It’s past time for the West to get serious with layered sanctions on Russia

The failed Russia policies of the three prior U.S. administrations have created the dangerous predicament involving Ukraine that the Biden team is desperately struggling to manage but may be only adding to the list of failures.  

Dealt a bad hand by his predecessors — including his own role as foreign policy vice president in the Obama administration — Biden has played it erratically. During the transition period, his designated national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sensibly approached the German government and asked for a hold on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline intended to deliver gas from Russia. Angela Merkel’s government refused, and Biden quietly acquiesced and went along.

As the Ukraine crisis emerged, Biden instinctively reverted to his deferential posture toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aversion to military force, preemptively taking U.S. “unilateral” intervention off the table while evincing no interest in mobilizing collective NATO action against the common threat to Europe. The administration has even failed to send units of the U.S. Navy into the Black Sea, an international, not Russian, waterway. Biden made it clear that the only punitive Western reaction Putin would face would be economic sanctions, something he has readily learned to live with since 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia with no intolerable consequences.

Having cleared the deck of any kinetic Western response to further Russian aggression, Biden subsequently diluted even that milder U.S. posture. Tipping his hand, and freeing Putin’s hand even further, when asked for specifics on U.S. economic action, he said, “[I]t depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.” A shocked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately tweeted, “We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations.”  

Biden later “clarified” his meaning: “If any … assembled Russian units move across the

Ukrainian border, that is an invasion [bringing] a severe and coordinated economic response.” But the geopolitical damage was done, and the handwriting was on the wall. Putin could be confident that Russia could weather whatever bombastic rhetoric and dramatic action he initially would face within the narrow economic domain. Biden’s own accommodationist instincts would ensure his vulnerability to appeals for moderation from U.S., European and Asian commercial interests, as well as from the German government, NATO’s weak sister. 

Biden failed to persuade Germany’s visiting new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to join him in publicly declaring that Nord Stream 2 would not be activated if Russia entered Ukraine. And Germany not only has refused to send defensive weapons to Ukraine; it has blocked other NATO countries from using its territory to do so. 

Biden could repair some of the damage from his missteps and from an alliance that has inconsistently cooperated with his administration’s valiant efforts to forge a united Western front.  He urgently needs to scrap his ineffective all-or-nothing approach to sanctions. The administration threatens “severe” and “crippling” economic consequences for Russia, including, says Biden but not Germany, “the end of Nord Stream 2” — but only after a “further invasion” of Ukraine.

Yet, the combination of Putin’s escalating military buildup along three sides of Ukraine’s borders, his increasingly extreme demands and hostile rhetoric, and his well-established history of prior invasions and occupations, which are ongoing, already constitute egregious further aggression under international law and plain common sense. Article 1 of the United Nations Charter states as its first and paramount purpose “the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and …the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.”

Several members of Congress have recognized this reality and proposed legislation that would authorize sanctions for what Moscow already has done and continues to do, not waiting for a Russian fait accompli and a devastated and occupied Ukraine. But the Biden administration unwisely has prevailed upon Democrats to block the measure.

Sullivan repeatedly has offered the administration’s dubious rationale. He said over the weekend that there are two reasons for not imposing pre-invasion sanctions. The first is the “logic [of] deter[rence] … they have to be set up in a way where, if Putin moves, then the costs are imposed.” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby agreed, saying imposing “preemptive sanctions” now would forfeit the leverage. “If you punish someone for something he hasn’t done yet, you lose the deterrent effect.”

But, of course, Putin already has “moved” and “done” many things. The administration is certainly capable of structuring a regime of layered sanctions with increasingly severe impacts.  This would demonstrate the administration’s willingness to actually impose sanctions, rather than simply talking about imposing sanctions. Applying sequential, escalating measures while saving the very worst for last — e.g., cutting Russia off completely from the international financial system — has a more realistic chance of influencing Putin’s thinking than anything that has been done or is being done now.

However, the second reason Sullivan gave for holding back on “preemptive” sanctions may be the more telling point: “That the West be strong, be united, and be determined to operate with common purpose. [The president] believes that the sanctions approach he’s taken in lockstep with our European partners, the Canadians, and others puts us in a position for the West to be able to respond to this contingency in the most united and purposeful way possible.”

The unspoken message: Despite administration rhetoric of a unified alliance, some members are still reluctant to antagonize Putin even at the lower level of action of economic sanctions.  Recognition of that reality reinforces Biden’s earlier inadvertent admission that, even after a Russian “incursion, … we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.” Putin surely knows of these internal Western divisions as well as anyone, which explains why he continues to pursue his fateful course.

The United States must assert — and lead — a stronger, more timely and coherent response to Putin’s aggression and not allow the weakest links in the alliance to play into his strategy.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.