Biden shovels weapons to Ukraine as Trump rattles sabers at Middle East
(Originally published Dec. 3 in “What in the World“) U.S. President Joe Biden is shipping another $725 million of weapons to Ukraine in a last-ditch effort to reverse Russia’s recent advances before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office and pulls the plug.
Biden is rushing weapons to Kyiv in the hope that it can reverse Russia’s recent gains before Trump takes office and withdraws U.S. support. The lame-duck President has vowed to send Ukraine all of the $7.1 billion worth of U.S. weapons still authorized by Congress before he leaves the White House, though doing so without leaving U.S. forces dangerously short on weapons is apparently impossible.
The latest package includes more missiles for Ukraine’s U.S.-supplied Himars mobile launchers—the batteries that helped turn the tide early in the war and that, among other missiles, fire the Atacm long-range missiles Biden last month finally allowed Ukraine to start lobbing into Russia.
As a parting gift, Biden is also asking Congress for another $24 billion in weapons for Ukraine: $16 billion for the Pentagon to replace weapons it gives Kyiv from its existing arsenal, as well as $8 billion for Ukraine to buy weapons directly.
Europeans are, meanwhile, lobbying Trump by taking on the role of Cold Warriors with warnings that ceding to Russia in Ukraine will embolden America’s enemies in Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran. The latest retread of the old Domino Theory comes from the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Mark Rutte, and follows one from the head of British intelligence agency MI6. In an interview with the Financial Times, Rutte said:
We cannot have a situation where we have Kim Jong Un and the Russian leader and Xi Jinping and Iran high-fiving because we came to a deal which is not good for Ukraine, because long-term that will be a dire security threat not only to Europe but also to the U.S.
Trump has criticized the cost of supporting Ukraine and the risks of sparking world war and suggested that he will push Ukraine into negotiating a ceasefire that freezes the front lines, effectively giving Russia control of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern provinces and a land bridge to the strategically vital Crimea.
This impractical DMZ solution has been something some policy boffins have been advocating since early in the conflict, as well as an outcome others have been predicting all along. Keeping Russia bogged down in Ukraine while it depleted its military muscle, even if it meant eventually giving it the Crimean land bridge it wanted all along, was likely Washington’s cynical game plan all along.
The domino-theorists’ notion that China, or Iran, or North Korea, would view what has happened to Russia in Ukraine as an invitation to test U.S. resolve elsewhere ignores two things: first, Washington’s willingness to blow $60 billion worth of weaponry and bring the world to the brink of World War III just to pin Moscow down in a proxy war on Russia’s doorstep, and second, that Trump’s warm-and-fuzzy feelings toward Russian President Vladimir Putin don’t likely extend to China’s Xi Jinping, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, or even North Korea’s “little rocket man” Kim Jong Un.
Russia may also have managed to thwart Washington’s efforts to emasculate it militarily. A new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on global defense contractors concludes that Russia’s weapons makers have managed to gear up production (and sales) much more quickly than those in the West. Moscow has thus succeeded, despite sanctions, in moving its economy to war footing better than the U.S. or Europe, where supposed production bottlenecks have kept defense companies from ramping up production to keep up with accelerating demand.
In case there was any doubt that Trump is some kind of peacenik, he posted this message on his social media site Monday warning Hamas to release its remaining Israeli hostages:
If the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!
But the Middle East under the Biden-brokered ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah is starting to look a lot like life before the ceasefire: On Monday, Hezbollah fired missiles into northern Israel from Lebanon and Israel responded with airstrikes. La plus ça change…