Biden’s Black Friday in Ukraine

Today is a day of Thanksgiving. But tomorrow will be yet another stark reminder, as shoppers flock to stores, that there are no bargains or discounts when it comes to U.S. national security.

America’s bounty is indeed plentiful, yet it is also under a growing attack.

As the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City takes place this morning, there will be another disquieting parade of our nation’s enemies taking place across multiple kinetic regional theaters. Ukraine, for now, is still the main show, but Israel’s war against Hamas is the second in a double feature. Disturbingly, Taiwan looks more and more like the coming attraction.

Our national security strategy does not support three such contingencies, let alone anything more than that. It did not need to be this way. 

Nonetheless, it is, and we are fast approaching a day of national reckoning. President Biden’s escalation fears in confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin are resulting in the very escalation that he and his administration had hoped to avoid. 

Biden’s initial instinct about Putin was right when he went off script in Warsaw in March 2022 boldly declaring, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” White House officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, quickly walked his comments back saying, “We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else, for that matter.”

Certainly, Washington-instigated regime change in Moscow was always off the table. Yet an aggressive posture ensuring Ukraine a decisive win in its war against the Russian invaders would have gone a long way into Putin’s domestic foes removing him from power. Instead, Biden – or perhaps his national security team did for him – chose the least intrusive path to defend Kyiv in his now all too familiar and oft-repeated phrase “for as long as it takes.”

It is taking too long. Ukraine war fatigue has set in.

Putin has used the extra time the Biden Administration has afforded him to turn his “special military operation” into a “forever war” in the best-case scenario – or in the worst case, into a war of attrition that Ukraine likely will not win or survive. Bakhmut was Putin’s first attempt to achieve the latter. More recently, it is his counteroffensive along the Kupiansk-Lyman axis and sustained attempts to encircle Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine.

Biden’s refusal to commit to winning in Ukraine has also given the Kremlin the opportunity to expand the board into the Middle East. As we previously noted, Putin’s fingerprints were all over Hamas’ bloody attack against Israel on Oct. 7. As a direct consequence, the White House was forced to assemble a massive armada of U.S. naval aircraft carriers, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, and fighter jets in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The alignment between Putin, his “Arsenals of Evil” partners (including Iran and North Korea), and China on the edges is continuing to coalesce. Yet, the Biden Administration still fails to understand that the U.S. is caught up in a growing global whirlwind of a dystopian third world war. 

Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and other Iranian-backed militant groups are actively attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. These are all being wielded, directly or indirectly, by Moscow via Tehran. Biden and his national security team, particularly National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, may fear escalation, but Putin and his Axis of Evil allies do not, and they have hurled themselves into it headlong.

The hard truth is that Putin is in this thing to win, as is Chinese President Xi Jinping. They are not shopping for Black Friday bargains. Until and unless the Biden Administration confronts this reality, U.S. national security will remain at high risk. 

Tellingly, if not frustratingly, Biden’s instinct has proven right again. During a post-APEC news conference in San Francisco last week, Biden characterized Xi as a dictator, noting “Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.”

Beijing predictably was not pleased. A Chinese Foreign Ministry official described Biden’s candid comments as “irresponsible political maneuver, which China firmly opposes.” Nor was Blinken thrilled by the president’s candor. The Secretary of State winced noticeably upon hearing Biden’s description of Xi. 

It is time Sullivan and Blinken remember that Biden is the president and begin channeling more of his ‘instincts’ into the posturing of U.S. national security policy. Maddeningly, however, both top White House officials remain focused on de-escalation what would come at a high cost to the American people. Moscow, Tehran and Beijing are focused on increasing tensions in eastern Europe, the Middle East and in the Indo-Pacific as part of their larger global ideological war against the West.

Reports abounded earlier this month that Washington is slowly attempting to maneuver Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals into a negotiated settlement. Putin might welcome freezing the conflict, but only as a means of regrouping and resetting to renew his invasion of Ukraine another day. Putin’s plan to build a new naval base in Abkhazia, a separatist region of Georgia in the Black Sea, is proof enough he has no long-term intention of backing down against either Ukraine or the West.

It is not too late for the Biden administration to get it right and take the steps necessary to help Kyiv win. U.S. aid to Ukraine has been miniscule relative to gross domestic product. In 2022, it represented only 0.33 percent of GDP. In Black Friday terms, that spending level has been more than a bargain in terms of the cost inflicted upon Putin and Russia’s military. 

Yet, by bargain hunting, Biden is allowing Putin to outspend Ukraine nearly 3:1 ($15 billion to $5 billion) according to Andrei Illarionov, a former senior economic policy adviser to Putin during his early years in office. During an interview with Jason Jay Smart for the Kyiv Post, Illarionov noted that no country since Clausewitz’s times had won a major western war while being outspent by the enemy. 

Nor is it likely the U.S. can win its ideological war against Russia and China if it allows itself to be outspent. Nor by enabling Putin to outfox the West in Ukraine by negotiating a ceasefire that would only be a pause so that he can regroup. 

Xi is watching. Biden must echo Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas’ comments earlier this week at the Atlantic Council, wherein she declared, “It is not enough to say the Ukraine must win – Russia also must lose.” If not, then Taiwan is likely next. In which case the U.S. might find itself canceling future Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades, as it did during World War II. 

Mark Toth, an economist and entrepreneur, is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.