Biden has two big problems: The Russians and the Republicans

You have probably read or seen by now that President Biden announced new sanctions on Russia in response to its invasion of Eastern Ukraine.  The sanctions include “blocks” on two major Russian financial institutions, the VEB bank and the military bank, Promsvyazbank, which handles its defense deals.  The sanctions would effectively ban them from the U.S. banking system, freeze their assets, and ban Americans from doing deals with the Russian banks.  He announced U.S. sanctions on Russian debt, meaning the Russian government would be cut off from Western international financing, and said sanctions would be announced tomorrow on Russian “elites” close to Putin and their family members.

At a press conference later in the afternoon, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, standing beside Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said the U.S. was holding other, tougher, sanctions in reserve to deter Russia from “moving further into Ukraine.”

The question now is not whether the sanctions will work against Putin’s aggression in Ukraine – it already happened – but whether they will work to deter the Republican Party from splitting the U.S. response to Russia in half.  So far, it doesn’t look good.

Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said, “Joe Biden becoming president is the best thing that ever happened, tragically, for Vladimir Putin.  Europe is on the verge of war because of the weakness, the fecklessness of Joe Biden.”

This came on the heels of a letter sent by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley to Blinken seeking “clarity about the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s prospective membership in NATO.”  Hawley told Blinken that “it is not clear that Ukraine’s accession would serve U.S. interests.”

How’s that for unity in the face of Russian aggression, huh?

Today, former U.N. Ambassador and Trump national security advisor John Bolton appeared on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC to test-drive the Republican response to Biden’s handling of the crisis in Ukraine.  “President Biden announced on Friday that his Ukraine policy has failed,” Bolton said, having difficulty suppressing a great big grin.  “He [Biden] said unequivocally that the Russian decision to invade Ukraine had been made.  That’s an admission that deterrence has failed.  Their [the Biden administration’s] admission that they are engaged in a gradual escalation of sanctions is a further admission of the failure of a disastrous policy.  If deterrence has failed, the answer is to come up with new steps that can be taken.”

Aha!  There’s the saber-rattler I remember! 

Bolton went on to say that the decision to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline “has been vastly overhyped.”  He said Germany and the EU had already suspended the pipeline previously, “so this third suspension is nothing new.  Tell Putin Nord Stream 2 will never be implemented unless and until all forces he has on foreign soil including Crimea and Eastern Ukraine are removed.  If you don’t do that, Putin still has the initiative, he has the momentum.  The action is Putin’s in Ukraine right now.”

Then Bolton really began beating the war drums.  “I think we should have had more American forces in Ukraine, not to fight the Russians, but to train with the Ukrainians, and to show those Russian generals looking across the border and seeing American flags, I wonder what that means?  Biden took that off the table saying there would be no American forces involved and got nothing for it.” 

Andrea Mitchell asked Bolton if Trump’s “perfect call” with Ukraine president Zelensky hadn’t “telegraphed to Putin that he could do what he wanted with Ukraine, that America would not stand up.”

Listen to Bolton’s response: “I think Putin was undoubtedly waiting for a second Trump term, but he’s getting, effectively, almost what he would have expected.  This is going to be a victory for Russia.”

Biden is confronting this kind of crap at home at the same time he’s confronting the Russians in Ukraine:  a Republican Party that is right now waiting for cracks to show in the NATO alliance, waiting for cracks to show in the U.S. resolve to stand with Ukraine, waiting in fact for the main guns on Russian tanks to begin firing and barrages of Russian missiles to fly, waiting for reports of American citizens to become “trapped” in Ukraine, and waiting for the Biden administration to be forced into an evacuation that will be a replay on some level of the one in Afghanistan.

Watch ‘em.  There’s going to be a Republican halleluiah chorus about “the failure of Biden’s sanctions on Russia,” “Biden’s feckless failure to lead NATO,” and “Biden’s failure to stop Russian aggression.”  The Republican war cry for the 2022 elections is going to be, “Who lost Ukraine?  Joe Biden and the Democrats.”

And I can’t wait to hear Trump’s I-told-you-so aria about NATO and the blizzard of lies and excuses he’ll come up with for his pal Putin, how he was “forced to defend his country,” how “vicious leftists in Ukraine pushed him over the edge,” and how “Biden isn’t putting America first, he’s putting Ukraine and Europe first, and you’re paying for it.”

You thought you had seen it all with the up-is-down-and-black-is-white pre-school of the Trump White House.  See, we’ve been on the wrong side all along, folks.  Just wait until you see them turn the good guys into the bad guys, and the bad guys into the good guys with Ukraine.