On January 20, 2021, baton changed hands in Washington, Trump gave way to Biden, after the horror of the January 6 Capital riot.
Over a year after, Biden finds himself marshalling Europe to confront what the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, 30 nations body has tagged Putin war against Ukraine.
And Biden has not spared words dubbing Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal’, with the White House saying POTUS spoke from his heart, which Moscow deemed unforgivable rhetoric.
Biden was not yet done with the diatribe, hitting the Russian hegemony with a sledgehammer, describing Putin as a butcher, a man who cannot remain in power.
To the Kremlin, this was a faux pas, it is doubtful if Ukrainians in Warsaw, where Biden slammed Putin, shared the same view.
While Biden had taken some sharp swipes at Putin, his predecessor, not ready to be outdone, had also gone public. Speaking at Republican Annual Convention, CPAC, Trump lavished praise on Putin, calling him smart, a comment which left the United States and NATO leaders stupefied, considering the carnage being caused by the invasion ordered by Putin on Ukraine.
That was in the early days of the invasion, Donald Trump was to deliver another salvo in March when he told conservative radio hosts, Buck Sexton and Clay Travis, ‘Putin is a genius’. Key Republican figure, Lindsay Graham must have been horrified by the comment, calling it a mistake.
Beyond the verbal rhetoric of the two POTUS, glazing the issue in a larger context, flip back the years to Trump’s presidency, should the scenario playing out in Ukraine had erupted while Trump was in office, what would have been his response?
Let’s do a check on Trump’s time in office. In 2019, Trump withheld $250 million in military aid to Ukraine. Days later, Trump held a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which he asked Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Attorney General William Barr to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter (American Progress Organisation).
According to The Washington Post, the State Department learned that the Trump administration intended to withhold military aid from Ukraine a few days before Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, with Ukraine embroiled in a simmering war with Russian proxies.
Given such a scenario then, would Trump have stood up to Putin, or left Ukraine to stew in the cauldron of the present situation?
Trump’s presidency was characterized by a frosty relationship with Europe sparked mainly by his America First approach, which heckled the values-based transatlantic relationship between the United States and Europe.
Would NATO have been able to forge a united front against Putin amidst the scepticism with which Europe looked at United States commitment to sustaining the solid cohesion of the alliance?
During his presidential campaign, President Trump had called the alliance ‘obsolete’ and there was also the issue of NATO’s 2 per cent ofGDP target for defence spending.
Was there any possibility of Trump jettisoning his cosying up to Putin and muster Europe to fend off Putin’s aggression in the face of worldwide opprobrium in the face of Putin’s action?
For the United States intelligence community, time with Trump was not that rosy, as the nation’s chief security officer often rubbished Intel reports that pointed the way to Russia.
To Trump, such was nothing but balderdash, especially in the light of the controversies surrounding Moscow’s interference in 2016 presidential election.
Obviously, morale would be low in such circumstances in the US Intel community, and there would be scepticism and apprehension among officials when it comes to approaching Trump with a credible Intel report.
It left many wondering if Trump was not playing Man Friday to Putin. When intelligence agencies or advisors fear homing truth to leadership, it carries with it potential danger for any nation: Vladimir Putin is faced with such a situation, at the moment.
According to the United Kingdom’s director of intelligence agencies, GCHQ, Jeremy Flemming, in a prepared speech to the Australian National University in Canberra, Putin’s advisors fear telling the truth about Ukraine’s war plan. Flemming described the invasion as massively misjudged. (India Today)
US intelligence had equally made a similar assessment, indicating that Putin was being misinformed by his advisors about the progress of the Russian operation.
It all boils down to the fear factor!. And the casualties on the Russian side speaks volume, with between 7,000 and 15,000 deaths, besides armoured tanks, jets and warplanes downed in Ukraine, though Moscow only claims just over a thousand deaths.
Would Trump have decided to take on Putin decisively going by his comment that he once told the Russian strongman that he would bomb Moscow, and he would have sent US nuclear submarine into Russia’s coast amidst the ongoing crisis?
Give it to him Trump could be brash. For example, he warned the US was targeting 52 Iranian sites and will strike very fast and very hard if Tehran attacked Americans or US assets.
His remarks followed the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian general, in a drone strike.
Was it likely that Putin would have trodden cautiously, knowing that Trump could at times be unpredictable, especially with his America first and Make America great vision, and thus sees Putin’s action as undermining?
Or perhaps, the current bi-partisan support coupled with the swell of public opinion, global rage, and angst against China for tacit support of Putin, could have propelled Trump to take on Putin, thus healing the frosty relationship with Europe.
Joe Biden has succeeded in doing just that, declaring America is back as he has rallied Europe to toe the same path against Putin, something the Russian strongman could have gambled on, thinking EU countries that depend on Moscow’s energy might not be willing to risk economic backlash, should the tap from the Kremlin cease flowing.
Germany has put the Nordstream 2 project with Moscow on hold, European countries dependent on Russia’s crude are fast thinking about alternatives to aborting reliance.
Putin is no stranger to Biden, as the US President has been in the corridor of power for a number of years, especially during his time as vice president, during Barrack Obama’s presidency.
According to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, Joe Biden sees foreign relations as being about relationships, and he has been developing the one with Vladimir Putin for two decades.
Biden warned that Putin had dreams of rebuilding an authoritarian empire going all the way back to his days as a senator in Delaware and that he knew that Putin did not want him to win.
However, Biden has declined to accede to Ukraine’s demand for fighter jets and a no-fly zone to counter Russia’s air superiority, which had resulted in the massive destruction of infrastructure in Ukraine.
NATO countries are largely on the same page with Washington on this to avoid direct confrontation between NATO and Putin, who had threatened to go nuclear.
Obviously, NATO in this wise wants to avoid catastrophic human causalities such as was witnessed in the First and Second World wars, rather than out of fear of taking on Putin: after all, NATO has countries with nukes.
Would Trump have consented totally to such restraints if he felt Putin was feeling too big to be handled by a resurged NATO?
Simeon Ugbodovon
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