At a hastily arranged meeting on the Polish border, General Zaluzhny admitted to Generals Cavoli and Aguto that the Ukrainians had in fact decided to mount assaults in three directions at once.

“That’s not the plan!” General Cavoli cried…

Fifteen months into the war, it had all come to this tipping point.

“We should have walked away,” said a senior American official.

But they would not.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House nearly a month ago, the New York Times packed its pages with stories denouncing Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for abandoning Ukraine, and the impolitic “dressing down” of a friendly foreign leader. The Times like most Western news outlets for years suggested that anything short of a full-throated expression of support for war was a betrayal of the “democratic world order” that would lead to instant battlefield deaths.

Now that the war appears lost, and newspapers abroad (conspicuously, not here) are full of news about an apparent bombing of Vladimir Putin’s motorcade, and the future of NATO hangs by a thread, the Times has run a 13,000-word “Secret History” that shows the same U.S. officials who denounced Trump and American voters for saying it out loud long ago concluded that they, too, should probably “walk away.”

The piece is also an extraordinarily comprehensive betrayal of Zelensky and Ukraine, exponentially worse than the “dressing down” by Trump. Authored by longtime veteran of controversial intel pieces Adam Entous, it’s sourced to 300 American and European officials who seem to be responding to their apparent sidelining via a shameless tantrum, exhibiting behavior that in the field would get military men shot. Not only do they play kiss and tell with a trove of operational secrets, they use the Times to deflect blame from their own failures onto erstwhile Slavic partners, cast as ignorant savages who snatched defeat from the jaws of America-designed victory. It’s as morally abhorrent a piece of ass-covering ever as I’ve seen in print, and that somehow is not its worst quality.

The people who quarterbacked the NATO side of the Ukraine war are so pleased with themselves, they can’t keep from boasting about things that will make the average American want to pitchfork the lot of them. Entous describes a tale told “through a secret keyhole” that reveals how America was “woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” (Translation: it was hidden from us.) Sources not only make it clear that the public was lied to on a continuous basis from the outset of the conflict, but they describe how we were lied to, apparently thinking the methods clever. Some are small semantic gambits the idiots wrongly believe exculpated their actions, but the main revelation involves one gigantic, inexcusable deception. From Joe Biden down, they all lied about the risk of World War III.

They risked our lives and our children’s lives, knowingly, repeatedly, and for the worst possible reason: politics. Afraid to admit a mistake, they planned individual excuses while letting bureaucratic inertia expand the conflict. Worse, as was guessed at on this site late last year, the Biden administration after last November’s election increased the risk of global conflict by “expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia,” in order to “shore up his Ukraine project.” If you check this “secret history” against contemporaneous statements of American and European leaders, you’ll find the scale of the lies beyond comprehension. Heads need to roll for this:

The Entous feature begins as all war histories sourced to military and intelligence officials do, as a tale of triumph and ingenuity. Two months after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, two Ukrainian generals were picked up on the streets of Kyiv and driven across the Polish border by British commandos in plainclothes, after which they flew in a C-130 to “Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany.”

Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi recalled being led “up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium,” where he looked down on a “warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.” The area that became a “full-fledged headquarters” had been a “gym” used for Army band performances and “Cub Scout pinewood derbies.”

Entous is literally leading us down a rabbit-hole. The “warren” of cubicles to which he referred became the war’s command center:

“Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

“One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.”

The Wiesbaden cubicle-dwellers relayed battlefield intel to Ukrainians, where “again and again… Americans found it, and the Ukrainians destroyed it.” A mid-2022 rocket barrage in Kherson that killed “generals and staff officers,” along with a “predawn swarm of maritime drones, with support from the Central Intelligence Agency” that attacked the Russian port at Sevastopol, were together an early “proof of concept” that boosted confidence.

However, the “arc of the war shifted” when Ukrainians began calling their own plays:

“The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling — the prototypical patronizing Americans. The Americans sometimes couldn’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice… Where the Americans focused on measured, achievable objectives, they saw the Ukrainians as constantly grasping for the big win, the bright, shining prize.”

The Ukrainians, we learned, “increasingly kept their intentions secret,” and were “angered” by America’s reluctance to “give them all of the weapons and other equipment they wanted,” while refusing to take “politically risky steps” to help them. The Times sources then blamed the “fractious internal politics of Ukraine” for causing the first major disaster, the early 2023 attempt to recapture the city of Bakhmut. The Times in May of that year called Bakhmut an “apparent loss” of a city that assumed “outsize importance” and “would have more symbolic than strategic value for Russia,” analysts said. Sunday, Entous was free to call Bakhmout a “stillborn failure.” After this sudden bout of frankness, Entous in a flashback indulged in another.

“The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats.”

The it in that passage was the partnership. Our own officials worried that the mere act of creating the “we see it, Ukraine smashes it” collaboration, which sources boasted quickly became a “killing machine,” might be viewed as a “red line” by Putin, who in turn might “make good” on his nuclear threats.

If you’re wondering when we ever heard an American official acknowledge a non-zero threat of nuclear retaliation throughout this conflict, the answer is, never. In fact we were consistently told by Biden and everyone else that the opposite was true, that “World War III won’t be fought in Ukraine,” because the United States was not bringing its own troops into the theater of battle:

According to the Times, as Biden was saying these things, his administration “time and again… authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited.” This in turn forced us to “dispatch” advisers “to Kyiv and later… closer to the fighting,” out of concern of more line-crossing. The military and the CIA were then given permission to launch strikes “deep inside Russia itself,” which prompted thoughts from Entous:

“In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later… It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.”

How many times were we scolded that this was no “proxy war,” and not a quagmire like Vietnam or Afghanistan? A hundred? A thousand? As early as April 28, 2022, right when this “partnership” run out of the Wiesbaden “warren” began, Biden explicitly denied we were in a proxy war, and said Russia was only making such claims to excuse their failures in defeating Ukraine:

Internally, concern along these exact lines was growing. American M777 howitzer batteries were effective at first against Russian troops, but soon they learned to pull material behind the 15-mile limit of those shells. Ukraine and some American and NATO officials began demanding the administration escalate by deploying “High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, which used satellite-guided rockets to execute strikes up to 50 miles away.” This is the moment when the Biden administration passed the point of mass-deception no return:

“The ensuing debate reflected the Americans’ evolving thinking. Pentagon officials were resistant, loath to deplete the Army’s limited HIMARS stocks. But in May, General Cavoli visited Washington and made the case that ultimately won them over… At the White House, Mr. Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against fears that pushing the Russians would only lead Mr. Putin to panic and widen the war. When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like “standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?”

Unbelievable! The U.S. began delivering HIMARS missiles to Ukraine in June 2022, which means for almost two years a White House that claimed not to be worried about World War III or nuclear war was worried about exactly that, each time they took a “step forward.” There were many steps after HIMARS, all cataloged by Entous, who began short-handing the nuclear war concern by referring to “red lines.”

When we upgraded from HIMARS to ATACMS missiles, expanding the range to 190 miles, it was “a particularly sore subject for the Biden administration,” because Russian commander Valery Gerasimov had “warned General [Mark] Milley that anything that flew 190 miles would be breaching a red line.”

After the disaster of Bakhmut, the U.S. kept raising its stakes. “A year ago, the coalition had been talking victory,” Entous explained. “As 2024 arrived and ground on, the Biden administration would find itself forced to keep crossing its own red lines simply to keep the Ukrainians afloat.” Entous then explained the “red lines kept moving,” as ATACMS were followed by SMEs, or “subject-matter experts,” obvious American military advisers whose presence in Kyiv had to be tripled (to three dozen, they say) as failures mounted.

Then they crossed “the hardest red line,” the Russian border. Here the administration couldn’t resist a good calculated risk:

“The Russian offensive exposed a fundamental asymmetry: The Russians could support their troops with artillery from just across the border; the Ukrainians couldn’t shoot back using American equipment or intelligence… Yet with peril came opportunity. The Russians were complacent about security, believing the Americans would never let the Ukrainians fire into Russia. Entire units and their equipment were sitting unsheltered, largely undefended, in open fields.”

Who could pass up an opportunity like that? The Biden administration decided to create an “ops box” near north of Kharkiv, a territory “encompassing an area almost as large as New Jersey,” within which Ukrainians could conduct operations using American weapons and intelligence. In keeping with the ass-covering nature of this media exercise, we were told this decision was made “against the generals’ recommendation” (one imagines some are still serving and want to keep their stars).

To many watching from afar, it seemed like simple common sense that using American weapons and American support personnel to attack Russians in Russia risked drawing this country into a shooting war with a nuclear enemy at any moment. Those of us who said these things were dismissed as alarmist, Putin-loving fellow-travelers. Now we have Entous describing American officials feeling the same after the opening of “ops box” attacks:

“With Wiesbaden’s points of interest and coordinates, as well as the Ukrainians’ own intelligence, HIMARS strikes into the ops box helped defend Kharkiv. The Russians suffered some of their heaviest casualties of the war… The unthinkable had become real. The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.”

We never heard any concern of this type. Instead, we were told repeatedly that if anyone was risking World War III, it was Putin, and moreover that any nuclear risk would not involve Europe or the United States, but Ukraine. Former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described nuclear combat as a “low probability event” at the outset of the war, noting Russia had no reason to strike at us, because “they are not under an existential threat. NATO is not going to invade Russia.” A little over a year later, America was “woven into” the killing of Russians on Russian soil.

Worse, according to the Times article (which on many occasions offered dubious assurances that the American military and the CIA banned attacks in Russia), Ukrainians broke a promise by sending troops into the city of Kursk while carrying “coalition-supplied equipment,” a violation of “ops box” rules. Entous added:

“The box had been established to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Kharkiv, not so the Ukrainians could take advantage of it to seize Russian soil. “It wasn’t almost blackmail, it was blackmail,” a senior Pentagon official said.”

We were supplying weapons to a “partner” who was blackmailing us into a conflict with a very dangerous enemy by using American equipment to invade a region, Kursk, that’s about as far south of Moscow as Columbia, South Carolina is from Washington. (CNN described the surprise attack as a “major success.”) The U.S. might have “pulled the plug” then, the Times tells us, but were said to be afraid of a humanitarian catastrophe. Meanwhile, while Zelensky and his friends in the West were still preaching victory, in private they’d settled on a more realistic goal: “to capture and hold Russian land that could be traded for Ukrainian land in future negotiations.”

If you’re counting, that means we were lied to about the risk of World War, the chance of “victory,” the desire for negotiations, the success of last year’s counteroffensive, the solidity of our relationship with Ukraine, and the significance of U.S.-backed incursions into Russia. This was before Democrats lost the election last November, after which Biden crossed one more line:

“Mr. Trump won, and the fear came rushing in… In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project… He crossed his final red line — expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia — after North Korea sent thousands of troops to help the Russians dislodge the Ukrainians from Kursk… The administration also authorized Wiesbaden and the C.I.A. to support long-range missile and drone strikes into a section of southern Russia used as a staging area for the assault on Pokrovsk, and allowed the military advisers to leave Kyiv for command posts closer to the fighting.”

Racket readers will recall in late November I wrote about the Biden administration commencing a game of “nuclear chicken,” one that had Duma defense committee chair Andrei Krasov calling the launching of Western missiles deep into Russia “the last red line.” The lame-duck administration blew off concerns about nuclear brinksmanship, with Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh saying, “We are not at war with Russia,” and “the party here that continues to escalate this war is Russia.” Britain’s Keir Starmer at the G20 conference in Rio shrugged off questions about the use of British Storm Shadow missiles, saying NATO needed to “double down,” not show restraint:

From the outside it certainly appeared that U.S. officials, at a time when their lame-duck president was wandering into foliage in Brazil, were upping the ante in Ukraine as a way of rendering rapprochement impossible before the new government took office. No other explanation made sense. On the other hand, heightening global nuclear risk just to guarantee continuation of a doomed policy seemed impossibly cynical, even for whoever was running the White House by then.

Now we find out from inside sources this was done precisely to prolong the “Ukraine project.” There are a hundred details in this “Secret History” that serve as stark warnings to anyone who thinks protection from Armageddon is secure in the hands of career military and intelligence officials. Not only did we allow ourselves to be “blackmailed” into escalating a conflict with a nuclear power, the management of the “partnership” broke down because of a Heathers-style spat between the key brass twits, Ukrainian general Valery Zaluhniy and Mark Milley.

When Milley second-guessed Zaluhniy, the latter would respond with teen-like silence, or by avoiding Milley’s next call. Underscoring: the country to which we were giving hundreds of billions in aid didn’t feel a need to pick up the phone. Entous describes the general lack of communication via a moment of levity: “Biden administration officials would joke bitterly that they knew more about what the Russians were planning by spying on them than about what their Ukrainian partners were planning.”

The solution to the Miller-Zaluhniy feud, no joke, involved a blimp maker:

“To keep them talking, the Pentagon initiated an elaborate telephone tree: A Milley aide would call Maj. Gen. David S. Baldwin, commander of the California National Guard, who would ring a wealthy Los Angeles blimp maker named Igor Pasternak, who had grown up in Lviv with Oleksii Reznikov, then Ukraine’s defense minister. Mr. Reznikov would track down General Zaluzhny and tell him, according to General Baldwin, “I know you’re mad at Milley, but you have to call him.”

The storied Wiesbaden partnership devolving into a game of telephone refereed by a blimp-maker might be the thirtieth- or fortieth-most horrifying detail in the story. There are too many to count.

The standard position of “liberal internationalists” like McFaul is that a United States that does not project its power and engage abroad is inviting mischief and aggression by hostile actors. In other words, not stepping in to oppose Putin militarily in Ukraine would make nuclear war more likely, not less. This could make sense, if officials entrusted with “democracy promotion” weren’t always dangerous imbeciles. McFaul for instance was the point man for dealing with Moscow, and couldn’t order a beer there without a translator. They think Nguyễn Văn Thiệu is the same as Hamad Karzai is the same as Volodymyr Zelensky and it never penetrates their thick skulls except by accident that every culture is different and unpredictable, as Lloyd Austin somehow only found out years into the war.

When Austin came for a “surprise visit” late last year, he noticed “out the window of his armored S.U.V. snaking through the Kyiv streets” that the country had a lot of “men in their 20s, almost none of them in uniform.” Austin managed a thought: In a nation at war, “men this age are usually away, in the fight.”

When Austin pressed Zelensky to lower the draft age to 18, Zelensky reportedly snapped in return: “Why would I draft more people? We don’t have any equipment to give them.” To another “official,” the light flickered on, realizing this was “not an existential war if they won’t make their people fight.”

While the Times piece does little to clear up whose fault the military and diplomatic failure was (there were numerous passages of the “mistakes were made” variety), it’s clear we were lied to about everything. Zelensky and his set will no doubt tell their side now, and it’s possible Ukraine’s freelanced heightening of risk to Americans will come out seeming less treacherous. Either way, it’s clear the Biden administration should have cut the cord years ago, to prevent Americans from being dragged into World War by “partners” with every incentive to pull them in. Instead, the administration berated its critics as treasonous cowards who’d have let Hitler swim to London.

Everyone involved in this caper should go to jail, forever, beginning with whatever person or persons deployed the autopen to bomb Russia to “shore up” the Ukraine project of Biden’s corpse. These people make Westmoreland and Clark Clifford seem like Einstein and Bohr.

In another section, a “U.S. official” explained how NATO got around the seemingly very dangerous optics of providing Ukraine with lists of “targets”:

“Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”? Some officers thought “targets” was appropriate… The debate was settled by Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, European Command’s intelligence chief: The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.”

“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official explained.”

That’s a scene from Catch-22 or M*A*S*H. It’s inconceivable that anyone would think this was an actual intelligence solution. Apparently our people did think like this, as officials used a similar semantic workaround when giving Ukrainians locations of human targets. As another “senior U.S. official” put it, “Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman… Like, we’d go to war.”

Can I get a No shit, Sherlock? Are these people real?

Russia’s incursion into Ukraine was not “naked aggression,” as President Biden called it. It was aggression clothed in an aura of cultural heritage. Putin’s pre-invasion speech was full of historical justification that had special meaning for his Russian audience. Even for Western listeners, his visceral resistance to Western efforts to separate Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence should not have been surprising coming from one whose given name is associated with Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev and ruler of the Kievan Rus’ at the turn of the 11^th century. Since the Russian invasion, Vladimir Putin has revealed himself as an assertive strongman whose leadership of the Russian remnant of the Soviet Union seems to benefit, at least in his own mind, from restoring the country’s hegemony as it existed in the time of the Tsars.

But even before today’s Vladimir came to power, Senator Biden, in March 1998, argued vehemently in favor of expanding the countries in the NATO alliance eastward beyond a reunified Germany to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Waving a rhetorical red flag, Senator Daniel Moynihan, former Ambassador to the United Nations, countered, “We’re walking into ethnic historical enmities. We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Biden won the argument in 1998, as demonstrated by NATO’s addition of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in the next decade. But Moynihan’s warning showed that US diplomats and political leaders in this post-Cold War era should have been aware of the complicated history of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the interconnected relationship of Russia and Ukraine. 

And in important ways they were. The moves of the United States and its European allies in this period were designed to exploit the civil divisions in Ukraine between its Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking electorates—the result of years, centuries even, of convulsive conflict. This approach, taken in the interest of maintaining the US’s unipolar world dominance, was tried out with mixed success on a series of regime-change “color revolutions” promoted by a range of Western-aligned NGOs and underwritten by the United States Agency for International Development and other US agencies in countries like Serbia (Bulldozer Revolution, 2000), Georgia (Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (Orange Revolution, 2004), Kyrgyzstan (Tulip Revolution, 2005), Belarus (Jeans Revolution, 2006), and Russia itself. The expansion of NATO to the east was carried out in intentional disregard for the warnings of distinguished and thoughtful observers like George F. Kennan (President Truman’s director of policy planning and architect of the Cold War policy of Soviet Union containment), William J. Perry (secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration), and Jack Matlock (US ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991), among many, many other American scholars and political leaders like Sen. Moynihan who generally agreed that pushing NATO to the borders of Russia would lead to a missed opportunity for regional peace, at best, and at worst become a dangerous provocation.

In retrospect, the danger signals should have been clear. During the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin said, “NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” At the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in 2008, Putin repeated his previous warnings that Moscow would view any attempt to expand NATO to its borders as a “direct threat.” But the next year, when Biden made his first trip to Kiev as Vice-President and the Obama Administration’s point man on Ukraine, he insisted on supporting Ukraine’s “deepening ties to NATO,” saying, “We recognize no sphere of influence,” and pointing to US funding that year of $120 million to Ukraine to “bolster peace and security” and to “ modernize your military.” 

In his Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Robert M. Gates wrote of Vice-President Biden:

I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. …Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation.

In 2010, Russia drafted a “European Security Treaty” with clauses that might have prevented the United States and its allies from forming new ties to states that Moscow considered to be in its sphere of influence—a Russian version of our own Monroe Doctrine. The text of the Russian proposal was studied by the US, but to no one’s surprise, it was rejected.  

Three years later, building on experience gained during the Orange Revolution of 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy, a USAID-funded offshoot of CIA regime-change programs in the 1950s, was involved in sparking Kiev’s Maidan Square protests in late-2013 and early-2014. Just two months before they broke out, NED’s then-president wrote, “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.” In practice, this meant funding groups that the Financial Times reported “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.” The Maidan Square protests led to the ouster of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, effectively disenfranchising the Russian-speaking, Russia-leaning citizens in eastern Ukraine who had voted him into power in 2010 as a reversal of the Western-oriented Orange Revolution.

As Biden wrote in his book, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, Yanukovych fled Kiev after a remarkable series of extended phone calls with the Vice-President that ended with Biden telling him “it was over” and advising him to “walk away.” In the interest of democracy one might hope that Biden’s advice to Yanukovych had been even-handed, but during the uprising the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, was seen handing out snacks to the anti-government protesters in Maidan Square and caught on phone discussing with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt which Ukrainian leader would be acceptable to the US as prime minister and assuring him that “Biden’s willing” in Pyatt’s words “to help midwife this thing.” 

For many eastern Ukrainians the result of the Maidan protests was not just a new Eurocentric government but rather a political coup that ended their fragile bi-cultural democracy. One omen was the passage of legislation by the Verkhovna Rada to repeal the law protecting the use of Russian as a minority language. A civil war broke out in which government forces supported by Western countries were arrayed against separatist regions supported by Russia. After a referendum, Crimea, historically the site of Russia’s only warm-water port, was absorbed back into Mother Russia herself and Donetsk and Luhansk proclaimed themselves independent republics.

In 2014-15, the negotiated Minsk agreements—signed by Russia, Ukraine, separatist representatives, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—seemed to point the way to a federated republic as a solution, with the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine having a measure of autonomy and an effective veto on Ukraine joining NATO. But these agreements were never fully implemented, and were intended by the West—as admitted after-the-fact by the former leaders of Germany, France, and Ukraine—not to settle the conflict but rather to buy time to strengthen the Ukraine government’s military posture. A 2024 article in The New York Times documented how the US used this time to build up a network of CIA installations near the border of Russia capable of electronic surveillance and tracking the path of armed drones. In addition, the US Navy built a “maritime operations center” at the Ochakiv Naval Base near Odessa that could coordinate Western and Ukrainian activity in the Black Sea and accommodate NATO ships. (Imagine the US reaction if China set up a network of MSS state security installations along the Rio Grande and took over the port of Veracruz for its own purposes in the Gulf of Mexico.)

In mid-December 2021, after watching these confrontational developments over a period of years, Russia presented the West with a written set of regional security proposals, warning that Moscow might have to act militarily if the talks they desired did not materialize. Again, the most important of these proposals had to do with the non-expansion of NATO and steps that would lead to the guaranteed neutrality of Ukraine. These were rejected in early January by the US deputy secretary of state as “non-starters,” a cheeky response that seemed calculated to try Putin’s patience. Just days before Russia invaded, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled an urgent trip to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva, ironically and inexplicably citing Russia’s “wholesale rejection of diplomacy.” In the context of these exchanges and actions, US predictions of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine—announced repeatedly on the evening news in the months before the invasion—were less an intelligence coup and more a willful poking of the Russian bear. 

Without reference to these years and years of trying to wrest Ukraine away from Russia’s sphere of influence, often involving his own personal participation, President Biden assured us during his State of the Union Address on March 1, 2022, that the Russian incursion was “totally unprovoked” and that Putin had “badly miscalculated.” Biden promised that we would sap Russia’s economic strength with sanctions and “weaken its military for years to come.”

If Putin indeed miscalculated by invading Ukraine, one wonders whether this is what US diplomacy (or lack of diplomacy) was trying to achieve all along, tragically at Ukraine’s expense, as President Zelensky had predicted when the war began. An ultimate goal—unseating Putin—was manifested in Warsaw later that March when President Biden blurted out, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” These days, in the context of recent signs of Ukrainian weakness and Russian strength, we are not hearing much about the prospect of regime change in Moscow. (The government that experienced regime change is in Washington, DC!) If Putin had been removed from power, even if the direction of the war remained unchanged, perhaps some would have seen that as a feather in the cap of President Biden and his staff, as well as the Atlantic Council, the CIA, our military industrial complex, and our security establishment, who have been walking down this path together for more than two decades. 

It is also possible, however, that we are the ones who miscalculated. The changing of the guard with the Trump Administration has given the US an opportunity to reassess, to find a way out of this diplomatic misadventure. If President Trump is successful in negotiating an end to the war, it is still not clear who is going to emerge unscathed in world history in the telling of this story—who chose a course toward war and when. If he fails and the war escalates further, it is not even clear who is going to be doing the telling. 

© Copyright February 2025 Benjamin S. Dunham

About the author:

Benjamin S. Dunham (Harvard College, B.A., 1966) retired as editor of Early Music America magazine in 2014. Prior to his 12 years in that role, he enjoyed an active career in arts administration and journalism, serving as executive vice president of the U.S. National Music Council, executive director of the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, director of public relations and publications for the American Symphony Orchestra League (now League of American Orchestras), assistant editor of the Music Educators Journal, and editor of American Recorder magazine. In 1981, as the first executive director of Chamber Music America, he was named “Arts Administrator of the Year” by the Arts Management publication. He has served on the boards of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, the American Recorder Society, Early Music America, and the Boston Early Music Festival and was for many years a member of the Avery Fisher Artist Program Recommendation Board. He performed on recorder and viola da gamba in early music ensembles in Washington, D.C., and in the SouthCoast region of Massachusetts and has reviewed concerts and recordings for national and regional media. In retirement, he researches and manages a website on the British artist James Alphege Brewer (www.jalphegebrewer.info).

Former President Joe Biden has a lot of explaining to do, as does Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky will need to explain to his exhausted nation why choosing the path of war over the path of diplomacy after the Istanbul talks in March and April of 2022 was worth the cost. At that time, what still seemed to be the Ukrainian goals—continued sovereignty and the withdrawal of Russian troops to pre-war boundaries—might have been met. Zelensky must explain why he succumbed to Western pressure to pursue wider ones.

He is going to have to explain why pursuing those wider goals was worth the loss of so much life, limb and land. And, if he is to survive politically and, perhaps, even physically, he is going to have to find someone to blame.

He already fired Valery Zaluzhny, who served as Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief until last year. Now, Ukraine’s security service has arrested two generals and a colonel on the charge of failing to protect Ukrainian territory from Russian advances. 

But blaming the generals won’t be enough to acquit Zelensky. The war went on after Zaluzhny and continued to worsen. And no one will buy the blaming of field commanders. “We were defending a huge swath of the border, we fought to the death in the first hours of the attack,” said soldiers in one brigade after their former commander was arrested. “We were short of people, ammunition and support but we fought, we fought under the leadership of our commander!”

Ukraine no longer has the capacity to field the men nor the weapons to hold off the Russian advance. More land will be lost the longer the war goes on, and more men and weapons are not on their way. “The problem with Ukraine is not that they’re running out of money,” Marco Rubio said at his confirmation hearing for his nomination as secretary of state, “but that they’re running out of Ukrainians.”

Zelensky will need to blame someone higher up than the field commanders. In recent weeks, he’s laid some of that blame on Biden, complaining of insufficient support. “With all due respect to the United States and the administration,” Zelensky said in a podcast interview, “I don’t want the same situation like we had with Biden.”

One day, Zelensky will need to explain to Ukrainians his part in the tragedy. He will have to defend his decision to yield to the West’s pressure not to sign anything with Russia but to “just fight,” as then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly put it. As American President Donald Trump said in his first Oval Office interview, “Zelensky… shouldn’t have allowed this to happen either. He’s no angel. Zelensky decided that ‘I want to fight.’”

But that does not exonerate the U.S. or mean that Zelensky is unjustified in blaming Biden. Biden, too, is one day going to have to explain what the war in Ukraine was for subsequent to the promising talks in Istanbul. 

The Biden administration repeatedly promised Ukraine whatever they needed for as long as it takes. But that promise evolved into whatever we agree to for as long as convenient. And a clear answer to the question “Whatever they need to do what?” was never provided.

According to Biden National Security Council official Eric Green, U.S. support for Ukraine was never intended to push Russia out of its territory, recover its lost land, and reassert its territorial integrity.

“We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” Green said in an interview with Time. “The more important objective,” he explained, “was for Ukraine to survive as a sovereign, democratic country free to pursue integration with the West.” 

But reclaiming territory was all that was left for the Ukrainians after the West pressured them to keep fighting rather than abandon aspirations to join NATO. Neutrality for Kiev was “the key point” for Russian negotiators, according to one Ukrainian lawmaker who participated in peace talks. If an agreement had been made, a still-sovereign Ukraine would remain free to pursue economic and cultural—but not military—integration with the West.

Green’s assertion, at first, seems unlikely. The U.S. pushed Ukraine to carry out a counteroffensive in the Donbas and endorsed strikes on military targets in Crimea. 

But that was for public consumption. Privately, they knew that Ukraine’s counteroffensive likely couldn’t succeed, that Kiev didn’t have the training or weapons needed to expel Russian forces from the Donbas. And, according to a report from early 2023, they knew it was not “a wise move” to recapture Crimea and were not “actively encouraging Ukraine” to do so.

If Biden was not prepared to give Ukraine whatever it needed to reclaim its territory, and if he was not prepared to offer Ukraine NATO membership, then what was American support for the war all about? Was it really just about weakening Russia or asserting NATO’s unchallenged right to expand wherever it wants, including right up to Russia’s borders? If so, then the people of Ukraine have been cruelly used by America. 

In the first weeks of the war, there was a plausible hope worth exploring that Ukraine might retain much of its territory while avoiding catastrophic bloodshed and destruction of lives. Washington chose a different path, and it is incumbent on Biden to explain why.

Ted Snider is a columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft as well as other outlets.

That was one of the three objectives Biden set. He also wanted the U.S. and its allies to remain united, and he insisted on avoiding direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Looking back on his leadership during the war in Ukraine — certain to shape his legacy as a statesman — Biden has achieved those three objectives. But success on those limited terms provides little satisfaction even to some of his closest allies and advisers. “It’s unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it,” Green says in an interview with TIME. “Because there is so much suffering for Ukraine and so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land.” 

For the Ukrainians, disappointment with Biden has been building throughout the invasion, and they have expressed it ever more openly since the U.S. presidential elections ended in Donald Trump’s victory. In a podcast that aired in early January, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the U.S. had not done enough under Biden to impose sanctions against Russia and to provide Ukraine with weapons and security guarantees. “With all due respect to the United States and the administration,” Zelensky told Lex Fridman, “I don’t want the same situation like we had with Biden. I ask for sanctions now, please, and weapons now.”

The criticism was unusually pointed, and seems all the more remarkable given how much support the U.S. has given Ukraine during Biden’s tenure—$66 billion in military assistance alone since the February 2022 Russian invasion, according to the U.S. State Department. Combine that with all of the aid Congress has approved for Ukraine’s economic, humanitarian, and other needs, and the total comes to around $183 billion as of last September, according to Ukraine Oversight, a U.S. government watchdog created in 2023 to monitor and account for all of this assistance. 

Yet Zelensky and some of his allies insist that the U.S. has been too cautious in standing up to Russia, especially when it comes to granting Ukraine a clear path to NATO membership. “It is very important that we share the same vision for Ukraine’s security future – in the E.U. and NATO,” the Ukrainian president said during his most recent visit to the White House in September.  

During that visit, Zelensky gave Biden a detailed list of requests that he described as Ukraine’s “victory plan.” Apart from calling for an invitation to join NATO, the plan urged the U.S. to strengthen Ukraine’s position in the war with a massive new influx of weapons and the permission to use them deep inside Russian territory. Biden had by then announced that he would not run for re-election, and the Ukrainians hoped that his lame-duck status would free him to make bolder decisions, in part to secure his legacy in foreign affairs. “For us his legacy is an argument,” a senior member of Zelensky’s delegation to Washington told TIME. “How will history remember you?” 

The appeals got a mixed reception. On the question of Ukraine’s NATO membership, Biden would not budge. But he did sign off on a number of moves that the White House had long rejected as too dangerous. In November, the U.S. allowed Ukraine to use American missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory. And in January, the Biden administration imposed tough sanctions against the Russian energy sector, including the “shadow fleet” of tankers Russia has used to export its oil. 

While these decisions fell short of what Zelensky wanted, they helped Biden make the case during the last foreign-policy speech of his tenure that the U.S. had met its goals in defending Ukraine. He remained careful, however, not to promise that Ukraine would regain any more of its territory, or even survive to the end of this war. Russian President Vladimir Putin “has failed thus far to subjugate Ukraine,” Biden said in his address at the State Department on Jan. 13. “Today, Ukraine is still a free, independent country, with the potential — the potential for a bright future.” 

The future that Zelensky and many of his countrymen have in mind is one in which Russia is defeated. But in rallying the world to the fight, the implication Biden embedded in his own goals was that defending Ukraine against Russia is not the same as defeating Russia. So it is not surprising if that goal remains far from Zelensky’s reach.

It is Russian President Vladimir Putin who decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the ground for this conflict was prepared by US securocrats in the 1990s. Back then, Russia had just emerged from the dissolution of the USSR much weaker and disoriented, while the Russian leadership, idealistic and inept as it was at the time, worked on the assumption that full-blown integration with the West was inevitable.

Decisions made at that time triggered confrontation between Russia and the West which arrived at its logical climax during Biden’s presidency.

The problem was never the eastward expansion of NATO – a security pact created to confront the Soviet Union – and the European Union per se, but Russia’s exclusion from this process.

Crucially, this approach set Ukraine on the course of Euro-Atlantic integration while Russia was kept out of it – creating a rift between two nations closely linked to each other by history, economic and interpersonal relations. It also precipitated Russia’s securitisation and backsliding on democracy under Putin.

This outcome was never pre-destined and it took relentless efforts by American securocrats to bring it about.

One of the lost chances for a different path was the Partnership for Peace programme, officially launched by the Clinton administration in 1994. It was designed to balance the desire of former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO and the crucial goal of keeping Russia on board – as a major nuclear power and a new democracy with a clearly pro-Western government.

Russia joined it but, as the American historian Mary Sarotte writes in her book Not One Inch, this useful framework was derailed at its inception by a small number of securocrats in Washington.

She specifically talks about “the pro-expansion troika”, consisting of Daniel Fried, Alexander Vershbow, and Richard Holbrooke, who pushed for an aggressive expansion of NATO, disregarding protests from Moscow.

Sarotte also mentions John Herbst as the author of a later report on unofficial promises of NATO’s non-expansion made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev which, as she suggests, shaped the US policy of ignoring Russia’s complaints about NATO expanding all the way to its borders for decades to come.

The unreflective arrogance and triumphalism that these securocrats embody can also be seen in Biden himself who back then was a prominent member of Congress. In a 1997 video, he mocked Moscow’s protests against NATO expansion by saying that Russia would have to embrace China and Iran if it kept being intransigent. He clearly assumed it to be an absurd and unrealistic scenario back then – believing, perhaps, that Russia had no choice but to stay in the Western orbit. But it turned out exactly along the lines of what he thought was a smart joke.

In his hawkish politics on Russia, Biden found a willing partner in the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It is hardly a coincidence that Zelenskyy’s massive U-turn on relations with Russia started as Biden took office.

The Ukrainian president had been elected on the promise that he would end the simmering conflict that began with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. He met with Putin in Paris in December 2019 and the two agreed to a ceasefire in the Donbas region, which both sides had largely respected, reducing the number of deaths to near zero.

But once Biden set foot in the White House, Zelenskyy ordered a clampdown on Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk, while simultaneously launching loud campaigns for Ukraine’s NATO membership, the return of Crimea, as well as for the derailing of the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.

Two factors may have played into Zelenskyy’s decisions. Azerbaijan’s victory over Russian-backed Armenian forces in the fall of 2020, achieved largely thanks to Turkish Bayraktar drones, gave hopes that high-tech warfare against Russia could be successful. The other factor was that in December 2020, polls showed Medvedchuk’s party ahead of Zelenskyy’s.

Just a few days after Biden’s inauguration, Zelenskyy gave an interview to American outlet Axios in which he famously asked his US counterpart: “Why Ukraine is still not in NATO?” This was followed by an op-ed with the same question in the title by Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, published by Atlantic Council – a think tank that gets much of its funding from the US government and Pentagon contractors.

Unsurprisingly, some of the same personalities that shaped US policies towards Russia in the 1990s also egged on the Biden administration to adopt aggressive policies that contributed to making the invasion happen.

On March 5, Fried, Vershbow and Herbst, along with three others, published a report in the Atlantic Council with a list of recommendations for the Biden administration with regard to Ukraine and Russia. These boiled down to pressuring Putin by escalating on every front – from offering NATO membership plan to Ukraine to derailing Nord Stream 2 and “enhancing security” in the Black Sea.

Three weeks after that publication, Putin began deploying troops on the Ukrainian border, embarking on 11 months of hair-raising brinkmanship. This period saw the British warship HMS Defender entering what Russia had declared its territorial waters off the coast of occupied Crimea in June, the US starting secret supplies of weapons to Ukraine in September and finally the US and Ukraine announcing a strategic partnership in November – a move that amounted to casus belli in the eyes of Kremlin hawks.

It was around that time that Putin began preparing for the invasion in earnest before eventually triggering it in February 2022. The resulting war is now approaching its third anniversary.

Despite massive Western backing, Ukraine suffered terrible losses and gained nothing from challenging Putin to a fight. The war has brought Ukraine to the brink, causing a massive refugee crisis, economic collapse, social disintegration and ever-growing death toll.

If peace in Ukraine is achieved this year, it will likely be along the lines of the failed Istanbul agreements of 2022, which envisioned an Austria-styled neutral Ukraine with limits on the size of its army. Russia will likely insist on keeping much of the territory that it gained as punishment for Ukrainian intransigence. This will technically constitute a defeat for Ukraine, but it will be a clear win for the Ukrainian people, who have borne the brunt of this war, as well as for the rest of the world.

It will also be a major defeat for the securocratic class which has been pushing for a new standoff with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The aggressive pursuit of expansion at the expense of Russia has clearly failed as a strategy. It is time for Western policymakers to do some soul-searching on how to reverse the situation and start a slow drift back towards rapprochement with Moscow.

This is not about absolving Putin’s government from accountability for the crime of aggression as well as war crimes committed by Russian troops. It is about removing conditions which caused Russia’s transformation into a militarised dictatorship and ending a conflict which will keep propping up Putin’s regime for as long as it lasts.

Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist based in Riga.

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

Joe Biden has never functioned as the 46th president of the United States. He was senile, limited, bewildered, and plain demented.

An important Wall Street Journal article published on December 19 at last acknowledged in the so-called mainstream US media what has been blatantly obvious for the past four years: Joe Biden has never functioned as the 46th president of the United States. He was senile, limited, bewildered, and plain demented from the very beginning of his supposed term of office. That pitiable condition was finally publicly displayed to the whole world on June 27 when the 82-year-old President of the United States and commander-in-chief of its armed forces angrily argued that he was a better golfer than Donald Trump. And that was in one of his few semi-coherent moments. Yet only now, a full half a year later, has Biden’s real condition during all of his presidency, so catastrophic for the American people and the entire world, from beginning to end – and it is not over yet – been reported in any so-called “respectable” US mainstream media outlet. This appalling, shameful, inconvenient fact exposes, as nothing else has done before, how the Right to Free Speech, enshrined in the for-so-long-cherished First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, is dead as a doornail in 21st century America. And that has already been the case for generations.

The Wall Street Journal has finally publicly acknowledged and documented the awful reality: for the past four years, the armed forces of the United States and one of the two largest thermonuclear arsenals on the planet have been controlled by a Little Man in the White House who was never there. And we still have to endure his diabolical, dead, zombie, withered hand on the nuclear release codes and the Levers of Fate until January 20, 2025.

I am writing this on Western Christmas Eve, December 24. A month ago, on November 18, the London Daily Mail reported that with Biden’s approval, Ukraine fired the first of the US-made and supplied long range missiles at strategic targets in the heart of Russia. Yet President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government have repeatedly warned that such an unprecedented and inexcusable escalation is their final red line and will trigger a nuclear response. Why then, did Biden do it? And was he even aware that he did? Probably not. For it has been abundantly clear to the whole world for years that the 46th President of the United States is senile, unaware of the simplest things going on around him, unable to speak plausibly for more than five minutes at a time, and even then, he was obviously shot up with amphetamines and ridiculously incoherent.

This has been a frightful state of affairs: and yet both parties in the Congress of the United States in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the proud, immensely wealthy US mass media with its enormous resources have consistently pretended all along that it has not happened.

Joe Biden was the Phantom Menace in “Star Wars,” an invisible presence whom nobody refers to and who is protected by a shroud or cone of silence.

The clear truth is that Joe Biden is a Sith. He is the Phantom Menace in “Star Wars,” an invisible presence whom nobody refers to and who is protected by a shroud or cone of silence. Yet he wields enormous, unlimited destructive power, and no one dares to prevent him from using it. Nowhere in the American media until December 19 was any reference to his ludicrous and contemptible physical and mental condition mentioned.

Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump have been cheering the emergence of a new Golden Age in America. But it is certainly not going to happen if all the major cities of the United States are turned into radioactive dust in a thermonuclear exchange before Trump is scheduled to take office on January 20, 2025. And that date as I write is still weeks away. There is plenty of time still for Biden, the Phantom Menace, to trigger World War III and the destruction of the Northern Hemisphere of the globe.

Among the one-third of a billion people in the United States, only one man so far has been willing to speak out boldly, identify the danger, and demand a lawful, constitutional solution to eliminate this mortal danger and remove this gross little abomination and threat to the very survival of the American people from the supreme position he has still been permitted to hold. That man is University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle. For more than 40 years, Boyle, a great Irishman, has been one of the most eminent and certainly the most fearless and principled legal champion for the human rights of the suffering and the oppressed. He has championed through legal channels the rights of the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Palestinians, the Blackfeet and Lakota nations in North America, and the state of Hawaii among many others. On November 18, Boyle circulated a letter he had sent to every member of the current 117th Congress demanding that impeachment proceedings be started immediately to eject Biden from office as quickly as possible.

For 130 years until 1998, the impeachment mechanism was only used once in US history in 1868 against President Andrew Johnson, when he was deliberately sabotaging congressionally approved policies of fully enfranchising more than 4 million black Americans, who had previously been slaves, to enable them to exercise their full civil rights. It failed.

Over the past quarter century, the impeachment mechanism has degenerated into a contemptible joke that has made American democracy the laughingstock of the entire world. It was used by Republicans against President Bill Clinton once when he allegedly lied to cover up his sexual liaison with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It failed.

The impeachment procedure was then used unsuccessfully twice against Trump. He was also convicted on 34 ridiculous felony charges, all based on his allegedly paying $130,000 hush money to a pornographic actress, one Stormy Daniels, for a one-night sexual encounter. The US Supreme Court threw out all the convictions.

Such encounters – and payments – have been a routine practice by US presidents all the way to the revered Thomas Jefferson 220 years ago whose passion for democracy and human rights never extended to freeing his own slave-concubine for 32 years Sally Hemings (pictured). Jefferson did eventually free the surviving four of the six children he fathered with Hemings.

In the long US election campaign, mercifully concluded, Trump was endlessly attacked by liberal Democrats who expressed their horror that a “convicted felon” (they had never heard, presumably, of their own Supreme Court which set aside the clearly politically motivated convictions) could be elected as President of the United States. Yet not a single one of these paragons of honesty and virtue ever suggested that Biden should be removed from office for his administration’s deliberate sabotaging of every move to prevent and then rapidly end the Ukraine war, which has cost the lives of well over 600,000 Ukrainians so far and which is now spiraling into thermonuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. Nor did a single one of the 73 million people, recorded as voting for Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, in the November 5 presidential election, ever reportedly express outrage at the failure of both her and Biden to raise a finger to end the war in Gaza that has so far cost at least 40,000 Palestinian lives and possibly five times as many.

Amid all the hysterical panic over Trump’s victory in the election, a ghostly silence has continued to shroud and protect Biden even though he is obviously senile, incapable of speaking for more than five minutes at a time and, even then incoherently. Yet Biden’s pitiful and appalling condition has been obvious to the world ever since he self-destructed in front of almost 70 million viewers in his single presidential debate with Trump on June 28. However, so superficial, so infantile is the American liberal demonization of Donald Trump and concurrent ludicrous worship of Kamala Harris that the terrifying reality of the Chief Executive’s condition remained denied or ignored by more than 300 million Americans. The December 19 Wall Street Journal article was just the first crack in this immense, towering Wall of Silence and Lies.

Joe Biden, the Phantom Menace of “Star Wars,” continues to roam the White House with its cold, ghostly hand clamped down hard on the accelerator to thermonuclear world war.

The reality is this: the position of commander-in-chief of the US armed forces continues to be held by a demented, senile, incoherent, and no doubt also incontinent 82-year-old dwarf who wanders around the White House muttering to himself. And this invisible Sith, the Phantom Menace of “Star Wars,” continues to roam the White House with its cold, ghostly hand clamped down hard on the accelerator to thermonuclear world war.

Joe Biden is still President of the United States: and he is scheduled to stay in that position until Trump is inaugurated at last on January 20, 2025. But will the United States and its 330 million people survive until then? Possibly, not. And even if it does, Biden’s Dead Hand has already locked incoming President-Elect Trump into multiple confrontations with Russia, China, and across the Middle East, any of which would be catastrophic for his country and the whole world.

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back anymore!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)

William Hughes Mearns
American poet (1875–1965)

“I think what we’re handing off is a very strong hand from the United States in terms of our national power,” Sullivan told CNN on Sunday. “…America’s competitors and adversaries are weaker and under greater pressure than they have been.” On the latter front, Sullivan is particularly enthused about the state of affairs in Moscow.

The Russians “are not doing great,” Sullivan bragged last week. “They set out on a strategic objective of taking the capital Kyiv, wiping Ukraine as we know it off the map…and they have failed in that. And they will fail in that.”

Anyone willing to read Kremlin statements since Feb. 2022 can easily recognize that Sullivan’s rendering of Russia’s “strategic objective” is fictional.

Russia’s stated objectives were forcing Ukraine into “denazification,” “demilitarization,” and permanent neutrality, so that it would never join NATO or any other military bloc. Russia pursued its objectives not by attempting to take Kyiv, but by sending just enough forces to compel Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky — who had long refused to implement the 2015 Minsk Accords — into negotiations.

Russia achieved immediate success. Talks between Moscow and Kyiv began within days of the invasion and culminated in a draft peace agreement brokered in Istanbul two months later.

During the Istanbul talks, Russia called on Ukraine to ban “the glorification and propaganda in any form of Nazism and neo-Nazism,” including the naming of Ukrainian streets and memorials after Nazi collaborators. On the latter request – a clear would-be fulfillment of Russia’s desired “denazification” — Ukraine did not consent.

Yet on the core issues pertaining to Russia’s security concerns, namely permanent neutrality for Ukraine and limiting the size of Ukraine’s military, the outlines of an agreement were reached. As multiple sources – Ukrainian, Russian, European, American, and Israeli — have all testified, this diplomatic breakthrough was quickly undermined by Kyiv’s US and UK sponsors.

The latest corroboration comes from Jean-Daniel Ruch, Switzerland’s ambassador to Turkey during the Istanbul talks. Echoing his earlier counterparts, Ruch now recalls that it was “the Americans with their British allies” who “pulled the plug on the negotiations” just as they were “on the edge” of finalization. To Ruch, the reason was clear: as Biden officials openly admitted, they wanted to “first weaken Russia.” For Ruch, the US-UK peace deal sabotage was “deeply immoral” because of the likelihood that “hundreds of thousands” of deaths would follow. And given that any future peace deal will “pretty much be based on what was negotiated in Istanbul,” that leaves Ruch with the obvious question: “Why did all these people die?”

In the eyes of Sullivan and his White House colleagues, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians had to die so that Washington bureaucrats could one day boast that they “weakened” Russia. As Sullivan’s delusional remarks newly illustrate, this remains the guiding objective. Accordingly, to meet its goal, the Biden administration is spending its final days in office lobbying Kyiv to lower the draft age from 25 to 18.

“Even with the money, even with the munitions, there have to be people on the front lines to deal with the Russian aggression,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained earlier this month. Accordingly, he added, “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary. Right now, 18- to 25-year olds are not in the fight.”

The Ukrainian government has so far resisted its chief sponsor’s advice. As an aide to Zelensky put it, Ukraine “will not compensate for the lack of weapons, aviation, or long-range capabilities with the youth of our men.”

Despite Blinken’s attempt to tout “the money” that Ukrainians are failing to reciprocate with younger cannon fodder, US funding for the proxy war is indeed running out. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the White House quietly asked Congress for an extra $24 billion in military aid for Ukraine. Coming on the heels of an election in which Donald Trump capitalized on war fatigue to win the presidency, not even Biden’s fellow Democrats bothered to consider it.

The Trump team has offered conflicting signals over its plans. According to a report in the Financial Times, Trump aides have informed European counterparts that the incoming president “intends to maintain US military supplies to Kyiv after his inauguration.” Yet in recent comments, Trump has suggested that he will reverse Biden’s decision to let Ukraine fire long-range US missiles into Russia, which, Trump claimed, he “vehemently” disagreed with.

For its part, the outgoing administration is counting on Trump to contain the dangers that its policies have encouraged. After Biden authorized the long-range strikes last month, the New York Times explained the rationale. Inside the White House, the Times reported, “officials believe” that “the escalation risk of allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with U.S.-supplied weaponry has diminished with the election of Mr. Trump.” The reason is straightforward: as the Biden team bows out with a closing salvo, they are simultaneously “calculating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia knows he has to wait only two months for the new administration.”

The White House is therefore acknowledging that their decision to let Ukraine launch long-range US missiles into the territory of a rival nuclear power was directly influenced not by battlefield conditions, but the outcome of a US presidential election. And moreover, they are gambling that the risk of escalation has “diminished” solely because they are soon leaving office.

Desperate to achieve their aims in Ukraine, some U.S. and European officials have “even suggested” that Biden “could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Times added. Such a move, the report vaguely noted, “would be complicated and have serious implications” – implications including nuclear war, given that Russia would never allow it.

Asked about that claim days later, Jake Sullivan offered a quick denial. “That is not under consideration,” Sullivan said. “…What we are doing is surging various conventional capacities to Ukraine so that they can effectively defend themselves and take the fight to the Russians, not nuclear capability.”

Yet as his own administration simultaneously admits, all the conventional US weaponry in the world cannot produce the Ukrainian soldiers needed to use it. This helps explain why, contrary to Sullivan’s hope that Ukraine will “take the fight to the Russians”, the Russians are advancing on multiple fronts.

Despite Sullivan’s exit-interview boasts, it appears that the outgoing Biden team is playing the weaker hand, while leaving the next White House – along with generations of Ukrainians – to bear the strategic failure.

With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word. 

Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.”

Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.

Much has been made of Biden as the family man torn between his duties as president and his compassion for an errant son as the victim of perverted justice. The Times unfolded a singular line of argument on Tuesday.

“President Biden was deeply concerned,” Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush reported, “that legal problems would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, and he began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon.”

No other way out. Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions (to alcohol and crack). It is of a piece with Biden’s very regular references, always for similar political advantage, to the death of his other son, Beau, and the earlier deaths of his first wife and daughter. 

The Rogers and Thrush piece now passes for news reporting Americans are invited to take seriously. It is one among countless others of its kind and quality that are together a measure of how the corruptions of the Bidens, father and son as well as others, have deepened an already severe crisis in American media and turned public discourse into bad afternoon television.  

The reporting on the pardon has been defective since the White House released the Executive Grant of Clemency, along with Biden’s official statement, last Sunday. The Times, The Washington Post, the other major dailies and the broadcast networks all reported as if in unison that Joe Biden’s motivating concerns were the guilty verdicts Hunter Biden faces on gun-possession and tax-evasion charges.

Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Biden père has told the nation his intent was simply to protect Hunter from a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicized. 

From the president’s statement:

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.  

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.” 

You read a statement such as this and you have to wonder whether Joe Biden is capable of speaking truthfully in any circumstance bearing upon his personal interests.

The plea deal, negotiated in the summer of 2023, was indeed carefully negotiated — by Hunter’s attorneys and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors acting to keep the president’s son out of prison. The agreement collapsed not due to political pressure — there was none — but because an un-beholden judge with a commitment to the rule of law, Maryellen Noreika, read it and threw it out of court. 

The feature of the plea bargain that moved Judge Noreika to put an end to the negotiated arrangement was its stipulation that Hunter would be immune from further prosecution not only for the matters then tried — the gun and taxes charges — but for any other crimes he may have committed. Preposterous, Noreika rightly concluded. 

Special Treatment

Was Hunter Biden singled out as his father asserts? Not as his father asserts, but yes, singled out. He had made a mess of his life, breaching various laws while doing so, and was singled out for special treatment in a judicial system that plainly leaves elites and their families above the law.  

This context is essential to understanding why Joe Biden decided — and one strongly suspects this was not, as reported, a decision Biden considered and took over the Thanksgiving weekend — to grant his son clemency in the manner he did. The operative language in the official document, the raison d’être of the case, is this:

“Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN A Full and Unconditional Pardon For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)…”

As is easily discerned, President Biden has reinstated, not quite verbatim but nearly, the terms of the plea agreement thrown out of court a year and a half ago — the agreement he defended in his official statement as fair and reasonable. He has granted his son precisely what Judge Noreika found objectionable — open-ended immunity for crimes “he has committed or may have committed or taken part in.” 

The dates are what matter in this language. Hunter Biden assumed his infamous board seat at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas supplier, in March 2014, a few months after the beginning of the period his father’s pardon covers. Years of bribe-taking, extortion schemes, and various other financial machinations involving Burisma and other foreign clients followed.  

The tax and gun charges, to put this point another way, were all along minor matters next to the far graver allegations leveled at Hunter Biden. This is why guilty verdicts on the lesser infractions went through. They were effectively displays intended to demonstrate prosecutors’ integrity and seriousness as they ignored or otherwise quashed compelling evidence of grand-scale corruption. 

As has been widely remarked, Hunter’s attorneys were almost certain to argue successfully for very light prison time, or none, during the sentencing hearings due this month. The gravity of the foreign business dealings allowed for no such prospect. Not only did these yield Hunter, his business colleagues, and his uncle, Joe’s brother James, tens of millions of dollars; the evidence implicating Joe Biden — “the Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to his father — is hard and plentiful. 

It is possible, providing one has followed various investigations into Hunter Biden’s influence-selling schemes, to read the terms of Hunter’s pardon as Joe Biden’s upside-down admission of his son’s guilt.

And given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings — as an enabler and a beneficiary — it follows that Joe Biden’s ultimate intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself — that is, to protect himself by immunizing the master of all the malign ceremonies from prosecution. 

It was more than a year ago, in September 2023, that the House speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, authorized the Oversight Committee to open preliminary hearings to determine if the full House should begin impeachment proceedings against the president for his alleged involvement in Hunter’s corruptions. 

Plenty of Evidence

Evidence had already begun to accumulate. It was obvious Biden was headed into increasing political peril. And it was obvious that the White House and the Democratic machine, having concluded neither Biden nor his son could win at trial, would fight their corner in the media.

Evidence? What evidence? There is no evidence. This was the Democrats’ rather pitiful counter as the case against Biden mounted. 

In mid–December 2023 the full House voted to begin a formal investigation into the president’s alleged involvement in Hunter’s affairs, based on the accumulating evidence, implicating the president as a participant in and/or a beneficiary of Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving during his father’s years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and during the post–Obama interim before Joe was elected president in 2020.

This evidence was formidable. It included very considerable email and text message archives, 36,000 pages of bank records, and 2,000 pages of the Treasury Departments “suspicious activity reports,” which cover irregular international bank transfers. There was also testimony from Hunter’s business partners, federal agents, federal attorneys, and Mykola Zlochevsky, the chief executive of Burisma Holdings. 

The investigators’ inventory included records of gross payments to the Biden family, chiefly Hunter and Joe’s brother James, of more than $20 million during the years (2009–2017) Joe was vice-president. Investigators also uncovered a network of more than 20 shell companies the Biden family set up to disguise payments received from influence-peddling schemes Hunter conducted in Ukraine, Russia, China, and elsewhere.

At that time of the House vote a year ago, Oversight made clear those areas where it would further focus its attention. These include what Hunter Biden and James Biden took in from their dealings with various foreign entities and where it went, the numerous occasions when Joe met with Hunter’s foreign partners, and the extent to which the Biden White House and the Justice Department had obstructed or suppressed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service. 

Among the most significant findings of F.B.I. and IRS investigators was a payment of $10 million Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly extorted from Burisma in an even split, as described by Zlochevsky in several interviews with an F.B.I. informant, and a payment of $240,000 James made to his older brother immediately after a Chinese equity investor paid Hunter several million dollars.

As the stonewalling at the Biden White House continued, mainstream media began reporting, again in unison, that the House hearings had reached a dead end. But the propaganda operation against the Oversight Committee was failing.

More than two-thirds of Americans, according to a poll conducted earlier this year, thought the House hearings should continue; half of these respondents — 34 percent of those surveyed — “think Joe Biden is guilty of corruption and should be impeached.” 

Hunter Biden agreed to testify under oath last February, an appearance he refused until he was threatened with contempt of Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee, which also had an investigative function in the Biden case, voted on May 22 to release 100 pages of new evidence showing that Hunter Biden lied three times during that testimony.

The evidence of this was provided by Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, the two IRS investigators who had previously presented the Oversight Committee with evidence of the Biden family’s corruption.

It is a family of liars, we can now conclude. Joe Biden, having denied any involvement in his son’s businesses on multiple occasions, was proven to have lied on just as many. He went on to assert numerous times that he would not pardon his son. 

Strangely enough, he said in the official statement issued last Sunday, “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word… .” This is Joe Biden. He has operated for half a century on the understanding that people believe his lies if he repeats them often enough.

It is likely that the case against the Biden crime family, as various commentators have taken to calling it, is closed, but it is too early to conclude this with certainty. Biden’s pardon is perfectly legal, but a court challenge would be legal, too, if the House or another entity chose to mount one.

While Biden’s intent appears in part to have been to protect himself a well as his son, it does not automatically follow that he cannot be investigated after he leaves office. 

How far the House investigations would go, where they would lead, always hinged partly on political will: Oversight and Ways and Means had sufficient evidence to try Joe Biden, but it was never certain the full House would advise the Senate to do so. And it was highly unlikely the Senate, with a Democratic majority until last month, would proceed to trial.

The damage the Bidens have done to an already failing republic is very formidable. This is chiefly due to the gross corruption of the Justice Department, from attorney general on down, and straight through the F.B.I.’s leadership. As I have written elsewhere, when the judicial system decays, the road to failed-state status opens.  

Democrats are fond of asserting that Donald Trump, in his second term, will politicize the Justice Department as a matter of avenging his enemies. One hopes not, although Trump has plenty of cause to seek revenge for actual politicized prosecutions against him.

It was the Democrats who corrupted Justice, in large measure to protect Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. And this will be the deepest, most enduring scar they leave on the American polity. 

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

The scene came to mind this week as I considered the bitterness of President Joe Biden, who seems to be full of resentment because a group of Democratic Party bigwigs, aware that he was failing, forced him to give up his planned re-election campaign and turn over the fight against Donald Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris, and all the more resentment because she failed to beat Trump as Biden did in 2020.

The president is no longer talking about his failed policy in the Middle East, though American bombs and other weaponry are still flowing to Israel and being put to deadly use. Biden is now trying to stem the losses in Ukraine’s war with Russia. A week ago he gave the Ukraine government, headed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, permission to fire a long withheld advanced American ballistic missile capable of hitting targets 190 miles inside Russia. Days later, he decided to provide Ukraine with landmines capable of maiming and killing all whose paths cross them, young and old, friendly and not. 

I have been told that the strategic implications of the president’s escalation—both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have nuclear bombs at their fingertips—had not been fully analyzed inside the Pentagon, and that some important offices, sure to have different views about escalation, were never asked for their input. Putin responded by escalating in turn by firing a nuclear-capable ballistic missile at Ukraine and said in a speech that what had been a regional conflict “had now acquired elements of a global character.” The New York Times noted that the response “was meant to instill fear in Kyiv and the West.”

Putin’s explicit warning came a day after Biden’s decision to permit the use of American anti-personnel landmines in an effort to slow Russian advances in the Donbas region. Neither Washington nor Moscow are signatories to the international mine ban treaty that has been signed by 164 parties, but Biden’s decision to deploy the weapon was widely criticized by international human rights groups

Meanwhile, the Russian army, whose front-line troops are exhausted, continues to push forward against their even more undermanned and under-equipped enemy. Ukraine’s successful penetration into Kursk, the scene of a dramatic German defeat in World War II, is now the object of a brutal Russian counterattack, with huge Ukrainian losses in men and equipment. The long-term prognosis for the Ukrainian army remains dire.

Why is Putin, clearly angered at Biden’s willingness to let Zelensky launch missiles at Russia targets, amid his public talk of being at war now with NATO, not moving to go all in against the weakened Ukraine army and the capital of Kyiv? 

The answer could be messaging from Donald Trump, perhaps relayed through a close associate, who has since his election been nominating the most inexperienced and politically radical cabinet in American history. Trump often makes the point in public that America was not at war during his first term as president, which ended in January 2021, conveniently forgetting the then ongoing occupation of Afghanistan as well as US military operations elsewhere. He has been a consistent supporter of Israel and an all-out supporter of the current Israeli war against Hamas, which has morphed into the vicious targeting of the population of Gaza. His foreign policy appointments so far all share a zealous commitment to Israel and unquestioning support for its ongoing war.

Russia is another matter. Trump was precise about the war between Ukraine and Russia in his debate in September with Kamala Harris. And what he said then is consistent with what I am hearing now in my reporting.

“If I were president,” Trump said, the war “would have never started. . . . I know Putin very well. He would have never. . . . gone into Ukraine and killed millions of people. . . . I’ll get the war with Russia and Ukraine ended.” At that point he added, “If I am president-elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president. . . . That is a war that’s dying to be settled.” 

One of the moderators asked a gotcha question straight out of the Cold War: “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” It was a question to which the vice president would have to say yes. Trump did not. “I want the war to stop,” he said. “I want to save lives that are being uselessly . . . killed by the millions.” A moment later he added of Putin: “He’s got a thing that other people don’t have: he’s got nuclear weapons.”

Trump’s casualty numbers might have been off, but his consistency, especially when pressed, adds to the credibility of what I have been learning in recent weeks: that an understanding about the mechanisms for ending the war has been debated and discussed and even tentatively outlined between informal advisors to Trump and Putin and their teams. I was told by one American that “the lines are open” between those representing the two men, with some vague “assurances sent and received.” 

I have also been told by experts here in Washington who are knowledgeable about Russian political affairs that Putin does not want to make a settlement with Zelensky “until he is good and ready”—meaning that he is going to wait until the currently very successful Russian surge targeted at Donetsk and Kursk plays out. There is said to be concern in Moscow about extensive “stay-behind” intelligence and operational activity in Ukraine that is believed to be organized by American and British agencies.

What is going on now, one American expert told me, is an attempt to change the long-standing American support for containment, exemplified by the Biden administration’s instinctive disdain for the governments of Russia and China, which marred the initial meetings with each in 2021. The Chinese delegation at the meeting in Alaska early that year publicly walked out on Secretary of State Antony Blinken after accusing him and his delegation of attempting to interfere in internal Chinese matters.

Biden has been a disdainful critic of Putin throughout his public life, calling him at various times a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator,” and a “pure thug.” He famously claimed at a one-on-one meeting in Moscow with Putin in 2011 that he looked into his eyes and told him: “I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin replied, according to Biden: “We understand one another.”

This is not a brief for Putin, a former Soviet intelligence agent who is brutal to his political opponents and runs a government that is quick to put foreign journalists in jail. He is also considered by many in the American intelligence community to be a competent and informed leader. 

Trump’s agenda, I was told, was to find a way once in office not to be haunted by worries about contacts with those who dissent from America’s foreign policy. Hence the idea of working more with military-to-military negotiations as a start. One American told me that “reality over politics and history over headlines” would be a fresh way to close out the murderous war between Russia and Ukraine.

Such tactics are not going to solve the crisis in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but there must be a better approach than bowing to the Israeli religious right and Benjamin Netanyahu. That will be a test for the president-to-be, whose choices for cabinet roles have left official Washington and the press agog. Ending the war between Ukraine and Russia will be a start. 

There was no way Joe Biden was going to get it done without much more blood being shed.

The questions from that day onward have been how the policy cliques in Washington would respond to such a change in America’s place in the community of nations and what they might do — how great the risks they would take — to avoid, or at least forestall, this world-historical shift. 

How chaotically or otherwise, to put this question another way, would the arrival of a new, post–American world order prove?  

We have just witnessed a week’s worth of shocking provocations as the U.S. and Britain escalate their proxy war against Russia under the pretense of defending Ukraine in a war that is already lost.

Washington and London — the latter with the former’s assent — have now authorized the grossly irresponsible regime in Kiev to fire American– and British-made missiles into Russian territory. 

The Ukrainians wasted no time doing so. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) launched a volley of U.S.–made ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles at Russian targets last Tuesday. A day later the AFU fired a similar barrage of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory. 

The degree of planning and coordination behind these attacks seems to me self-evident. Nobody in Washington, London, or Kiev is commenting on the targets hit, but these, too, were without question chosen after careful consultation.      

Moscow has responded just as it said it would weeks ago. It now considers itself at war with the Western powers and, last Thursday, attacked a Ukrainian target with a new-generation hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

The message could scarcely be clearer — providing, I must add, one is capable of reading it accurately.    

So we now have answers to the above-noted questions. 

It was never difficult to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, lacking all imagination and anything remotely resembling courage, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order.

After the Sept. 11 events, a continued commitment to American primacy was ineluctably going to prove a commitment to one or another degree of disorder.  

The Biden regime’s latest escalation of its proxy war in Ukraine indicates the limits of this commitment: There are none.

We are now on notice that the world — bitter to write this — is condemned to unceasing chaos and violence so long as the American imperium’s ideologues are capable of mounting a resistance against against the world as it struggles to be.

We know now the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation. 

We hear a lot these days about the Israeli doctrine known as the Samson Option, whereby the Israelis, if they thought themselves under an existential threat, would use their nuclear arsenal to bring the world down with them. Those freak-show terrorists running the Zionist state, you might say: Who or what could be more diabolic?

It is a reasonable question. But there is no longer any pretending as to the unique perversity of terrorist Israel and its Samson Option. America in its post–Sept. 11 phase — fearful, viewing itself as threatened by history itself — has just proved equally perverse, equally diabolic, equally given to contempt for the human cause. 

There is a greater and lesser way to understand the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets. It is partly a matter of passing politics, this is to say, and partly a question of the dynamics of late-imperial ideology. Let us consider each.

It is certainly so, as Joe Lauria pointed out in Consortium News last week, that the immense recklessness of the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets reflects a failed president’s spiteful determination, on his way out of office, to undermine President-elect Trump’s announced intention to end the war in Ukraine. 

I do not see how giving Kiev permission to use Western-made missiles (with Western military operating them)  against Russia will do anything to alter Trump’s intentions. The only way such a gambit could work is by provoking Russia into a vastly expanded, vastly more dangerous war. This goes to my previously made point: No risk is too great if taking it will prolong the long U.S. assault on Russia in the name of American preeminence.     

There is also Joe Biden’s pitiful desire to preserve his “legacy.” Biden was foolish beyond words when he settled on the subversion of the Russian Federation — is “subjugation” my word? — as the project that would engrave his name in the history books. 

This is another lost war: Biden’s “legacy” lies in ruins even before he leaves one behind. The Man from Scranton will go down, as measured by the failures, dangers, and messes he leaves behind, as the worst-performing president in postwar American history. 

We can fairly mark this down to Biden’s native ineptitude: Any careful review of his career reveals him to be — no apology for my word choice — very stupid. His declining mental state, which has received so much press in the months since he was forced to withdraw his bid for reelection, is a case of incapacity piled atop incompetence.

A little while back the Russians began referring to “the collective Biden” to take account of the reality that there is no way of knowing who makes the judgments and policy decisions commonly attributed to “the president,” or “Mr. Biden,” or “the White House.”

You might think it unbelievably irresponsible of the Democrats, and the whole of Capitol Hill along with them, to leave the United States without a capable president, but I propose a reconsideration:

While it is certainly irresponsible to leave the Oval Office vacant for many months, if not years, it is perfectly believable given the extent to which the Deep State (the national-security state if this makes you more comfortable) now runs U.S. policy — this not quite but nearly out in the open.

So far as one can make out, to dolly in on this point, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a very few others form an inner circle that has been directing U.S. policy for much of Biden’s presidential term, either autonomously or by way of his nodding (literally) assent.

An outer circle, with input at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but less operational authority, would include such figures as Samantha Power, who directs the Agency for International Development, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

This is “the collective Biden” — so well coined, this phrase. Look at its members, and there are many more I have not named. These are the imperium’s praefecti, procurators and consuls. They have no interest in politics and want nothing to do with the citizenry. The empire is their ideology, and they are dedicated solely to extending its power. 

And it is these more or less remote apparatchiks who form the collective Biden and who are yet more indifferent to the taking of unconscionable risks than the weak figure behind which they manage the empire’s affairs. 

As many remarked after Russia began its intervention in Ukraine two years and nine months ago, Joe Biden started a war he cannot afford to lose. But Joe Biden will content himself with his Corvette and his sunglasses in a few weeks’ time. 

The Deep State has a lot, lot more on the line at this point — not less, I would say, than the longevity of the American imperium. The people who form it are the true losers who cannot afford to lose. 

It is impossible to know at this point what will come next now that the U.S., with Britain in tow, has authorized the long-range missile strikes.

We do not know, among much else, how the Deep State will field what efforts Trump may make to end the war. These people subverted his plans to improve relations with Moscow during his first term, we must remind ourselves. 

But the extent of the desperation shared between the Deep State and Biden-the-outgoing-pol is very plain. The collective Biden reportedly did not inform the Pentagon before taking the missiles decision. It simultaneously announced plans to provide Kiev with anti-personnel land mines, the kind that blow combatants’ legs off and maim children who come upon them years or decades later. 

This is not, to put the point mildly, the conduct of a policy clique confident it is in control of its destiny. 

The Russian Response

Much has been made of the hypersonic missile, called the Oreshnik, the Russian military fired at a Ukrainian defense industry plant in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk last Thursday — a day after Kiev fired its volley of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Out came the shrieks in Western media that “Putin’s Russia” has again threatened to resort to a nuclear attack.

There is no question of the Oreshnik’s unusual, if not unprecedented power. It triggered explosions that lasted three hours, according to the first press reports. And it can indeed carry a nuclear warhead.  

But I do not share the prevailing read of the Oreshnik’s first deployment — just as I have not shared any of the previous talk of Russia’s suppose threats to go nuclear. I would summarize the message the Kremlin may as well have scribbled in chalk on the Oreshnik’s fuselage as,

Let us remind you that we, on both sides, are nuclear powers. Let us introduce some sanity to the impasse to which you have brought us.

The televised speech President Vladimir Putin delivered last Thursday evening supports this interpretation. While there are likely to be more Oreshniks fired into Ukraine, the targets, like last Thursday’s, will be chosen for their military merit and Russia will continue to refrain from deploying any short– or medium-range missiles anywhere beyond Ukraine —depending, he said, on what the U.S. does next. 

Per usual, the Russian leader has taken the long view — as we all should — and places Russia’s response to the crisis the U.S. and Britain just created in the historical context of the West’s long list of post–Cold War betrayals.

“It was not Russia but the United States that destroyed the system of international security,” Putin said, the latest of his many references to Washington’s withdrawal from various arms-control treaties since the Bush II administration.

Glenn Diesen, an editor at Russia in Global Affairs and among the wisest heads in matters such as these, published a piece last week in which he asserted that the West has “crossed the line between proxy war and direct war.” In it Diesen posed the question on everyone’s mind right now:

“How will Russia respond? There are several more steps on the escalation ladder before pushing the nuclear button. Russia can intensify strikes on Ukrainian political targets and infrastructure, introduce North Korean troops that were likely intended as a deterrent for a situation like this, strike NATO assets in the Black Sea and logistic centres in Poland or Romania, destroy satellites used for the attacks on Russia, or attack US/NATO military assets in other parts of the world under the guise of enabling other countries to defend themselves.”

I do not know the likelihood or otherwise of any of these projections. But it seems to me the collective Biden and the national-security apparatus behind it may have got the Kremlin in a Catch–22 of sorts. 

So long as Russia exercises the restraint it now exhibits — let’s say so long as Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, remain the statesmen in the room — the U.S. and clients such as Britain are likely to press their campaign of provocations to the next step, and the step after that, and so on. This is the long road to America’s version of the Samson Option.  

And if the only way to stop these provocations is to respond to them as the West intends — that is, to escalate into a state of risk no sane statesman would find acceptable — the Russian Federation could find itself in the very war it has resisted, over many years, entering upon. The short road to the Samson Option. 

We can thank Joe Biden for leading the world to this perilous moment. But I don’t think Biden is diabolically intelligent enough to get this done on his own. And this is what ought to worry us most. 

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.