The alarms are growing louder about the Ukraine crisis — and
questions are becoming sharper as to how the issue will reverberate through
domestic politics of United States. It is feared that a full-scale invasion of Russia would
pitch the US President Joe Biden into new turmoil.
The failure to
prevent such a move would be regarded as a diplomatic failure by the White
House. It would be another foreign policy misstep to add to the chaotic
withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.
But Republicans are divided on Ukraine, with some the most
pro-Trump elements of the GOP voicing isolationist sentiments. Their views
complicate the GOP’s traditional hawkish image.
Biden has ruled out involving US troops directly in a ground
war in Ukraine, even in the event of a Russian invasion. He faces the challenge
of keeping NATO allies on the same page if Russian President Vladimir
Putin mounts some kind of aggressive operation that stops short of a traditional,
full-scale military assault.
In alluding to this conundrum at a recent press conference,
Biden appeared to suggest that Putin could get away with a “minor incursion” —
a statement that infuriated the Ukrainians, and which the White House tried to
clean up, with limited success.
At a Pentagon briefing on Friday, Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, said that Putin had assembled all he needed for a full-scale
invasion of Ukraine. The Russians are now estimated to have more than 100,000
troops adjacent to the border.
Milley told reporters that “you’d have to go back quite a
while to the Cold War days to see something of this magnitude.”
The comment echoed Biden’s remark last week that a Russian
invasion would “change the world” and would, in practical terms, be “the
largest invasion since World War Two.”
But one pressing political question is whether Biden will
play a political price at home for a failure of diplomacy if Putin presses
ahead.
Robert Wilkie, a former Secretary of Veterans Affairs and,
before that, an Under Secretary of Defense during the Trump administration,
faulted the Biden administration, saying, “we haven’t been playing the long
game while Putin has.”
Wilkie, who was also Assistant Secretary of Defense under
President George W. Bush and is now a visiting fellow at the conservative
Heritage Foundation, argued that there were longer-term moves the
administration could make to constrain Putin, such as “opening up an
avenue for Finland and Sweden to come into the NATO family” to help change the
overall dynamic in Europe.
But he also noted there were real difficulties, not least
Russia’s increasing closeness with China, which he argued made sanctions less
likely to be effective.
“Unlike in the past, Putin has a banker now — and that’s
Beijing,” he said.
Liberal voices are of course more supportive of Biden’s
position, arguing that he has played his hand as well as he could, including
making clear to Putin that there will be severe consequences for an invasion.
“The US does have a number of tools that it can use that
would be really painful for the Kremlin and potentially catastrophic for Russia
overall,” said Max Bergmann, a senior fellow and the Director for Europe and
Russia at the liberal Center for American Progress.
Bergmann added, “We should not think of this as a way to
find a silver bullet that will cause Vladimir Putin to not invade or to say
‘uncle.’” He argued Putin had painted himself into a corner with his troop
build-up and would have to go ahead with some form of action at risk of losing
face.
Russia denies it has any intention of invading Ukraine,
assurances that are dismissed in Washington because of the troop movements. The
Kremlin wants a formal commitment that Ukraine, which is not a NATO member,
will never be allowed to join the alliance. But that kind of guarantee is a
non-starter with the US and other western nations.
Paul Gosar has contended, “We have no dog in the Ukraine
fight.” A recent story from Axios noted the influence of Fox News
broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who has been openly skeptical about the need
for the US to get involved on Ukraine’s side. The website also noted a number
of GOP candidates who have sounded similar themes.
Those positions sit very uneasily with the GOP’s traditional
hawkish image. They also draw scorn from liberal foreign policy experts, who
accuse Trump Republicans of giving comfort to an adversary.
“Protest is fine, disagreement on policy is fine, but active
support for Putin’s expansionist policies, including the potential invasion of
another democracy, give confidence to Putin that he has effectively undermined
the American president at home,” said Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant
secretary of State during the Obama administration.
Some polling shows the peculiar contours of US public
opinion in relation to Ukraine. An Economist/YouGov poll released lately, for
example, indicated more Republican voters than Democratic voters consider Putin
a “strong leader.”
Asked whether it was more important for Washington to “take
a strong stand” on Ukraine or “maintain good relations with Russia,” voters of
both parties went for the first option. But Republicans did so by a slimmer net
margin than their Democratic counterparts.
There is, too, the fact that American voters have a raft of
other, more immediate topics to worry about, with COVID-19 and inflation prime
among them.
That could mean that another blow to American prestige in
the shape of a Russian invasion would hurt Biden anew. Or, it could mean that
US voters simply don’t care all that much what happens in Kyiv.
Right now, it’s waiting game that is becoming tenser by the
day. The most likely time for a Russian invasion is in the next few weeks, as the
ground freezes and makes troop movements easier.
“I think [Putin] is
going to do it,” said Bergmann. “Once you put this in motion, it can be hard to
unwind it without losing face and credibility…He could just leave forces where
they are. But, yeah, I would be nervous.”
