the end it doesn’t matter whether Biden was deluded or diabolical. Come November, Americans will rightfully blame him for willfully damaging their lives.
The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms.
This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.
The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.
First, the Biden Administration is in such denial of inflation that it sounds to Americans simply callous and indifferent to the misery it has unleashed.
Biden officials have scoffed at price spikes as “transitory.” Or they have preposterously claimed spiraling costs are a concern only to the elite. They blame the Ukraine crisis. Or they fault the out-of-office bogeyman, Donald Trump.
The administration assures us that consumer prices are only rising at an annualized rate of 7.5 percent—as if the steepest increase in 40 years actually is not all that bad.
Yet the middle class knows that inflation is far worse when it comes to the stuff of life: buying a house, car, gas, meat, or lumber.
Second, inflation is an equal opportunity destroyer of dreams. It undermines rich and poor, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. It unites all tribes, all ideologies, all politics against those who are perceived to have birthed the monstrous octopus that squeezes everything and everyone it touches.
The conservative passbook holder sees his meager life savings eaten away. The liberal teacher’s car payments stretch from six to 10 years.
The prospective Republican home buyer sees his hard-earned potential down payment eaten away each month. The Democratic carpenter feels his new higher wages buy even less.
Third, inflation is ubiquitous, inescapable, omnipotent—and humiliating. It destroys personal dignity. And its toxicity is insidious, sort of like seeping, odorless, colorless, but nevertheless lethal carbon monoxide.
Unlike now-unpopular critical race theory, it cannot be avoided for a day. You cannot tune it out like one does the mess in Afghanistan or the now nonexistent southern border. Inflation attacks everyone in 24/7, 360-degree fashion.
It belittles you at the gas station. It downsizes you at the food market. It humiliates you in the obscene real estate market. It makes you look stupid when you are paying for a new car. It ridicules you when you buy lumber. Suddenly you apologize that you really cannot afford your child’s braces.
Fourth, inflation undermines a civil and ordered society. It unleashes a selfish “every man for himself” mentality, the Hobbesian cruelty of a “war of all against all.”
Inflation is the economic and emotional equivalent of smash-and-grab or carjacking. It is a brazen robber in broad daylight that so infuriates Americans by its boldness. It convinces them their very civilization is dying.
One day a friendly, hard-to-find plumber announces that he will work for cash only to avoid taxes that all others must pay. You notice at your neighborhood Walgreens suddenly lots of once inexpensive stuff is now pricey—and locked up because of shoplifting fears.
You sense that price stickers are mysteriously glued on top of older, original, and cheaper price stickers.
In warranted paranoia, you begin to wonder if you are being price-hiked by the car salesman, the barber, or the mechanic, and conclude that in order to survive, you too should price-hike others.
The noble fool who won’t play the inflation roulette game is reduced to the clueless standing naif victim of musical chairs—with nowhere to sit once the music ceases.
Fifth, Americans know that our current inflation is self-induced, not a product of a war abroad, an earthquake, or the exhaustion of gas and oil deposits.
Biden ignored the natural inflationary buying spree of consumers who were released from being locked down for nearly two years unable to spend.
Instead, he encouraged gorging that huge demand by printing trillions of dollars of funny money for all sorts of new redistributionist entitlements, green projects, and pet congressional programs.
The Biden Administration eroded the work ethic. It kept labor non-participation rates high by subsidizing with federal checks those staying at home.
It nihilistically slashed gas and oil production by canceling federal leases, oilfields, and pipelines while pressuring banks not to lend for fracking.
In just a year, Biden reduced America from the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization to an energy panhandler begging the Saudis and Russians to pump more of the oil that America needs but will not tap for itself.
Americans know the inflation octopus was willfully birthed. They are confused only whether Team Biden unleashed it out of incompetence—or a neosocialist idea of eroding the value of money for those who had it while gifting cash to those who didn’t.
Or was Biden deluded by crackpot “modern monetary theory,” the fool’s gold that claims printing money ensures prosperity?
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Biden was deluded or diabolical. Come November, Americans will rightfully blame him for willfully damaging their lives.
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As I have repeatedly said:
It’s Joe Biden’s Inflation
He blames Vladimir Putin, but his policies and the Federal Reserve are at fault.
The Editorial Board
Inflation keeps rising, and working Americans are paying the price in falling real incomes. That’s the bad news from Thursday’s consumer-price index report for February, and the White House can’t blame Vladimir Putin for this one, though it’s trying.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said prices rose 0.8% in the month, the fastest rate in four months. That’s 7.9% over the last 12 months, and 8.4% over the last three months. In other words, inflation is accelerating.
The inflation surge was driven by rising costs for gasoline, food and shelter (imputed rents). But the price increases were also broad-based, suggesting that the psychology of rising prices has set in with businesses and consumers. The price of services (not counting energy services) rose 0.5% for the month. Remember when inflation was supposedly caused by supply-chain shortfalls for goods?
Well, services aren’t goods. Transportation costs rose 1.4%, and shelter jumped by 0.5%. The latter are likely to keep rising because they usually trail housing costs (which aren’t directly part of the consumer-price index).
Used-vehicle prices, which some economists said a year ago explained nearly all of the inflation, were down in February but overall inflation still rose fast because inflation expectations are now embedded across the economy. The latest NFIB survey found that 68% of small business owners had raised their average prices in the last three months, a 48-year high.
All of this is bad news for workers, despite recent gains in nominal wages. A separate Labor report on Thursday found that real average-hourly earnings fell 0.8% for the month. Real wages have fallen in nine of the last 12 months, including 2.6% since February 2021. (See the nearby chart.)
That wallops low-income workers in particular because they pay a larger share of their wages for the household basics of food and energy, which are both rising fast. No wonder Americans are sour about the economy despite healthy GDP growth.
The White House was locked and loaded for the bad news on Thursday and blamed, no surprise, Mr. Putin. “Today’s inflation report is a reminder that Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike,” President Biden said in a statement. “Putin’s price hike” quickly became a Democratic and media meme.
It won’t wash. Russia’s invasion has certainly contributed to rising oil and gasoline prices in recent weeks and, as villains go, he’s top of our list. But inflation had already hit 7.5% on an annual basis in January before Russia invaded Ukraine. The prices of oil and other commodities have been on an inflation-inspired tear for months. Gasoline prices were up 6.6% in February, but they’re up 38% over 12 months.
Mr. Biden can blame Mr. Putin for many things, but not U.S. inflation. The root cause is homegrown: Two years of historically easy monetary policy, and explosive federal spending that fed economic demand even though the economy had long ago emerged from the pandemic recession.
The Ukraine invasion will feed inflation in March and coming months if oil prices keep rising. But getting inflation back under control requires a U.S. policy change: Tighten monetary policy, and control federal spending
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All about advice regarding Putin:
How to Deal With the Unappeasable Putin
The Russian leader, like Mussolini, lacks the military and economy of a great power—and has an impossible political goal.
Russia is internationally isolated, its forces are stuck in the mud in Ukraine, and it faces the toughest array of economic sanctions ever imposed on a great power. Yet Russian armies continue to advance, China appears to back Vladimir Putin’s play, Ukrainian negotiators are considering concession to some Russian demands, and Europe remains vulnerable to Russian energy blackmail.
So: Is Mr. Putin a political genius we underestimate at our peril, or is he an overrated buffoon who, intoxicated by a long run of good luck, has fatally misjudged his prospects in Ukraine?
History offers another way to think about figures like Mr. Putin. Benito Mussolini had an astonishing career, creating a political movement that ruled Italy for 20 years. His methods often were morally repugnant, but the Fascist movement he created found sympathizers and imitators from Germany to Japan. There was a time when Fascist Italy looked to be leading Europe out of the “decadence” of parliamentary democracy toward a postliberal era.
But Mussolini had an Achilles’ heel. His political project of re-creating the Roman Empire couldn’t be realized. He could build the most powerful political movement in modern Italian history, he could conquer Ethiopia, he could help Franco win the Spanish Civil War, but none of it brought his goal within reach.
Like Mussolini, Mr. Putin has a long record of success. The war in Chechnya was ugly, but he began his time in office by ending what many thought was the inevitable dissolution of the Russian Federation and reasserting Moscow’s control over its restive regions. Coming to power when oligarchs dominated Russian politics, Mr. Putin skillfully played them against one another until he emerged as the unrivaled master of the Russian scene.
He reasserted Russian power in international relations. Post-Soviet Russia was a helpless and weak state, unable to halt the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or to influence American and European power in the Balkans and Central Asia. A combination of adroit diplomacy and the ruthless use of force gave Mr. Putin a de facto veto on NATO expansion after his 2008 invasion of Georgia. In 2014 he snatched Crimea and invaded the Donbas, drawing only halfhearted sanctions from a divided West.
Defying the sanctions, and profiting from the Obama administration’s strategic confusion, Mr. Putin seized the opportunity of the Syrian civil war to support longtime Russian ally Bashar al-Assad, making a mockery of John Kerry’s pompous demand that Mr. Assad had to go. Russia’s new role in Syria gave it an entrée into Middle East politics, which it used to build a close relationship with Israel and the Arab oil producers. Employing mercenary organizations like the Wagner Group, Mr. Putin was able to extend Russian power into Libya and sub-Saharan Africa, forcing the French out of Mali. By selling sophisticated antiaircraft weapons to Turkey, he drove a wedge into NATO even as he cultivated close relations with countries like Hungary and Italy in ways that undercut European Union cohesion.
Like Mussolini, Mr. Putin was fortunate to face an ungifted generation of Western leaders. Nobody will be expanding Mount Rushmore with sculptures memorializing any of America’s post-Cold War presidents, and the generation of European leaders that included figures like Gerhard Schröder and François Hollande will not long be remembered. Playing a weak hand aggressively, Mr. Putin managed to divide and confuse this motley crew long enough to threaten the Western order in Europe and reassert Russia’s place among the great powers.
But as Mussolini discovered, diplomatic and even military victories cannot make an impossible dream come true. Mussolini was unable to build an Italian economy that could support his ambitions or a military capable of rivaling the great powers like Germany and Britain. This is where the limits of Mr. Putin’s achievements also seem to lie. After 20 years in power, he has failed to equip Russia with either the economy or the military that a great power needs. And because his power rests on such narrow and unsatisfactory foundations, his foreign policy remains one of brinkmanship and adventurism that is always vulnerable should his adversaries call his bluff—or if he miscalculates and bites off more than he can chew.
The best way to think about Mr. Putin is as a gifted tactician committed to a strategic impossibility: for Russia to regain the superpower status once held by the Soviet Union. Such leaders are unappeasable because their goals can never be reached. The rise of China, Russia’s continuing demographic decline, and its continuing inability to create a modern and dynamic economy will not end because Russian flags fly over the ruins of Kyiv.
There are two mistakes we can make about figures like Mr. Putin. One is to underestimate their talent for troublemaking if they don’t get what they want. The other is to believe that by giving in to their demands we can quiet them down. The West has made both mistakes with Mr. Putin in the past. We must try to do better now.
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Biden Is Failing the Sanctions Test
Officials worry too much about whether allies will follow to lead effectively.
Friday-afternoon news dumps are always revealing, and that includes last week’s Treasury Department clarification of U.S. sanctions on Russian banks. Don’t buy the Biden administration’s line that it’s pulling out the stops against Russia.
The president continues to insist he’s “enforcing the most significant package of economic sanctions in history” against Vladimir Putin’s regime. Some Biden loyalists are even veering toward hagiography. Connecticut’s Chris Murphy bragged last week on the Senate floor that Mr. Biden’s “stunning” diplomacy had produced “a sanctions package that is sweeping, that is unprecedented, that is breaking the back of the Russian economy.” The press nods along.
The reality is far different, which accounts for rising frustration in Congress—and growing divisions between even Democrats and the White House. The administration refused to impose sanctions in the lead-up to Mr. Putin’s invasion, naively trusting diplomacy. Yet even after Russian tanks rolled—and despite having months to prepare—the response has been slow, timid, hostage to feel-good “multilateralism” and unwilling to attack the real engine of the Russian economy: energy. Even the president’s own party is losing patience with his inadequate sanctions.
Consider that Treasury announcement. In late February Mr. Biden grandly announced sanctions targeting Russian banks. Yet on Friday, Treasury quietly clarified that the sanctions won’t apply to the banks’ energy transactions until June 24—meaning Wall Street can continue to trade in Russian oil and gas. “The energy sector of the Russian Federation economy itself is not subject to comprehensive sanctions,” explained Treasury’s website, a scandalous caveat the media largely ignored.
Sen. Rob Portman on Tuesday asked Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland to justify the decision to give the Russian energy sector a pass for four months. She explained that working “multilaterally” remained the top priority, so “we did agree to a phase-in” at the behest of energy-dependent “European allies.”
Mr. Biden this week belatedly announced a ban on Russian oil and gas—but only because congressional Democrats and Republicans were uniting to pass legislation forcing his hand. Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi supported the ban and reportedly refused to agree to a White House demand to drop it. The Biden team scrambled to get ahead of Congress by announcing the embargo itself.
The White House has also demanded congressional Democrats stand down on a bipartisan bill that would suspend Russia’s preferential trading status with the U.S.—again, seemingly in order to discuss it to death with Europe. The good news is that lawmakers in both parties said late this week that they remain undeterred and may pass the trade restriction next week—potentially forcing Mr. Biden’s hand again.
The White House is nonetheless getting its way when it comes to blocking a Republican bill from Sen. Jim Risch that would impose real sanctions on Russia’s oil, gas, mining and mineral sectors. It targets oligarchs. It would create a lend-lease program to ensure Ukraine will continue to get necessary military resources. Crucially, it provides for “secondary sanctions” against global institutions that finance the Russian economy. As Mr. Risch notes, these secondary sanctions would “force the world’s financial institutions to make a choice between Russia and Western markets” and finally “isolate” the Russian economy.
The White House is resisting all this for the same reason it resisted the Russian oil embargo. Truly punishing sanctions against Russia’s energy sector are still anathema to Old Europe allies who want to continue importing Russian oil. The administration also fears that seriously targeting Russian energy would further drive up gasoline prices, hurting Mr. Biden domestically. Senate Foreign Relation Chairman Bob Menendez was, before the invasion, working with Mr. Risch on a bipartisan bill. At the behest of the White House, he went AWOL, and Democrats last week blocked a vote on the Risch legislation.
Republicans note that for all the talk of multilateralism, the U.S. is woefully trailing Europe in other areas. Since February the European Union has imposed sanctions on at least 12 oligarchs among the Navalny 35, a list of key Putin abetters compiled by dissident Alexei Navalny’s organization. The U.K. has targeted nine of them since February; the U.S., zero. Yes, Washington has targeted a handful of Putin cronies, but it’s only a sliver of the hundreds of oligarchs who hold Russia’s wealth. It did, however, announce a “task force” to investigate oligarch behavior. Twenty-two years into the Putin regime, the U.S. government doesn’t have that information?
The Biden team will argue that sanctions work best in conjunction with allies. No doubt. But the way to get the world to join in truly punishing and isolating Mr. Putin is to lead by example and to invite or shame allies into joining the fight. It’s not the current approach, which is to yammer in the halls of Foggy Bottom and settle for the path of least resistance. Mr. Biden can talk all he wants about his plans to cripple Mr. Putin’s economy. He has yet to take the steps that might actually do it.
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It is as if Bill is reading my memos:
The West is selling out to Iran to lower gas prices
Part of the reason for the rush to re-enter a pact that will guarantee that Tehran gets a nuclear weapon is to put Iranian oil on the market. That’s a disaster for everyone.
(March 11, 2022 / JNS) Like politics, wars can make for strange bedfellows. In the Second World War, even a staunch anti-Communist like Winston Churchill saw no problem with an alliance with the Soviet Union. Making common cause with a totalitarian state led by a mass murderer like Josef Stalin was difficult to swallow, and would lead to future tragedies. But with the future of civilization at stake in 1941, Churchill had to embrace the Soviets so as to defeat a more immediate threat: Nazi Germany. As he put it at the time, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
According to the Biden administration, the United States is now in a similar position. With no end in sight to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the suffering this unprovoked war is causing continuing to grow, Western powers are struggling to come up with a response that doesn’t involve NATO forces going into combat against a nuclear power.But President Joe Biden isn’t taking a page out of Churchill’s book to build an alliance that will defeat Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin. Nor is he implementing a strategy that will do real damage to Putin’s alliance with China—a budding superpower that is an even more dangerous rogue regime. Instead, Biden seems to be primarily interested in saving his own political skin by making deals with terrorist and dictatorial regimes because that might lower American gas prices. Washington is selling out American allies like Israel in the Middle East and elsewhere merely to combat the record inflation that has grown on Biden’s watch and which is likely to lead to an epic midterm congressional defeat for the Democrats.
Doing nothing but enacting even the most severe economic sanctions—and sending arms and humanitarian aid to the embattled Ukrainians—isn’t terribly satisfying, especially with the public outrage growing about the situation. That’s why the administration is looking around the world attempting to peel away some of the Russians’ few allies in an attempt to somehow further isolate Moscow.
That was the conceit behind the recent not-so-secret visit of senior American officials to Venezuela. Their goal was, in the words of an AP report, to “unfreeze relations” between the dictatorial Socialist regime led by Nicolás Maduro and the United States to help get Venezuelan oil back on the market so as to reduce the impact of the administration’s decision to ban the importation of the vital resource from Russia. While two Americans were released from prison by Maduro’s government, there is no sign that he is willing to abandon his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nor is there any reason to think that anything that could happen in South America would have the slightest impact on the struggle in Eastern Europe.
At the same time, the United States was also hoping that a new nuclear accord with Iran, which will be merely a far more feeble version of the already dangerously weak 2015 Iran nuclear deal, would soon be completed. That may be on hold for the moment as Russia is seeking an exemption for its trade with Iran in the sanctions the West has placed on it. But no one should underestimate the determination of the administration to appease Iran, so it would be foolish to think that foreign-policy officials will not continue to push for a new accord.
While it boggles the imagination to think of how enriching and empowering the world’s leading state sponsor of international terrorism will make anyone safer, the war in Ukraine has provided another rationale for Biden’s appeasement policy. Washington believes that bringing Iran back into the community of nations—and its considerable oil reserves back onto the market—will also help the effort to isolate Russia, whose main national asset other than its nuclear arsenal is its vast supplies of oil and natural gas.
The point being is that if you think stopping Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine is the world’s top priority, then moral compromises are going to be necessary. And if that means holding our noses and doing business with Maduro or Tehran’s murderous theocrats, then that is what must be done.
But there’s more at work here than realpolitik. Unlike the alliance with the Soviet Union that ensured that the Allies would eventually defeat Hitler, doing business with Venezuela and Iran will do little or nothing to halt the slaughter in Ukraine.
A serious approach to stopping Russia would be rooted in the recognition that American efforts to cozy up to rogue regimes like Russia, China and Iran have to end. As Eli Lake outlines in a cogent analysis of the situation in Commentary magazine, that would mean understanding that such countries are a threat to the entire community of nations. Stopping them from gaining ascendancy—let alone preventing future Ukraine wars—involves, among other things, committing to disentangling the American and Chinese economies, and altering the international system to build an alternative to a United Nations that is unable to defend the rule of law or prevent itself from becoming hostage to dictatorial and anti-Semitic governments whose goals are antithetical to the idea of collective security or world peace.
But Biden is about as likely to rethink the Democratic Party’s devotion to multilateralism and the United Nations as he is to defy his party’s leftist base on any other issues.
The administration would like to halt the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine. To its credit, it is not so foolish as to listen to the delusional advice of those who want NATO to become a combatant in the war by imposing a no-fly zone that would have unknowable and likely catastrophic consequences. The grim truth is that after cutting the Russians off from the international economy and sending armaments, Washington has likely done all it could reasonably hope to help Ukrainians, who are bravely resisting the Russian onslaught. But if Putin is truly determined to get his way by any means possible, then he continues to hold all the cards.
Still, it’s time to stop the pretense that outreach to Venezuela or Iran is really about Russia.
With respect to Venezuela, it’s a tragic abandonment of the already beleaguered democracy movement in that country that has been as thoroughly squelched by the leftist regime as anything Putin has done in Russia or would like to do in Ukraine.
With respect to Iran, the rush to get their oil on the market is more than a betrayal of principle that won’t help democracy in Ukraine or anywhere else. It’s a sellout of American security interests, as well as allies like Israel and the Arab states that are directly threatened by an accord that doesn’t put off an Iranian nuclear weapon so much as it guarantees that Tehran will get one at the end of the decade or sooner. As Gabriel Noronha details in an article in Tablet, the new deal is “much, much worse” in terms of its appeasement of Iranian terror, in addition to failing to accomplish the pact’s stated goal of preventing this fanatical Islamist regime from becoming a nuclear power.
The current rush to implement this disgraceful measure is rooted in Biden’s political woes. The record inflation ravaging American households is the fruit of his failed policies that downgraded American oil production—not just the recent spike in gas prices caused by sanctions on Russia. But what he’s doing now is creating an existential threat to Israel and other Iranian targets merely in order to try and keep the prices at the pump from going any higher while pretending that it will stop the bloodshed in Ukraine.
It’s difficult to imagine a more cynical or destructive policy than one that endangers friends merely in order to boost the president’s political standing at home. Much as Americans want to put a lid on gas prices, to buy that outcome by appeasing Iran is an immoral abandonment of American interests and obligations that won’t aid Ukraine or stop Putin.
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Bidenese B-
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