Blinken Desperately Scrambles When Asked Why Putin Would Invade Under Biden, Not Trump – Opinion

The Biden Administration’s foreign policy is exactly like watching a train wreck. You know they’re going to hit that car that’s lying up ahead in the tracks, but they just keep speeding headlong into it.

Unfortunately, we saw what a horrible debacle that turned into in Afghanistan — and it doesn’t seem like they learned anything from that with the way they are responding to the Russian threat on Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelesky, Ukraine’s President, is asking for sanctions by the West and the United States to prevent Russia from invading. While Joe Biden has claimed that an invasion is imminent, he has refused to do that, which makes no sense — unless what he wants is war.

Blinken reiterated that approach on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, saying they wouldn’t impose sanctions until “the tanks are actually moving, the planes are actually flying, the bombs are actually dropping.”

“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen, and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had said. “Why would we need those sanctions then?”

Also, as we noted previously, Lloyd Austin (Secretary of Defense) indicated that some sanctions may be more severe on Putin’s people than they are on him.

Blinken attempted to justify the Biden approach.

“Biden has said while we believe President Putin has made the decision, until the die is cast, until that die actually settles, and until the tanks are actually moving, the planes are actually flying, the bombs are actually dropping, we’re going to do everything we can with diplomacy and with deterrence and persuasion to get President Putin to reverse the decision that we believe he’s made,” he said.

“The purpose of the sanctions in the first instance it to try to deter Russia from going to war,” he continued. “As soon as you trigger them, that deterrent is gone. Until the last minute, as long as we can try to bring a deterrent effect to this, we’re going to try to do that. As to laying out in detail what the sanctions will be, two things – first, Russia generally has a pretty good idea what we’re going to do, but we don’t want to lay out the specifics in advance, because that would allow Russia to try to plan against them.”

This is absurd. You wouldn’t do anything to put them off, but then you’ll drop the sanctions on them after they are already invading and committed to it? We can only assume that those in the Biden Administration don’t have a lot of knowledge. This doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand, and it’s no wonder that Zelensky is infuriated by all this weakness. They have already eased sanctions on Nord Stream 2 in 2021.

Zelensky notes – quite accurately – that the United States made certain commitments to Ukraine for giving up their nuclear weapons years ago as part of the Budapest Memorandum. According to that agreement, the U.S. promised that they would assist Ukraine. We made Ukraine give up weapons that could have been of assistance to them right now because they were committed.

Guess who was a big part of that denuding of Ukraine’s defense? Barack Obama as a junior senator in Illinois. They paid us a lot to get rid of the conventional weapons they had in their possession that could have been used by Russia when it invaded Crimea in 2014. Obama was absent in action and left Ukraine twisted in the wind despite his role in helping them defend themselves.

Kyiv Independent

Zelensky stated that he would like new security assurances from Budapest memorandum signatories. He said that if Ukraine didn’t receive renewed, actual security guarantees from the signatories – the U.S., the U.K., and Russia – all provisions of the 1994 agreement will be void.

Blinken also appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, where he was asked a good question about why is Putin making moves now, when he didn’t under President Donald Trump?

The last two times Russia has escalated in regards to Ukraine, Joe Biden has been in the White House https://t.co/qNXPzb2dqJ

— Tommy Pigott (@TommyPigott) February 20, 2022

The whole idea that Trump was a Putin stooge is just nonsense. Biden, and Obama before him, are the ones who have bent over for Putin at every turn, and he knows that he can just walk all over them and they wouldn’t respond. Biden continues to prove that. But, folks on the left don’t want to deal with that reality. If you display weakness like Biden does constantly, then people will take you to lunch.