Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
President Biden’s shambolic debate performance against Donald Trump has sent elements of the Democratic Party establishment into a panic. After long dismissing concerns about Biden’s cognitive decline, party donors and media pundits are now fulminating over his capacity to defeat Trump in November.
While suddenly doubting Biden’s suitability as a candidate for an election months away, the Beltway has yet to question his suitability for the job he currently he holds: commander-in-chief of the world’s top superpower and its vast nuclear arsenal.
Biden’s deficiencies would be dangerous even under peaceful circumstances. Yet he now finds himself overseeing – and fueling – two devastating and increasingly dangerous military crises.
The president’s unfettered support for Israel has enabled a mass murder campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, left Gaza in ruins, and continually risks a wider conflagration in Lebanon.
In the case of Ukraine, where the US is waging a proxy war against the world’s other top nuclear power, Biden’s mental incompetence is even more dangerous for the planet.
Weeks before he stumbled on the debate stage, Biden put his delusions on display in an interview with Time Magazine. The US media, Biden complained, has overlooked what he regards as the “number one” success of his proxy war effort in Ukraine. “The Russian military has been decimated,” Biden said. “You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.”
Biden’s top officials happen to disagree. As Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell acknowledged months ago, “Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily,” and has even developed “newfound capabilities” that “pose a longer-term challenge.” General Christopher Cavoli, head of the Pentagon’s European Command, likewise noted that Russia’s army “is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” and has “shown an accelerating ability to learn and adapt.”
Contradicted by his own State Department and Pentagon, Biden’s lament underscores that the chief sponsor of the world’s most dangerous conflict is living in a fantasy land. It also reveals the cynicism of his administration’s motives: so long as the vacant US president can convince himself that the Russian military is being “decimated,” then Ukraine’s continued decimation is well worth it – and not even worth acknowledging.
The same goes for the growing dangers of Biden’s investment in decimating Russia. When a Ukrainian missile strike killed four people and wounded dozens on a beach in Crimea last month, Moscow directly blamed the US. “This deliberate missile attack on the civilians of Sevastopol is primarily Washington's responsibility, which provided these weapons to Ukraine,” Russia’s defense ministry said, while also vowing that the attack would not go “unanswered.” Russia's Foreign Ministry summoned US Ambassador Lynne Tracy and told her that Washington is “waging a hybrid war against Russia and has actually become a party to the conflict,” and promised that “retaliatory measures will definitely follow.”
The Russian warnings prompted a rare phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart, Andrei Belousov. According to the Kremlin, Belousov “pointed to the danger of further escalation of the situation in connection with the continued supply of American weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian government has made clear that it welcomes this danger, and will continue to use US weapons to kill civilians in the Crimean peninsula. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, declared that Crimea is now “a foreign territory occupied by Russia.” Therefore, he concluded, “there are not and cannot be any ‘beaches’, ‘tourist zones’ and other fictitious signs of ‘peaceful life’ in Crimea,” and any civilians killed by Ukraine are merely “civilian occupiers.”
Although officials in the post-2014 coup Ukrainian government have long recognized that the vast majority of Crimeans want to be a part of Russia, Podolyak’s comment marks the most overt expression to date of Kyiv’s hostility to the population there – even seeing them as indistinguishable from military targets. Washington’s policy, therefore, is to directly assist the military strikes of a Ukrainian government that is willing to indiscriminately target Crimea’s civilian population – and countenance the risk of a Russian response.
Escalating conflict between the US and Russia comes as the global arms control regime that once constrained their nuclear arsenals continues to erode.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has just suggested that Russia will resume production of intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles that were previously banned under the INF treaty. The Trump administration withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019, a development roundly ignored in US establishment circles because it undermined the prevailing conspiracy theory that Trump was an asset of Moscow. In a bid to preserve some of the INF Treaty's safeguards, the Kremlin offered a moratorium on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. But that August 2019 proposal was swiftly rejected by both Trump and NATO. Just as with the Iran nuclear deal, Biden since taking office has declined to rejoin this Trump-nixed global treaty as well.
After observing a unilateral moratorium for nearly five years, Putin now says that US belligerence toward Russia will prompt him to change course. “Apparently, we need to start manufacturing these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where – if necessary to ensure our safety – to place them,” Putin said last week.
Were Washington’s political and media establishment concerned with global security, restoring US-Russia arms control would be a top priority, as would bringing the Ukraine-Russia war to a speedy end. At minimum, they would at least be raising alarms that this dangerous conflict, with its potential to go nuclear, is in the hands of a cognitively impaired president whose decline is now impossible to conceal.
Yet because Republicans are equally committed to fueling the carnage in Gaza and Ukraine, their only critique is that Biden is insufficiently belligerent. In their debate, Trump made the risible claim that Russia invaded Ukraine because of Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump then complained that Biden hasn’t let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza, and has therefore “become like a Palestinian” – an incoherent, bigoted statement that failed to draw any establishment condemnation. While Israel and Republicans have melted down over Biden’s pause of a single 2,000-pound weapons shipment for Israel, the White House has quietly disclosed that it has given Israel over 14,000 of those bombs since Oct. 7th.
Across the spectrum, therefore, the US political establishment has settled on its main point of contention: which belligerent, incoherent, and delusional candidate should preside over a bipartisan commitment to global carnage. While Biden is clearly the more impaired of the two, this shared warmongering consensus is the most dangerous leadership crisis of them all.
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