Every dollar that Biden spends on keeping Ukraine in a futile fight is seen by many of his voters as a dollar less for themselves, writes Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat
Not infrequently, the obvious is missed out while analysing a situation, and so it has proved in the case of the war in Ukraine that has been ongoing for almost two years and counting. Caught in the mists of a vanished past in which they could do as they pleased, the major European powers seem to have convinced themselves that the Ukrainian military could with their help roll back the Russians from territory that Moscow has been in effective oversight of, if not control, since 2014.Whether it was Napoleon or Hitler, or the 21st century paladins of Europe who saw visions of a disintegrated Russian Federation by the close of the Ukraine conflict, under-estimating the tenacity of the Russians proved to be their undoing. Fortunately for Georgia, those who led the country did not buy into such delusions, with the consequence that the country, although shaken, remained largely undamaged by the 2008 war with Russia that began when President Saakashvili sent his troops into Abkhazia to regain control of that territory.A little under two years back, President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had finally understood that the “Common European Home” that he had joined with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in seeking was unattainable. In such a fusion gone would be US primacy in Europe, and with that the special position the UK had long held within the continent. Not to mention the outsize role that the Franco-German alliance had within the EU.
The invasion of Georgia sparked off the effort by the Victoria Nuland school of regime change to somehow engineer the downfall of Putin, and in confrontingRussia in 2022 over Ukraine, the regime change artists believed they had found the key. Of course, the war would be harsh, especially for the Ukrainians, but sanctions would make the Russian economy implode just as the Iraqi economy had imploded after Saddam Hussein was driven out of Kuwait in 1991 and brutal US-Europe sanctions were imposed on the defeated country, sanctions that would make the 1919 Treaty of Versailles seem generous in comparison.Unfortunately for them, Russia was a former and very possibly future superpower, not an Iraq under a dictator who placed the highest priority not on welfare but on control of the population, especially the Shia majority. The sanctions imposed on Russia by the NATO alliance have caused havoc the world over by its impact on logistics and availability of supply of essentials, and in particular have severely damaged the future of Germany by Berlin cutting off supplies of energy from the Russian Federation and meekly accepting the sabotage by elements in NATO of the Nord Stream II pipeline.Had that been made operational, Germany would have experienced a new Wirtschaftswunder, another economic revival of the kind led by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in the 1960s.
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It was a surprise that Chancellor Olaf Scholz fell into the same “Let’s Get Putin” spirit as Joe Biden exhibited in his zeal to remove Putin from the Kremlin.Rather than that particular eviction taking place, what seems more likely is that Joe Biden will lose the keys to the White House next year as a fallout of his war on Putin. Every dollar that he spends on keeping Ukraine in a futile fight to reclaim lost land from pro-Russian elements is seen by many of his voters as a dollar less for themselves. Given the avidity with which Europe-obsessed aides of the US President such as Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan have been pushing for more and more taxpayer dollars to go into Ukraine, it comes as no surprise that several in the African-American community are turning away from Biden.Rather than check endlessly with European leaders such as Scholz, Sunak and Macron about what to do about Ukraine, President Biden needs to check with his support base about what they feel about the money flowing to Ukraine. He may be surprised by the gulf between their and his views about a war that was from the start unwinnable by Ukraine, given the hatred for Kiev of pro-Russian Ukrainians and the difference in scale between that country and the Russian Federation.
Not just Biden, every ruling politician across both sides of the Atlantic runs the risk of losing her or his job the more the Ukraine conflict drags on as a consequence of their support for Zelenskyy. Ask former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, who lost the post he had held since 2010, and who vied with Olaf Scholz in his zeal to assist Ukraine militarily in a war, the method of prosecution of which is proving to be a tragedy not simply for the people of Ukraine but for several hundreds of millions of the poorest people in the world. Rutte lost to Geert Wilders, who is opposed to funding for Ukraine.There have been incessant calls from the US administration for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but where Ukraine is concerned, these same individuals believe any call for a ceasefire is sacrilege. The reality is that an immediate ceasefire is most needed by the people of Ukraine, but this does not seem a population that President Zelenskyy is interested in talking to with the frequency with which he addresses parliaments across both sides of the Atlantic.In democracies, wise leaders heed the views of their voters.
As the Russia-Ukraine kinetic quagmire grinds on, more and more voters in the countries that have made the eviction of Putin from the Kremlin a bigger priority than the welfare of their own citizens are becoming hostile to providing more support to Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is almost as much anti-Putin as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.If there is no ceasefire in Ukraine around the second anniversary of the conflict, President Biden stands at risk of losing the backing of his supporters. This would be as a consequence of his obsessive focus on recovering territory from Putin’s control , much of which was lost in 2014 by Kiev following the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovich by street violence.
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