For all that it’s unmitigated tragedy in Ukraine, this article in WaPo tells me that, win or lose, President Biden’s non-egotistical approach to building alliances to oppose Russia is going to bear fruit both now and as far into the future as we’re willing to nurture that tree. In case my reader wasn’t aware, consider this:
Biden has seen one of his major goals as rebuilding global alliances that he viewed as recently tattered, and persuading leaders with disparate interests and varied domestic concerns to come together. As Russia prepared its attack, officials say, Biden engaged in discreet diplomacy with European allies, and in recent weeks he has encouraged them to take action.
“They avoid the political downside of having the view that somehow big brother is corralling or forcing the junior partners to do its own bidding,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s not just Joe Biden and the United States carrying the load.”
Even while much of the process may be stage-managed by the United States, he added, it helps European leaders domestically by presenting the response as a widespread global alliance and not just one orchestrated by Washington. The strategy is not without risk for Biden’s own domestic political concerns, depriving him of opportunities to tout achievements as he faces low approval ratings and attacks from Republicans who call his response weak.
By not turning this into America and a few allies, we now have a united front in which various nations have equal voices and opinions. This leads away from the toxic Oh, it’s a war between the United States and Russia, fought on Ukrainian territory, and towards the narrative Russia is a violent, rogue nation with a strongman for a leader … and look what happened to them.
This serves to fortify the alliance of liberal democracies, including those who are on the edge of falling off that wagon, or even are off that wagon – looking at you, Hungary! – because they see an alliance that is doing good in the face of evil, and that’s an often attractive option for leaders. The knowledge there are many similarly-minded countries encourages everyone even more.
Hell, if the Swiss abandon their neutrality, you know something is going on.
It also serves as a discouragement to would-be leaders who think they can be a successful strongman. Strongman leaders are rarely successful; instead, they tend to be prideful incompetents, from Franco of Spain to Bolsonaro of Brazil to Marcos of the Phillippines, and now, as Russian forces bog down against Ukraine, Putin of Russia. In this last case, it’s not just that Putin’s military did not immediately succeed, but the fact that Putin didn’t foresee, or head off, the devastating economic sanctions that will send Russia spiraling down to Third World status, the military aid dispatched to Ukraine by various alliance members that will kill more Russian soldiers, the sudden and shocking interest of Finland in joining NATO, the crippling removal of big Russian banks from SWIFT, and no doubt other items I’ve forgotten or missed.
Each failed strongman, whether dictator in fact only, or in name as well, is an object lesson in that failed governance model, a lesson that all its fans, from Trump to Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus to Tucker Carlson, should learn.
And Biden’s approach, as frustrating as GOP leaders and pundits may claim to be by it, is strongly beneficial for the United States, far more than the foolhardy pursuit of personal glory. But the GOP has discarded the old American tradition that politics stops at the American beach. They are not conservatives any longer, simply power-hungry fools who never learned how to govern in a world of hostile powers.
I expect we’ll benefit from Biden’s decisions for decades to come … unless Putin decides to fire off World War III with his nuclear arsenal.
