Most Americans have only heard about Ukraine in recent years because it was part of the laughable second impeachment effort against then-President Donald Trump.
It’s laughable because Trump didn’t do anything worse than what Hunter Biden did when he accepted a seat on a Ukrainian natural gas company board and then used his father’s connection, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to make a ton of money for doing little except selling influence. But because the Democrats were in charge of both chambers, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, went about impeaching Trump for a second time, though everyone knew from the beginning that the U.S. Senate would never convict him. but it was great theater, nevertheless.
Today, Ukraine is an international hotspot because Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it so. It is generally agreed that Putin is attempting to recreate the Soviet Union clad in a new suit to fit these times. He is working overtime to position Belarus and Ukraine as buffer states with his hand-picked puppet presidents against NATO.
If Trump had been elected to a second term, it is quite possible that the calculus that Putin is undertaking in threatening to invade Ukraine would be considerably different than what exists today under Biden, a militarily weak president.
America’s convoluted, chaotic and utterly mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan empowers Putin, Xi and Khomeini. It also told them that America’s president is feeble and unwilling to make the necessary moves militarily to counteract what Russia is doing. The fact that Biden has so far been unwilling to send the most important defensive weapons to Ukraine is another silent signal that Biden will resort to only economic sanctions.
NATO, on the other hand, has sounded much more hawkish than Biden. The NATO Secretary-General has openly spoken about the potential for war. Our president should be doing the same because, with his pronouncements to date, Putin knows that America will not flex our military muscle to impede his dream of reacquiring, by whatever means necessary, Ukraine under his influence and control.
Biden’s equivocation is inciting our worst enemies to take actions that could very well change the geopolitical landscape of the world. As Trump famously stated during his first campaign, why would he ever publicly signal what actions he is going to take as all it would do is let our enemies know our intentions or timetable. Having said that, Trump did just the opposite when he negotiated the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan at a date certain last spring.
To complicate problems, it appears that the Russian, Chinese and perhaps even North Korean regimes are on the cusp of putting into service hypersonic missiles which we do not yet have the capability to intercept. Furthermore, both Russia and especially China are on a full-scale effort to build a multi-ocean naval fleet that is surpassing what we have on the drawing boards for the next decade and beyond.
The world cannot afford for America to be perceived as weak. We cannot afford to be perceived as being impotent. Yet, we look to be both at the same time. With the American people tired of foreign wars, it is understandable that both Trump and Biden wanted to get us out of the Middle East wars that have been raging for decades.
America needs a president who understands that power is derived from actions, not words. Former President Barrack Obama, another Democratic president, warned Syria about a “red line” in the sand if Assad was caught using chemical weapons against his own population. When that red line was crossed, America didn’t do anything.
Now Biden speaks almost every day about harsh economic sanctions for Russia if they were to invade, but so far it hasn’t kept Putin from putting about 100,000 fresh troops on the front lines ready to invade at a moment’s notice. It appears doubtful that, in the end, the threat of economic sanctions will deter Putin.
To deter Putin, America needs to bolster NATO, Poland, Romania and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia with offensive and defensive weapons because only then will our allies comprehend our serious intentions to protect them and the rest of the world.
One thing that Trump did very well was push Europe to start spending their budgets on new military weapons and enhanced capability. To allow Europe to become weak by not demanding that they spend 3 percent of their budget on defense, as Biden has done by withdrawing that demand, is to commit America to foot the majority of the bill for defending Europe.
Europe, especially Germany and France, must commit and now to bolster their militaries in defense of their homeland with the acknowledgment that America will back them up, but that they must remain the first line of defense.
A weak America, for whatever reason, is of little value to the rest of the Free World if we are not militarily strong and vigilant. That means that we must prepare now to defend two wars, one in Eastern Europe and another in defense of Taiwan in the Far East, perhaps even simultaneously.
Anything short of a two-war capability means that America will no longer be the beacon of hope that the world has depended on since the end of the Second World War to maintain peace. A famous Roman general wrote in the Fourth Century that “If you want peace, prepare for war.” America needs to prepare for war now.
