WASHINGTON. President Biden’s challenge on Tuesday night was to rally Americans around his confrontation with the brutal Russian leader who destroyed more than three decades of the post-Cold War world without raising fears that renewed superpower conflict would come at an unacceptable cost.
As scenes of devastation erupted before the world in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, Mr. Biden argued that maintaining freedom in Eastern Europe was worth paying a price — one he thought he could limit. And he celebrated his success in organizing Western allies to impose really painful sanctions on the Russian economy as punishment for invading Ukraine and in hopes of weakening President Vladimir Putin’s grip on his country.
He argued that Mr. Putin’s aggression actually strengthened the Atlantic alliance that the Russian leader intended to splinter. And he argued that even if Mr. Putin prevails in Ukraine, Russia will emerge from this “deliberate and unprovoked” war “weaker and the rest of the world stronger.”
Yet Mr. Biden has left unanswered, at least for now, some of the toughest questions about where America will go next — and how it will ultimately emerge from Mr. Putin’s audacious attempts to destroy the world order. largely created in Washington.
What happens if the combination of destabilizing the Russian currency, denying it access to Western technology, and freezing the assets of its oligarchs and their families does not force Mr. Putin to back down? And what if, after ending Ukraine, the Russian leader continues to act, determined to reassert the sphere of influence that the last leaders of the Soviet Union had abandoned, in what Mr. Putin believed was disastrous?
For the first time since satellites picked up Russian troops on the border with Ukraine last fall, Mr. Biden openly admitted that he was not sure where Mr. Putin would stop.
So he has drawn a line along the borders of an enlarged NATO, a map that Mr. Putin insists must be rolled up. “Our forces are heading to Europe not to fight in Ukraine, but to protect our NATO allies,” he said, “in case Putin decides to continue moving west.”
The last line was the most sinister. Biden and his aides have often argued in recent months about whether the Russian leader’s ambitions extend far beyond Ukraine.
They look at electronic maps on screens in the White House Operations Room and wonder if the Russian leader, in his nearly 70s, thinks this is his last moment to tie together a conquered Ukraine, a captive Belarus, a dependent Kazakhstan, and maybe even a vulnerable Moldova has turned into a semblance of the former glory of the Soviet Union.
Eastern Europe was not the battlefield that Mr. Biden had in mind when he floated the idea last year that the battle of “autocracy versus democracy” would be the defining principle of his administration’s foreign policy.
At the time, he thought more about China than Russia, more about stimulating 21st-century American competitiveness than containing a Russia burdened by 20th-century discontent. When Mr. Biden first spoke of the “battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” he was focused on the long game of rebuilding the US semiconductor manufacturing base, getting ahead of China’s advanced military and demonstrating that the dirty business of self-determination can still outperform the top-down power.
Russia was considered a destroyer, but most likely it could be kept in a box.
It is now clear that Mr. Putin’s containment could be the deciding factor in his next three years as president, jeopardizing the long-drawn-out “pivot to Asia” long discussed in American foreign policy circles but never fully implemented.
Updated
March 1, 2022 11:19 pm ET
Mr. Biden spoke Tuesday night as someone who decided history left him no other choice.
Mr. Biden is one of the few remaining architects of the post-Soviet order still in power in Washington, and for him NATO’s borders are more than lines on a map. They are living testament to what happens when free people can choose their allies.
To Mr. Putin, of course, that same card looks like an invading boa constrictor, a string of nations lured by the West into a plot to crush Russia until it stops breathing. He has opposed the plan since 2007. And when he took action — invading Georgia in 2008 and annexing Crimea in 2014 — he met with no opposition from the West. It took the United States and its allies a long time to organize the sanctions, and they did little when they were imposed.
Mr. Biden was part of those decisions, especially on Crimea. But on Tuesday evening, he seemed to admit that the weak response only emboldened the strong Russian leader. “Throughout our history, we have learned this lesson: when dictators don’t pay the price for their aggression, they cause even more chaos,” Mr. Biden said. The cost to America and the world “continues to rise,” he added.
But Mr. Biden’s description of the problem is of little help in figuring out how this war will end.
Clearly, Mr. Putin has no intention of going back to the old days of negotiating arms control treaties and rules for military exercises, as suggested by the US. Instead, he is testing whether he can bring about more lasting change by force rather than negotiation, and do so in weeks rather than years.
Russian-Ukrainian war: what you need to know
Card 1 of 4
Russian convoy. Satellite images show a Russian military convoy stretching for 40 miles on a highway north of Kyiv, next to burning houses and buildings. Experts fear that the column could be used to encircle and cut off the capital, or for a full-scale assault.
migratory wave. According to the UN refugee agency, at least 660,000 people, mostly women and children, have fled Ukraine for neighboring countries. This is the most intense wave of European migration since at least the 1990s.
For his part, Mr. Biden has not offered the Russian leader, at least publicly, any compromises of the kind that marked the division of Europe after World War II. And Mr. Putin showed no interest in them, believing that, having gone this far, he could do better by continuing his brutal tactics than by diplomacy.
It’s no surprise that Mr. Biden, both creator and vocal supporter of the Western alliance, sees Mr. Putin’s push to tear it apart as a desperate attempt to turn back the clock.
But he also knows that there is no guarantee that Mr. Putin, emboldened by the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and convinced of his ability to resist any sanctions placed on him, will fail.
“No one can say unequivocally what kind of world will rise from the ashes in Ukraine,” Richard Fontaine, executive director of the Center for a New American Security and Republican foreign policy strategist, wrote on Tuesday.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also unaware of this when he testified before Congress in 1941, when Hitler was only six months away from the bombardment and siege of Kyiv in his offensive against the Soviet Union.
“The parallels between then and now are striking,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Tuesday, noting that democracy at the time was “threatened inside and outside of America,” in part referring to the isolationist “America First” policy. a movement that today has echoes in the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.
Roosevelt was ready for the moment, defined America’s “four freedoms” and drafted the Lend-Lease Act to help Britain contain Nazi Germany. But America did not enter the war until she was forced to, at the end of 1941.
In 2022, Mr. Biden’s challenge is to prevent history from repeating itself. But he acknowledged that it would be some time before the full implications of Russia’s decision to go to war would be felt.
“This is a real test,” he said. “It takes time. So let’s continue to draw inspiration from the iron will of the Ukrainian people.”