Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin
President Joe Biden's sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine have failed, according to longtime Alabama attorney and political observer Donald V. Watkins. In a post titled "Joe Biden’s 'Crippling Sanctions' Against Russia Have Failed," Watkins states that Congressional Republicans are balking at sending additional aid to Ukraine, and as a political independent, he is balking, too.
As a Democrat and progressive, I disagree with Watkins -- and I am not about to be guided by Congressional Republicans -- especially when you consider their inability to govern and the clownish show they made of dumping House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, only to select an even more incompetent speaker in Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Watkins is an intelligent and accomplished guy, one who has stood up for civil rights many times over the years, so count me as amazed that he would be influenced by a shallow shyster like Johnson, who has made it clear he does not believe in the First Amendment or the separation of church and state and wants to turn our country into a theocracy. The Donald Watkins I know would not go along with any of that -- especially when it is not clear the Russia sanctions have failed.
Let's examine Watkins' key points, and I will note my areas of disagreement where appropriate, with my key points highlighted in blue.
(1) Watkins writes:
In February 2022, President Joe Biden announced “crippling sanctions” against Russia for invading Ukraine. These sanctions targeted Russian banks and billionaire oligarchs.
This week, international news agencies reported that Russian banks posted record profits in 2023. This news shows how Russia has weathered Biden’s “crippling sanctions."
Russian banks raked in 3.3tn rubles (£29bn) last year, the Russian Central Bank (CBR) announced on Tuesday.
This figure is up from just 200bn rubles in 2022, when profits fell almost 90 percent due to Western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As part of Biden’s international pressure campaign on Russia, authorities from around the world seized more than a half-dozen super-yachts belonging to billionaire oligarchs allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin. These seizures meant nothing to Putin.
(2) Legal Schnauzer response:
a. Watkins states that Russian banks posted record profits in 2023, claiming that is evidence Russia has weathered Biden's "crippling sanctions." Perhaps Russia has weathered the sanctions for now, but our research indicates the full effect of sanctions are not usually known for some time, so Russia might not be out of the woods. From a report at NBC News:
"This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time," Biden said. "We have purposely designed these sanctions to maximize long-term impact on Russia and to minimize impact on the United States and our allies."
But it could take quite a while -- even years -- for the sanctions to hurt the Russian economy. said Brian O'Toole, who until 2017, served the U.S. Department of Treasury as a senior adviser to the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers and enforces trade and economic sanctions.
Both Biden and O'Toole say the sanctions are designed for long-term impact, so it likely is too soon to declare the sanctions a failure.
b. As Business Insider reports, the strong showing from Russian banks is not expected to last, partly because the central bank essentially rigged the mortgage sector to help reduce the pain of sanctions:
Russia's banking sector's performance last year was spurred by demand for mortgages as well as loans to finance large business acquisitions, the central bank said in its statement on Tuesday.
Mortgage lending last year rose nearly 35% from a year ago as Russians rushed to buy homes on state-backed subsidized mortgage rates, said the central bank.
Russian authorities have started winding down the discounted mortgage program, the independent Russian news outlet The Bell reported in September. At the time, mortgage rates in Russia were around 15%, but the subsidized mortgage rate was 8%. Families got a bigger discount with a mortgage rate of 6%.
In short, the sanctions are causing pain, and that is expected to continue once the country soon returns to the normal operation of its mortgage sector.
c. Watkins states that the seizure of super-yachts beloinging to oligarchs meant nothing to Putin.(You might want to ask the yacht owners how they feel about it.) Watkins cites no source to support this statement, so we see little reason (at this point) to take it as true.
d. Watkins says the U.S. should discontinue aid to Ukraine. The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page disagrees, stating: "The U.S. should continue to provide military aid to Ukraine. Doing so supports long-term strategic U.S. interests. Russia is bleeding out in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed, and much of the country’s modern equipment has been destroyed. This means a potential future opponent of the U.S. is being worn down without any American military members getting killed."
d. It seems clear that the two choices for president in the 2024 U.S. election are Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Watkins seems to place any poor outcomes at Biden's feet, without mentioning Trump's myriad missteps regarding the war in Ukraine -- and on other issues. Politico has reported that Trump talked a number of times with Putin about Moscow's plans to invade Ukraine. These discussions apparently did nothing to dissuade Putin.
e. Here is how Oxford Academic described the Trump presidency in regards to Ukraine and Russia:
The foreign policy of the Trump presidency was unlike that of any other US presidential administration in the modern era. What made it radically different from foreign policies before or since was less the direction of official policy itself—which often reflected a higher degree of continuity with the administration of Barack Obama than was popularly assumed—than the Trump administration's profound failures of coherence, articulation, and transparency. These failures are a consequence of the unconventional behavior of the administration as a foreign-policy-making body, something which limits the ability of the foreign policy analysis (FPA) field to explain Trump policy. This suggests that unconventional presidencies—and Trump's may only be the first of these—require a rethinking of some assumptions about US foreign policy and our ability to make sense of it. . . .
The article argues that while the incoherence on Russia and Ukraine can be explained as a consequence of differences between official policy and the views of senior officials—above all, those of Trump himself—the reasons for those differences and the extent to which they were manifested in interactions with figures outside the administration, including Russian government officials, remain unclear because of the administration's unprecedented lack of transparency. In multiple ways, then, the Trump administration's policy on Russian aggression in Ukraine challenges not only embedded scholarly assumptions about coherence in foreign policy articulation, but also the ability of analysts to describe and explain the extent of that incoherence.
In other words, the previous administration was a mess -- on Ukraine and many other issues -- and Joe Biden inherited those messes from Donald Trump.
(3) Let's return to Donald Watkins" points:
Joe Biden does not have a clue about what he is doing in the world of foreign affairs. For example, Biden made a catastrophe out of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Biden is notoriously soft on Iran and its state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. He appears to be incapable of protecting America's national interests abroad or keeping her citizens safe in foreign countries.
Since October, Biden has enabled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ability to commit genocide against more than 25,000 innocent Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. All world leaders know that Netanyahu is nothing but a "thug" with a prominent national government title.
Biden's southern border policy has been an unmitigated disaster. Nobody defends it.
With this in mind, it’s time for America to find another pathway forward on the war in Ukraine.
(4) Legal Schnauzer response:
a. Watkins claims Biden "doesn't have a clue what he is doing in the world of foreign affairs." The Miller Center at the University of Virginia does not agree; in fact, the Miller Center sees Biden as a significant improvement on Trump's foreign policy:
President Biden faced a number of challenges in foreign affairs. After years of erratic policy decisions under President Trump, Biden aimed to bring a state of normalcy to US foreign policy, rejoin treaties and alliances the previous administration abandoned, and restore the county’s standing in the world. The Biden approach jettisoned Trump’s “America First” nationalism in favor of rebuilding relationships with US allies and bolstering international institutions that Trump denigrated such as NATO and the World Health Organization. President Biden planned for the United States to return to the Paris climate agreement, focus on repairing the damage done to the Iran nuclear deal, and try to tame China’s widening international influence.
b. The Brookings Institution gives Biden low marks in some areas, but ultimately gives him high marks on the foreign policy front, saying he had an "unspectacular but solid national security record":
Biden's overall national security policy has been solid through the first three years of his presidency. It might be described as one of what I call “resolute restraint”—being firm on defending allies and core interests without looking for big new projects or succumbing to escalatory pressures when crises arise.
c. Watkins blames Biden for a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but a PBS report, under the headline "U.S. review of chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal blames Trump," says the situation was more complicated than that:
President Biden had committed to ending the war in Afghanistan, but when he came
into office he was confronted with difficult realities left to him by the Trump Administration. President Biden asked his military leaders about the options he faced,
including the ramifications of further delaying the deadline of May 1. He pressed his
intelligence professionals on whether it was feasible to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan
and both defend them against a renewed Taliban onslaught and maintain a degree of
stability in the country. The assessment from those intelligence professionals was that
the United States would need to send more American troops into harm’s way to ensure
our troops could defend themselves and to stop the stalemate from getting worse. . . .
When President Biden took office, the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program for
Afghans who had worked with our soldiers and diplomats required a 14-step process based on a statutory framework enacted by Congress and involved multiple government agencies. The Trump Administration’s disregard and even hostility toward our commitment to Afghan allies led to a massive backlog of over 18,000 SIV applicants. Despite drawing down troops and committing to a full withdrawal, the departing Trump Administration had all but stopped SIV interviews. Refugee support services had been gutted and personnel dramatically reduced, lowering admissions to historic lows and forcing more than 100 refugee resettlement facilities in the United States to close. And the Federal career workforce had been hollowed out. In November 2020, as President Biden was preparing to take office, the Department of State employed 12 percent fewer employees than it had four years earlier, leaving critical gaps.
d. Watkins claims Biden has enabled Israeli genocide against Palestinians, but he does not say how that has happened or offered any evidence that it has happened. Watkins' assertions run counter to a report from Al Jazeera under the he headline "Biden to Netanyahu: ‘Occupying’ Gaza would be a ‘big mistake’":
US President Joe Biden has said he had made it clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that occupying Gaza would be “a big mistake” and that the two-state solution was the only way to bring an end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
“I made it clear to the Israelis I think it’s a big mistake for them to think they’re going to occupy Gaza and maintain Gaza,” Biden told a news conference in San Francisco. “I don’t think that works.”
e. Watkins claims' "Biden's southern border policy has been an unmitigated disaster. Nobody defends it." That's not true on either point. No. 1, I defend his border policy, as do do many other never-Trumpers. But more importantly, we have this CNN report under the headline "Biden seizes on tougher border measures as he tries to fend off Trump attacks":
President Joe Biden is embracing tougher border measures, including shutting down the US-Mexico border, marking a stark shift from his early days in office as he tries to fend off former President Donald Trump’s attacks on immigration policy ahead of the election.
Hours after House Speaker Mike Johnson warned on Friday that the emerging border deal in the Senate is “dead on arrival,” Biden offered this message to House Republicans: “Securing the border through these negotiations is a win for America. For everyone who is demanding tougher border control, this is the way to do it. If you’re serious about the border crisis, pass a bipartisan bill and I will sign it.”
The problem, of course, is that Republicans aren't serious about passing a bipartisan bill. We even have this headline from The Washington Post: "Trump brags about efforts to stymie border talks: ‘Please blame it on me’:
Republican front-runner Donald Trump said he wants to be held responsible for blocking a bipartisan border security bill in the works in the Senate as President Biden seeks emergency authority to rein in a record surge of unauthorized border crossings.
As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” Trump told a rowdy crowd of supporters at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, ahead of the state’s presidential caucus on Feb. 8. “I’ll fight it all the way. A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please.”
Trump’s opposition follows Biden’s statement on Friday praising the deal and pledging to use its new authorities to “shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed” — a striking shift as he signaled openness to asylum restrictions and other enforcement measures that were previously unacceptable to Democrats
These are the depths to which the Republican Party has sunk. GOPers joke about our crumbling democracy because they have no intention of governing going forward; their only plan is to support Trump, "The Dear Leader," as he tries to become president for life and ushers in a dictatorship, while flushing life as we have known it down the drain.
I hope all Americans, including Donald Watkins, will come to recognize this reality before it is too late.