On the backfoot over vaccines and Ukraine, U.S. President Biden reaches for face-saving solutions

(Originally published Jan. 14 in “What in the World“) It turns out that masks not only help stem the spread of Covid-19, they also now make men look sexier to women, according to a new study in the United Kingdom. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that vaccines can’t be made mandatory for large employers, masks may be Americans’ best defense against getting Omicron. Unvaccinated employees should make sure they wear masks, because if they come down with Omicron, the antiviral pills many are treating as a panacea against the pandemic turn out to be in very short supply as record numbers of Covid hospital patients scarf them down.

Hospitals are so full, and so many healthcare workers already sick with Omicron, that President Joe Biden is ordering the military to send medics to help out. Yet a third of Americans don’t bother to wear masks, a troubling statistic that Biden aims to remedy by handing them out for free.

Meanwhile, deaths from Covid continue to rebound in both the U.S. and the U.K., despite persistent reports of Omicron having peaked.

As if the pandemic doesn’t give us enough to worry about, it may be time to spare a bit of anxiety over the situation brewing in Ukraine. In the latest news, talks in Vienna between Russia and the U.S. appear to have broken down. The talks are aimed at avoiding what the West worries are Russian plans to invade neighboring Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has positioned 100,000 troops near the border, complete with artillery, tanks and helicopters and, while no one knows for sure Russia will invade, its seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 don’t offer an encouraging precedent.

Putin’s negotiating position certainly isn’t encouraging, either. The Russian president has backed the U.S. and NATO into a position of having to provide Moscow with legally binding security assurances to avoid what seems to be an unstated threat to invade Ukraine in order to achieve that security in fact. In other words, Russia has demanded that the West essentially surrender Ukraine to Russian control or risk Russia taking it by force. Moscow has managed to convince the West that it still operates under the Kennan Doctrine of fearing European invasion and therefore needs a “buffer” of malleable states in Eastern Europe. That may be true, but toppling Ukraine doesn’t make Russia any safer. It only makes Europe more dangerous.