Republicans are all over the place when it comes to their reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they are largely unified behind one …
Republicans are all over the place when it comes to their reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they are largely unified behind one message: President Joe Biden is weak and this crisis is his fault. The GOP’s attacks on Biden offer a distorted take on what he can realistically do in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, while rewriting history in terms of how former President Donald Trump handled foreign policy. In the process of attacking Biden over Ukraine, Republicans have rarely said how their approach would be different. Their criticism and calls for Biden to show «strength» reflects a dangerously reductive view of the crisis. Such rhetoric implies that Biden should take the fight to Russia — an exceptionally risky course of action. The Biden administration has been extremely clear that it’s not willing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine, and there are existential reasons for this. The US and Russia are nuclear superpowers, armed with the largest arsenals in the world. They have the two most powerful militaries on the planet. A war between them would be catastrophic, with the potential to kill more people than World War II. «These are dangerous times. Russia has a large and very usable nuclear arsenal and is now using those weapons as a shield to carry out its invasion and subjugation of Ukraine, a sovereign European state,» Jon Wolfsthal, a senior advisor at Global Zero and a former National Security Council official under the Obama administration, wrote in a recent blog post. «That is why I have been reassured by President Joe Biden’s clear statements that he seeks to avoid a direct conflict between American and Russian troops in Ukraine.» The fear of nuclear war is also why NATO is not getting directly involved, because it could trigger Article 5 — the alliance’s principle of collective defense enshrined in its founding treaty. NATO considers an attack on one member an attack on all. If NATO countries got entangled in a war against Russia, it pulls the US into direct confrontation with it, along with other nuclear armed allies like France and the UK.
