Lame duck Biden's recklessness in Ukraine
The administration is going scorched-earth on its way out the door.
Two announcements from Joe Biden’s administration over the past week show a lame duck president venturing moves in Ukraine that he wouldn’t dare before his party lost the White House earlier this month.
On Sunday, Biden lifted a ban against Ukraine using US-provided long-range missiles to strike Russian territory. Ukraine quickly took advantage of the move to launch ATACMS missiles at a weapons depot in Bryansk, Russia on Tuesday. And just yesterday, Biden lifted another restriction — this time, on sending antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine.
Both decisions mark dramatic escalations in the war between the Russian Federation in Ukraine, and both are fraught with risk. President Putin has repeatedly warned that any use of US weapons against targets in Russian soil would be considered an act of war by the US. In September he announced an amendment to the country’s nuclear policy to reflect that determination, and shortly after the attacks he signed that amendment into law.
Biden’s approval of land mine shipments, meanwhile, places both the United States and Ukraine at odds with the overwhelming majority of the international community. The US is not a signatory to the UN’s convention against antipersonnel mines, but Ukraine signed the treaty in 2005. The use of landmines also, of course, poses a distinct danger to Ukrainian civilians. As of earlier this year the UN had marked more than 1,000 civilian deaths due to landmines in Ukraine; the mines pose a particular threat to farmers working in the country’s eastern and southern regions.
The US had held off on both approvals for more than two years despite ongoing pleas from Ukraine. Donald Trump’s electoral victory earlier this month, however, seems to have changed the political calculus in the White House. With little left to lose politically, the Biden administration is likely far less worried about popular approval of his policies — and a potential backlash against them — than it was just a few weeks ago.
But even if Democrats evade responsibility for these decision, their consequences will likely last far into the next administration. Through these escalations, the Biden administration is defining a new baseline of normalcy that the Trump administration will be able to default to as it pursues its own course in Ukraine. Though some pundits continue to speculate that the Trump administration will push for a quick negotiated settlement in Ukraine, Trump’s early nominations to his Cabinet — like Marco Rubio to State and Mike Walz as NSA — suggest he could take a more hawkish approach. As Daniel Larison notes, Trump’s obsession with US “credibility” also suggests that he may be more concerned about maintaining a militaristic posture in the region than in arriving at some kind of settlement — which hawks will inevitably spin as “appeasement.”
Regardless, less than a quarter of American approve of increasing military aid to Ukraine at this point, and his actual intentions notwithstanding, Trump’s win was widely understood by his supporters to be a victory for deescalation in the region. This places them, along with the antiwar movement, on the side of a majority of Ukrainians who also favor “a quick, negotiated end to the war.” These last-minute escalations from the Biden administration aren’t just dangerous — they’re also proceeding in defiance of most of the rest of the world.
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