Biden’s Ukraine policy must evolve: Defending freedom requires risks

As Russia’s offensive in Ukraine has turned from a military assault to a savage attack on civilians, we must wonder what the purpose of a democratic, free-world order is, if not to crush oppressive aggression like we are seeing from Vladimir Putin.

Many politicians have simply said we face a clear choice: allow Russia to advance — or start World War III. So far, Americans overwhelmingly support economic sanctions but are wary of actions that could lead to a war with Russia. Putin has successfully depicted himself as a crazed figure who will do anything, even destroy civilization, if he is challenged. The result is that we have supplied defensive weapons to Ukraine but stopped at providing jets, even as Putin deploys weapons like hypersonic ballistic missiles against civilian targets.

President Kennedy’s America would never have allowed this aggression to stand. When Russia attempted to put missiles in our hemisphere in 1962, Kennedy acted and said we learned from the 1930s: “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He said we should neither unnecessarily risk the costs of nuclear war nor “shrink from it at any time it needs to be faced.”

Preserving freedom is a risky business, but it is a risk worth taking. 

President Clinton, who intervened with airstrikes in Kosovo in 1999, said at the time that the U.S. was acting to protect “thousands of innocent people from a mounting military offensive.” He complained of a Serbian military offensive that was “an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people.” Ending that tragedy, he said, was “a moral imperative.” He complained about how, in both World Wars, that “Europe was slow to recognize the dangers, and the United States waited even longer to enter the conflicts,” allowing innocents to die. He said that looking the other way would “discredit” NATO.

Yet, today, we stand on the preposterous notion that we would defend Ukraine only if it was a NATO country.

It was President Reagan — ironically, like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, another performer-turned-president — who said, “We know only too well that the war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that the tyrants are tempted.”

For sure, President Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan was the final green light of the American signal that this country has long since abandoned the polices of Kennedy and Clinton.

So far, we have elected to fight real war with an economic war and defensive weapons support, yet the killing of civilians is escalating rather than receding. Without actual military or diplomatic intervention, the end here can only be an even greater loss of life and a crushing of the Ukrainian people. A defensive war is generally a losing effort against an enemy nine times as big. America itself would never have been born had the French not gotten off the sidelines and supported the colonials at the Battle of Yorktown.

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In the past, the expansion of Russia to abut so many NATO countries would have been considered an attack on NATO itself, just as Kennedy considered Russian expansion in Cuba a threat to our hemisphere. Russia’s use of Belarus and Ukraine as military bases against the rest of Europe is a major security threat, with the inevitable next step a direct NATO conflict. Nothing in Putin’s rhetoric has suggested that he sees any difference between Ukraine and Latvia, Lithuania, or other neighboring countries in terms of his right to conquer. This is a war of naked aggression without any provocation, and it is a continuation of expansion that was unchecked by President Obama when Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimean region in 2014.

Obama, unfortunately, failed to act when he could have, and we are paying the price for that weakness today. He tried with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to “reset” Russian relations, and mocked then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for warning about the danger of Putin; Obama accused Romney of a 1980s-focused foreign policy — and yet, today, we are haunted by the appeasement polices of the 2010s. 

Laughably, the Biden administration still grasps for an Iran nuclear deal that would have no restraints on Iran committing terrorist acts, expanding its territory or vowing to destroy Israel. It is systematically reversing the Trump administration’s policy of forming a coalition based on Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to check Iran’s power. No wonder the Saudis won’t answer Biden’s phone call and Israel’s leader visited Russia: Biden is continuing to cater to our enemies, a proven losing strategy of the Obama years. 

It is time for President Biden and our NATO allies to declare not only that Putin is a war criminal, but that Russia is now a rogue state.

They need to supply Ukraine with military jets and begin to set up red lines that prevent further killing of Ukrainians; chemical and nuclear weapons should become tripwires for direct military action to take out Russia’s invasion force.

We recognize Ukraine as an independent nation, and we should honor all requests by its government for military assistance on its land and in its skies. These are not Russian skies or land, so why are we effectively recognizing Russia’s right to be there? That is the fallacy of our position from day one of this war — Ukraine has been implicitly recognized as Russian territory rather than as a sovereign state.

As long as the West runs its economic play, Putin will continue his military advance, secure in believing that he controls the energy purse anyway. This conflict will come to a crossroads in the next ten days: Russia will continue to advance and kill thousands more civilians; China will have to decide how it is going to handle the crisis, and President Zelensky will continue to plead with the West for stronger action.

It is obvious that the U.S. must reverse its energy polices and exploit its own resources to block America’s enemies from controlling America. This was yet another failure to understand the geopolitical consequences of our policies that must be reversed, to put energy independence as a first priority as technology continues to develop to combat climate change.

President Biden, I believe, will have the support of most Americans for an even stronger stand on the Ukraine crisis. But following the current course is likely to produce a slow-motion loss, with hundreds of thousands of casualties.

It will take increased risk and strong presidential leadership to put the fear in Putin that no tyrant will be allowed to unleash unchecked aggression and pay only with his MasterCard. Russia must face a united NATO force, ready to take the next steps, even if it means edging toward a direct confrontation. 

As Kennedy said, such risk is the price of freedom.

Mark Penn is a managing partner of the Stagwell Inc., a global organization of digital-first marketing companies, as well as chairman of the Harris Poll and author of “Microtrends Squared.” He served as pollster and adviser to former President Clinton from 1995 to 2000. You can follow him on Twitter @Mark_Penn.