2 years ago
When he ran for president in 2020, Joe Biden structured his foreign policy doctrine on two major themes: that democracies must triumph over autocracies and that he would restore the world order turned on its head by Donald Trump.
More than a year later, these two pillars are under the most intense assault to date amid Russia’s invasion of its neighbor Ukraine.
It is a precarious moment for Biden, who will be judged on how he steers the country through the remilitarization of Europe, which is bone-chillingly reminiscent of the Cold War. And it’s one that could either further upend or begin to help stabilize his political standing back home.
Russia’s attacks come as he is preparing to deliver his first State of the Union address next week, as well as unveil the first Black woman nominee to the Supreme Court in the coming days. But before he can turn to either of those set pieces, Biden must first figure out how he’s going to manage a crisis halfway across the globe that is unfolding in real time. His administration has pledged to unite the international community and impose further consequences on Russia — likely the full battery of sanctions — for its “unprovoked and unjustified attack” on Ukraine.
“The world will hold Russia accountable,” he said in a statement late Wednesday, pledging during a call with the Ukrainian president to rally international condemnation of Russia.
Inside the White House and among close outside political allies, there is a sense that Biden — unlike during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer — has some political space to maneuver. Democrats have been heartened by the bipartisan acclamation for the president’s approach so far, including from unusual suspects. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has praised the president for reinforcing Eastern flank allies while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said he was lifting his hold on State Department nominees after the president moved to reimpose sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the pipeline delivering natural gas from Russia to Europe.
Biden advisers and allies also recognize that, in contrast to the near-uniform chorus of criticism they encountered over ending the Afghan war, Republicans are badly fractured on how to approach the unfolding conflict in Ukraine — and how hard to come down on Putin.
There’s little confidence that a new era of competition with Russia will suddenly restore the country’s political center, or take the steam out of modern partisanship. But they argue that the Republicans who have been lauding Putin — everyone from Donald Trump to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson — are playing to a winnowing crowd and will find themselves increasingly out of step with the majority of Americans.
“There obviously is still a lot to play out in terms of how the situation unfolds, but President Biden has shown strong and steady leadership in standing up to Putin, and he has come across as being very much in command of the situation,” said Geoff Garin, the Democratic pollster, offering a flash assessment of the shifting political landscape around Russia.
“On the other hand, the pro-Putin rhetoric coming out of the likes of Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson is real trouble for the Republican Party, and puts other Republicans in a difficult and awkward position,” Garin added.
While many Republicans have remained unsparing in their criticism of Biden — often arguing that his handling of Afghanistan and failure to pursue a sanctions regime against Russia sooner helped cause the current crisis — their divisions over what to do now have taken some of the focus away from the White House. Trump, for one, has repeatedly praised Putin as “smart” and characterized the totality of sanctions he faces as a pittance, rather than the heavy toll that Biden and European allies view them.
Carlson, meanwhile, has downplayed the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, asking why Americans should dislike Putin, let alone adopt an adversarial stance towards him.
A person familiar with the White House’s thinking said that inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the Fox host is perceived as someone with a “toxic ideology” who is “playing a character he invented, not communicating sincere beliefs, which are often antithetical to the beliefs he spoke about in public for many years, including on his MSNBC show.”
But there is also recognition that the strand of thinking Carlson represents has been adopted by elected Republicans or those running for office. These individuals are already serving as a foil for Democrats eager to rally the country behind the president during turbulent times.
“It’s an unfortunate sign of the political times that there would be this much division around one of the major parties in terms of how we respond, or maybe even if we respond in some cases, to someone that is literally disrupting the world order at a magnitude that we haven't seen since the end of World War II,” said Jeremy Butler, chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Biden has found himself in tricky global entanglements before. And, in those instances, he has often demonstrated a large degree of self-confidence in his foreign policy prescriptions, most recently his resolute determination to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Administration officials have been pushing the idea that Russia’s invasion into Ukraine will ultimately backfire on Putin and Russia’s wealthy oligarchs.
Officials have been sharing an op-ed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that argues the Russian leader had left “his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.”
Biden has stressed repeatedly that U.S. troops will not be dispatched to Ukraine to fight in the nascent war. The U.S. response, instead, will come via diplomatic and economic means. Here, too, his domestic political standing could be aided by Republican divisions, experts say, noting that Congress will continue to find it difficult to agree on legislation that could conceivably hem in the White House by imposing sanctions that go beyond what Biden might want, or tie his hands in other ways.
“Biden’s actual room to maneuver on Ukraine and his policy response has not really been that effectively restrained,” said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert and co-editor of the Liberal Patriot, who has written extensively about political sectarianism and its impact on America. “I look at what he’s done the last two or three weeks, and it’s hard to point to anything practical that either Republicans that are trying to constrain Biden, or Democrats who have a different view, have had an impact on.
“They have made a lot of noise, but it hasn’t actually effectively changed things.”
Where congressional and broader political divisions could hurt Biden, Katulis argues, is in failing to show unity on the world stage at a critical juncture. He often jokes with people about how, if former President Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech from 1987 were delivered today, “there would be 10 different views on it.” Adversaries like Russia, Katulis surmised, would seek to further exploit those divisions.
Already, Biden has faced some second-guessing over whether he and allies could have done more to prevent Putin from acting. But Charles Kupchan, senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted that the president wouldn’t suffer for the course he ultimately took.
“I don’t think he’ll be judged on whether or not he was able to block a Russian invasion because that’s not in his power to do,” Kupchan said.
Instead, he said, the president will be graded on how he handles the path ahead.
Max Tani contributed to this report.
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