andrewrgross

By trying to play it safe, Biden & co. ensured that the conflict would become more drawn out and expand,

This is how you know it's a proxy war.

As you point out, Biden's decisions were obviously ones that would prolong the war rather than affording a decisive counteroffensive. This was because the goal of slowly bleeding Russia's military out to weaken a rival power and bolster the American weapons manufactures was placed more highly than than trying to put Ukraine into a position of strength from which to demand a ceasefire on their own terms.

I don't know what Zelensky wanted, or what his plans were. But I think the most obvious and sensible approach would've been to privately lay out the bargain: the US gives Ukraine more or less everything that it wants to kick Russia's ass for a couple of months with the awareness that a full defeat of Russia by Ukraine is impossible, and pursuing a regime change would be inviting a nuclear world war. As such, the US goes hard, and puts Ukraine in a position to make the most modest concessions necessary to end the war in a way that lets Russia survive while having demonstrated that the overall approach was a disaster.

Could Putin decide to try again a few years later? Sure. Is it likely? And would that situation have been worse than what we're about to watch Trump and Putin do? Jesus Christ, not by a Texas mile.

Letting the war continue under any terms into Trump's presidency should've been viewed as the number-one all-time greatest military vulnerability to Ukraine, and should've been prevented at any cost.

I don't want to diminish that by claiming to have all the answers, but I would suggest a few things.

Preface: My overall advice would include a complete overall to the status quo US approach to Israel and the middle east pre-10/7. The prior plan -- which was to help buy the support of all of Israel's neighbors to isolate Palestinians from any consideration was deeply immoral, inhumane, and as 10/7 showed us, strategically unsound. But for the sake of the thought exercise, I'll answer as if I supported Biden's overall objective, which is to maintain the apartheid regime under a veneer of plausible deniability that preceded 10/7.

First, Biden should've imposed a series of limits of Bibi from the start of the war. He should've privately laid out the objectives the US would support and the length of time available to conduct it, and "leaked" some of these discussions. He acknowledged the risk that Israel would overreach as the US did during 9/11 -- which by the way, HE himself bears great responsibility for. He was the ranked minority member of the Senate foreign relations committee in 2001. Antony Blinken was his main foreign policy advisor when he passed the Patriot Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force that began the Global War on Terror, and the separate Authorization for Use of Force to invade Iraq in 2022. Considering all this, there was no reason to agree to give Israel a blank check for actions he publicly acknowledged were likely to create a disaster.

Second, he should've made clear during the first ceasefire in November of 2023 that the war was now over. They'd already killed tens of thousands of people and collapsed most of the infrastructure in Gaza. They'd made their point, and it was time to get the hostages home and negotiate a "day after" arrangement. Again, I would advocate for an actual long-term peace plan for Palestine, because the whole framework prior to the war assumes a permanent immiseration of Gaza that I do not support, but if that's what you want, this would've been a practical time to do that.

Third, there was always the problem that Netanyahu was trying to stay out of jail. He knew that if the first ceasefire held, it would mean that the war cabinet would dissolve, opposition leaders would call for elections and an investigation into the failures of 10/7, he'd lose office, face trial, and likely go to jail. Personally, again, I think this sounds very appropriate. But if you're Biden -- who genuinely thinks of Bibi as his little brother despite the fact that Bibi is a ruthless psychopath who would slit Biden's throat without hesitation -- you could offer to cover Bibi's ass by arranging for his complete pardon in exchange for peacefully ceding control.

Overall, this isn't really chess. It's more like a standard operating procedure. But truth be told, Biden did what he did because ultimately, this was all the outcome he wanted.

I know that sounds sick and deranged, but if you go through his entire career, it's always been there. From when he shocked Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin by justifying violence against civilians in a private meeting in 1982 to his repeated acts to undermine Obama in his dealings with Netanyahu, Biden has always been committed to a maximalist approach towards Palestinians. And now we're here.

I mean no disrespect, but I think you need to exercise a much more critical lens. If only as an exercise in understanding other viewpoints, even if you think they're somehow incorrect.

Biden didn't need to tear up treaties or threaten to invent new powers. He literally just had to obey US law.

A law known as the Leahey law states very, very frankly that it is illegal -- completely against US law -- for any US agency to knowingly provide weapons which they believe will be used to commit human rights abuses or violate international law.

Numerous whistleblowers in the state department -- Stacey Gilbert, Annelle Sheline, Josh Paul -- flagged the provision of weapons to Israel as a clear violation of the Leahy law. They repeatedly pointed out that internally, the State Department had clearly determined that weapons were routinely being used in a manner that made further deliveries a criminal act under US law. This happened in full public view. These three people (as well as others outside of the state department) resigned from the jobs they'd worked their whole lives for out of duty to the constitution to publicly disclose that Blinken and Biden were knowingly acting in direct violation of US criminal law. That's what makes this so frustrating. Biden had no excuse. Despite every claim to the contrary, his complicity in the war crimes in Gaza were conducted knowingly and deliberately. It was not passive, it required active, determined will to carry out. I think that based on numerous public testimonials from within his administration, frankly, the International Criminal Court had sufficient evidence to charge Biden with war crimes as they did Netanyahu and Galant. But obviously charging the US president is just way too hot a potato.

Biden withheld a single item: 2000 lbs bombs. That was a purely symbolic gesture. That in no way limited Israel's ability to conduct the war. And that was on purpose. If it had, he wouldn't have done it.

No one prevented him from withholding anything. I'm not sure what you think Republicans forced him to do, but that is the sole item that was withheld, and that restriction persisted until he left office.

This is very, very painful stuff to digest. But I hope you can take a deep breath and at least sit with these facts for a moment. I think we should all do so out of respect for people like Gilbert, Sheline, and Paul who sacrificed their careers and reputations over these plain facts.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/opinions/gaza-israel-resigning-state-department-sheline/index.html

I find it tragic the lack of strategic thinking or imagination that the national security world is capable of.

If what you're saying is true, this is the best outcome. Biden did the best that one could do. This result is the result you get from implimenting the best possible strategic war planning of the strongest military in all of history.

That's preposterous. If Biden, Blinken, and Austin sat down and applied the world's most formidable military power to simulating outcomes, among possible outcomes would certainly be these two:

1. Trump wins, withdraws all support, and possibly begins sanctioning Ukraine or supplying weapons and intelligence to Putin. Zelinsky is killed and Ukraine comes fully under Russian control as a puppet state.

2. Zelinsky agrees under pressure from Biden to negotiate a ceasefire in 2022. European leaders buy into a plan where they muster an overwhelming pressure campaign of limited duration to apply maximum pressure to Putin economically, and Biden warns that if Putin doesn't come to the table, all bets are off: Ukraine enters into a complete mutual defense pact with the US, and we begin building long range ballistic missile launchers on their border. OR; Ukraine agrees to surrender parts of Crimea and the Donbas in exchange for a complete withdrawal. Russia acquiesces. The war ends. Both sides are mad, but Trump comes into office more than two years after Russia has completely withdrawn, and Ukraine maintains a sizeable stockpile of American weapons, making a resumption of the conflict unappealing to Putin.

I don't love outcome 2. But can we not pretend that this was not an option obviously available to Biden? An option he refused to even consider, despite the obviously enormous risks?

Biden should've compelled an end to this by any means necessary before Trump took office. This was not an unforeseeable outcome, and they made no effort to even consider a response strategy.

I do not understand what your point is.

What lesson did you take from the fiasco with Bibi? Biden claimed for months that he was going to get Bibi to agree to a ceasefire, and that it was close, and that the major obstacle was Hamas. And that they were working "tirelessly". And critics continued to insist that if he was serious, he needed to call up Bibi and say that he either accept a ceasefire or continue the war with rocks and sharp sticks, but that one way or another, Israel was about to stop firing US-made bullets at kids. And we were told that it doesn't work that way.

And then Trump said that Bibi had to agree to Biden's ceasefire by January 20th or there'd be "hell to pay". Obviously not because of any humanitarian concern, but the point is that it was obvious all along: when the US is your essential supplier, the US can largely dictate exactly when you sit down at the negotiating table.

Do you see some other lesson here besides that Biden was terrible at diplomacy, specifically because he never really wanted diplomacy?

No: because that assumes that Putin knew Trump was going to win.

Both sides knew that the outcome of a coin flip election could make or break the terms of any future agreement, so Putin had no way to confidently know that a negotiation in 2025 would yield better terms than 2024.

I mean, it's all hypothetical. Maybe Putin would rather go for broke, because he's insane and an evil asshole. Maybe he'd rather die blowing up the whole world than every accept a stalemate. But the theory that there was no room to negotiate is preposterous.

I can definitely say in this moment, though, that Biden's refusal to even discuss negotiating a ceasefire was certainly a massive, costly mistake.

This is uncomfortable to say, but the US President has pretty much unconstrained authority to control the diplomatic matters of most of our allies. It's not unlimited, but it's obviously enough that the President of the United States can -- if they choose to -- simply dictate the end of a proxy war. I think this is really more obvious common sense than some fringe theory, but for any skeptics, Trump demonstrated this by commanding Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal he hated that Biden had ostensibly been trying to secure for about 7 months. The only difference between Biden's seven months and Trump's seven days was that Trump didn't ask. He just dictated what was going to happen.

That is... horrible. It's not a basis for international relations or peace or sovereignty or respect for allies...

But it is a frank demonstration that Biden could end the war in Ukraine at pretty much any time. Any month of the year that suited him, he could've picked up the phones and said it was time to strike a deal.

He couldn't end it on the terms of his choosing! The terms would've sucked at all points, but negotiated settlement was always an option. And at any point if he'd done that, I can guarantee you that Ukraine would've gotten a better "deal" than what whatever is going to be imposed on them by Trump & Putin.

This is really sad.

Yet again, I can't help but look back towards Biden, who overall seems to have employed a practice of making no plans to safeguard any of his work against an election loss.

I wish he would've negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage. I feel like that's been treated as a shocking proposal for the last three years. But it always seemed obvious to me: if Trump wins, you could lose any and everything. He could simply withhold weapons and invite Russia to complete full conquest. He could issue Zelinsky an ultimatum to surrender and live in exile or face a firing squad in St. Petersburg.

Ukraine will be lucky to simply survive these peace talks. Why they didn't negotiate this before the election seems to be another in an endless catalog of hubristic decisions.

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Dude...

As the expression goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Sure, he's a morally bankrupt wildly corrupt autocrat. But sometimes his enemies happen to be people I hate too.

Why is he doing this? I can't say for certain, but my guess is that the military-industrial complex is on the wrong side of his kleptocracy. If they'd given the right bribes and flattery I'm sure he'd be saying that we gotta build more nukes, but apparently the CEOs of Raytheon et. al. didn't back the right horse. Plus, Trump likes the dictator club. He'd rather he, Putin, and Xi spent those dollars on presidential yaughts and focused on locking up dissidents than having an arms race among buddies.

Even still... fundamentally he's fuckin right. It makes no sense for us to give billions and billions and billions to these companies so that we have the capacity to exterminate the human race a fifth time or something. Killing our whole species once is fuckin stupid to begin with, but planning on doing it multiple times is just advanced levels of stupid, and it's dangerous as hell to incentivize other countries to get into this red-queen race.

Sure, his reasons are almost certainly evil as hell. But wherever they are... he's right that we should cut our military budget in half and negotiate disarmament.

Holy shit... I did not have that on my bingo card.

Fine. Who knows if it'll happen, but when he's right, he's right. I don't think he'll ever be able to make me like his fascist ass, but if he cuts the military budget and sets up a new arms control treaty I'll give him the credit for it.

We'll see.