I’m filled with admiration for Biden’s handling of Ukraine. Yes I wish he could have prevented Russian aggression. But what he did was more important.
Rallying necessary public support can be much harder than stopping countries from misbehaving. Franklin Roosevelt understood the threat from Adolf Hitler a decade before the American public understood. Roosevelt read German and had read Mein Kampf in the original German. Americans tend to get upset if one reads the language of potential enemies as if that makes one love the enemy. But dealing with enemies requires breaking their codes, whether in written or computer language.
Roosevelt tread carefully. He got support only for leasing equipment to the British – until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Hitler could have been stopped much more easily if we hadn’t wasted time negotiating and trying to appease him, but Europe wasn’t ready to deal with Hitler before he attacked and the American public wasn’t ready before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Politics matters.
The American public and other NATO countries are beginning to understand the threat from Russia, a threat we hoped had ended when the Soviet Union broke up. We’ve been too comfortable. Calm, considered judgment are usually helpful. But Putin’s attack demonstrated the need for action. It’s too late to keep Putin out of Ukraine. If troops were on the ground there, attacking Ukraine would have meant attacking American troops – a clear no-no that would have made Putin stop short. But because of domestic politics, Biden made it clear that there would be no American troops in Ukraine. But Biden nudged NATO as well as the American public so the future will not repeat the past.
I recently asked a woman from Taiwan whether Taiwanese are nervous about China. No, she said, because America has large miliary installations there, including underground missiles. So China would not attack Taiwan. Threats are most effective before they are carried out. And military countermeasures are also much more effective before they have to be used. Having troops in Taiwan poses much more significant risks to China than a mere threat of sanctions. It is unlikely China would fire on American troops because it is unlikely that Americans wouldn’t fight back.
With respect to NATO countries, there must be a tripwire of troops. NATO has to act decisively with respect to countries in NATO or neither Russia nor anyone else will fear the alliance. The best way to make sure that its actions and its intentions are clear is to place soldiers on the NATO border and keep them there.
Many Americans are tired of keeping troops in other countries, but keeping them there is a LOT cheaper than fighting a war that would not have been necessary. If NATO collapses, America loses its strongest allies and it becomes every nation for itself. The neophytes in the Trump Administration either didn’t understand that, didn’t care, or were routing for Putin and his friends to take over much of the globe and threaten American peace and well-being. It doesn’t matter which because his attack on NATO set the stage for Putin’s push and threatens to put America in much more danger than when the industrialized nations of the free world felt they could trust America and needed to be with us in a crisis.
I think we are all more ready now to defend the free world.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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