At the G20 meet in Brazil, US president Joe Biden appeared to veer off the red carpet laid out for world leaders during arrival. Sadly, the sight has become all too common. During the G7 Summit in Italy in June, Biden wandered aimlessly away from a gathering before the camera, prompting host Giorgia Meloni to nudge him back. At Monday’s G20 family photo in Rio de Janeiro, Biden was nowhere to be seen on the podium, resulting in panic among reporters and photographers.
It was later clarified that Biden’s absence was due to “logistical reasons” to give at least a veneer of respectability to the actions of a man whose cognitive abilities are leaving him faster than it takes for the setting sun to dive into the horizon.
At the winter of a long public career, Biden’s neurological problems and cognitive impairment are hardly a secret. It is what cost him a second shot at presidency, and some argue even Democrats the election. At the debate against Donald Trump, a horribly out of sorts Biden induced panic among the Democrats. The party forced a defiant Biden out of the race and replaced his candidacy with Kamala Harris.
Nancy Pelosi, the powerful former speaker of the House whose role has been paramount in coercing Biden to end his campaign, even suggested to New York Times that the letter the US president wrote to Democratic members of the Congress on July 8 to end all speculation and announce that he was “running” for a second term may not actually have been written by him.
Coming from Pelosi, who has blamed the election defeat on Biden’s decision to drag his feet, this was a startling accusation. Democratic Party’s master strategist and the most powerful backroom operator meant to say that Biden, the US president, is not responsible for his actions and might not be taking his own ‘decisions’. The suggestion is pregnant with dark insinuations.
Now imagine that Biden, serving his notice period in the administration before president-elect Trump is sworn in on January 20, an octogenarian who suffers from such a debilitating mental disorder that he can no longer be trusted with the job of POTUS, a man who might not even be taking his own decisions, is miraculously mentally fit enough to majorly escalate hostilities with the world’s largest nuclear power a few days before he relinquishes his lame-duck office.
The decision to allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory with US-made, delivered and guided ATACMs air-to-air missiles may turn out to be the most reckless decision ever taken by an outgoing administration that has no public authority. The fateful move has sparked an escalatory spiral that may well lead us into World War 3.
The move is not only strategic malpractice, designed to tie the hands of an incoming president who has promised a quick end to the wars, it is also immoral. America’s decision even goes against the wishes of the Ukrainian people by foisting on them an escalation that they do not want.
A survey released by Gallup on Tuesday, the war’s 1000th day, found that 52 per cent Ukrainians are tired of the war and want a negotiated settlement after two and a half years, even at the cost of some territorial concessions. Around
38 per cent want to keep fighting until the war is won.
This is a marked departure from an earlier poll months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, when around 73 per cent Ukrainians were ready to battle the Russians. As the war of attrition has wore on, Ukraine has been demolished in body and spirit. The country is a wreck, its economy is in a mess, its territory has been carved up, nearly four million people have been internally displaced, nearly 80,000 of its troops have died and another 400,000 wounded.
Regardless of what the western propaganda machinery peddles, the war is so unpopular that Ukrainian men are going into hiding to avoid ‘conscription squads’. In absence of
willing volunteers, Ukrainian military officers in charge of recruitment are being accused of “kidnapping” and “forceful detention.”
Associated Press reports that “many Ukrainian men are evading the draft by hiding at home or trying to bribe their way out of the battle.” The ‘Ukrainian spirit’ that the liberal hegemonists, globalists and assorted warmongers in the West regularly invoke to justify their intensification of the proxy war against Russia is largely a myth.
Ukrainians are tired, exhausted and the country is struggling to muster enough soldiers to continue the war with mobilization increasingly becoming a challenge. There is a veritable mismatch between the rhetoric of Ukrainian political leadership and its military capabilities on ground.
To close this gap between its lofty aims and hard reality, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been clamouring for a long time for the green signal from the US to send these missiles deep into Russian territory, wasted no time.
Just a day after Biden authorized Ukraine to use the long-range weapons inside Russia, several media reports indicate Ukraine fired its first batch of US-made ATACMs (Army Tactical Missile System) into Russian territory on Tuesday, the 1000th day of the war, with the cluster hitting a military target in the Bryansk region, in all probability a large weapons arsenal more than 115 km from the Ukrainian border. The ATACMs have a range of approximately 190 miles (over 300 km).
The Russian defence ministry in a statement confirmed that ATACMs were used, and that its missile defence system neutralized five of the six missiles while one damaged rocket hitting a military facility and causing fire that was swiftly put out without any casualties.
Moscow, that had warned against such an eventuality, has stepped up its nuclear threat with Russian president Vladimir Putin lowering the nuclear weapons threshold after signing a new decree that states that any “aggression against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies by any nonnuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack.”
Moscow has said that since the US facilitated the strike, which cannot have taken place without Washington delivering the long-range weapons and providing the technological and navigational support to select the targets, the strike is tantamount to the US becoming a direct participant in the war against Russia.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that “the fact that ATACMS were used repeatedly in the Bryansk region overnight is, of course, a signal that they want escalation… Without the Americans, it is impossible to use these high-tech missiles, as Putin has repeatedly said,” reports Reuters.
Since Moscow has chosen to interpret the missile attack as a direct escalation facilitated by the US and has vowed to retaliate, it is now incumbent on Putin to act on his threat or suffer further erosion of Russia’s nuclear deterrence. Washington thinks that Putin is bluffing. The White House called the lowering of Russia’s nuclear threshold “the same irresponsible rhetoric from Russia, which we have seen for the past two years.”
There are several questions that arise at this stage. What were the potential tangible benefits for Ukraine that prompted Biden administration to flip its missile policy? Does it have the moral right to do so when it is acting as a placeholder for the new administration to be sworn in, one that ran and won the elections on the plank of ending wars? Was this a political decision by Biden who wanted to leave a veritable quagmire for Trump as he relinquishes his office so that the incoming president finds it difficult to launch peace talks?
The incumbent US president is facing stinging criticism from the Opposition. Republican lawmaker from Kentucky Thomas Massie posted on X (formerly Twitter) that by “authorizing long range missiles to strike inside Russia, Biden is committing an unconstitutional Act of War that endangers the lives of all U.S. citizens. This is an impeachable offense, but the reality is he’s an emasculated puppet of a deep state.”
As far as the benefits for Ukraine are concerned, Biden administration officials have themselves admitted that “they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war”. If anything, the provocative escalation may tie Putin’s hands and entice him to dominate the escalatory spiral by retaliating with lethal force against the US or its European allies.
It is a preposterous strategy to escalate hostilities against the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, one that is run by an autocrat, based on the assumption that he is bluffing while threatening to retaliate.
When there is no tangible belief within the Washington establishment that allowing Ukraine to attack high-value targets within Russia may result in any potential benefits for Ukraine, when it clear that it won’t bring any national security paybacks for the US, and serve to only complicate further a war that Ukrainian people are tired of — not to speak of the very real possibility of sparking a catastrophic nuclear war – then the obvious question is what prompted the lame-duck Biden administration to take such an inflammatory step?
The demand for allowing Ukraine a free hand with ATACMs is not new. If Biden had been circumspect earlier when he had the mandate, why did he flip the policy when the outgoing president no longer has the electoral mandate for such a key decision? Is he even the author of his own decision?
These questions assume even greater significance because American military has only a finite number of these long-range missiles and its stockpile is stretched. News agencies on Tuesday quoted the head of US Indo-Pacific Command Adm. Samuel Paparo, as saying that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East “are eating away at critical US weapons stockpiles and could hamper the military’s ability to respond to China should a conflict arise in the Indo-Pacific.”
In light of these realities, the inevitable conclusion that emerges is that the decision to allow Ukraine a free hand with deadly weaponry against Russia, at this specific time, wasn’t done to help the beleaguered Ukrainians win a war of attrition that it has little chance of winning, but to tie the hands of Trump and erect roadblocks in his agenda of achieving negotiated settlement to the war. This is an act of extraordinary deviousness, malice and bitterness.