Barack Obama’s gift for soaring oratory in front of big audiences was a formidable political weapon, but probably the most important thing he ever said was uttered in private.
Speaking to a fellow Democrat about Joe Biden being the party’s nominee in 2020, Obama famously warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”
There is no legitimate claim the former president was wrong about his vice president.
The evidence that he was on target is everywhere, from the border to the economy to the crime explosion on Biden’s watch.
Then there is Ukraine, which offers proof of Obama’s point in a different way.
It shows that even on the rare occasion when Biden gets the big policy right, he still finds ways to “f–k things up.”
Witness the bizarre timing of the president’s recent statements about Ukraine’s bid to join NATO and his administration’s contorted defense of why it is planning to send cluster bombs to the Ukrainian military.
Each misstep on a key detail undercuts the overall enterprise and risks the loss of public support for an expensive foreign policy.
According to a German research firm, total American aid to Ukraine reached $75 billion in May, making it by far our nation’s largest recipient of foreign aid at a time when the US government is running up a $1.5 trillion deficit.
What Biden got right initially was the need for NATO to step up and help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion.
He understood the alliance’s reason for being was to keep Russia out of Europe, and recognized the invasion as a challenge to global security.
He did so despite the fact that the smart money was betting Vladimir Putin’s tanks and army would pull off a modern blitzkrieg, carve up its former satellite state and take what it wanted.
And, naturally, some European leaders were keen on appeasing Putin, as they had been doing for generations.
Fortunately, it turned out that the Russian army was far more incompetent and unprepared than anyone realized.
But it was also NATO’s military and financial help that enabled the plucky Ukrainians to hold the line, and Biden was at the center of that mobilizing effort.
Yet since that impressive start, the president’s habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory has surfaced repeatedly.
His serial denials of upgraded weaponry to help Ukraine have been followed months later by reluctant approval, delays that cost unnecessary casualties and territory for our ally.
On artillery, tanks and fighter jets, Biden’s dithering ran counter to the strategy of giving Ukraine sufficient punch to send Putin packing.
Joe’s murky accounting
Moreover, despite the gargantuan cost of keeping the status quo, Biden never expressed any concern that all the money is reaching its intended purpose and is not being siphoned off by graft.
His lack of curiosity comes despite the fact that well over $30 billion and counting has gone to broad categories of humanitarian aid and financial support, with little tracking of where the money actually ended up.
In plain English, that means American taxpayers are paying the salaries of civil servants, keeping the lights on and who knows what else in a notoriously corrupt country.
Biden’s latest folly came Sunday, shortly before he traveled to the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius for the NATO summit.
Asked by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria the perennial question of Ukraine becoming a member of the alliance, Biden said it was “premature” and that Ukraine “was not ready” to join.
It was a strange answer because that was supposedly one of the agenda items for the summit.
Among those apparently caught off guard was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who took the highly unusual step of blasting his most important funder and other NATO members.
“On the way to Vilnius, we received signals that certain wording is being discussed without Ukraine,” he said in a long, smoldering tweet.
“And I would like to emphasize that this wording is about the invitation to become NATO member, not about Ukraine’s membership . . . It’s unprecedented and absurd when a time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership.”
He went on to suggest the slap isolated Ukraine and would encourage Moscow to keep the war going indefinitely.
In fairness, Biden is right to be cautious about making Ukraine a member during the war because it could legally trigger Article 5, which stipulates that an attack on any member is an attack on all.
But that is not a new fact, so why Ukraine was led to believe the summit would move it toward membership when Biden and other national leaders had a far different idea is at least a giant failure of communication.
And Zelensky is probably right that scuttling his request in such an embarrassing way will encourage Putin to keep the war going.
Biden’s other recent misstep involved his defense of sending cluster bombs to Ukraine, a weapon that most countries have banned, although not the US, even as the White House criticized Russia for using them against Ukrainians.
Some percentage of the 72 grenade-style explosives each bomb releases over a wide area don’t explode immediately and can cause indiscriminate civilian casualties for years.
Apart from the devilish nature of the weapon, it was Biden’s explanation for why the US was sending it that deserves attention.
The Ukrainians are “running out of” a certain explosive, he told Zakaria, “and we’re low on it,” so cluster bombs are a “transition.”
Oops.
Giving away the secret of our ammunition stockpiles is idiotic, but so was the policy that got us here.
Emptying US arsenal
Back in February, I wrote about worries expressed by historian Niall Ferguson that our aid to Ukraine was taking a toll on our own military stockpiles.
“The military industrial complex has withered away,” he said on Dan Senor’s podcast.
“It’s startling to realize how much capacity we’ve expended in Ukraine and how long it will take to replace it.”
One effect, Ferguson said, was to compromise our ability to help defend Taiwan if China moved against the island.
He called it a “strategic error” that Washington “failed to realize that China is the bigger beneficiary” of the aid to Ukraine and added: “All the tough talk about defending Taiwan is from an alternate reality.”
Just five months later, Biden publicly concedes the US is low on ammunition.
If Ferguson could see this moment coming, why couldn’t the president?
Paging Barack Obama . . .
The Midtown Influx Fiasco
Reader John Zimmerman asks and answers a question about the impact of a congestion tax in Midtown Manhattan, writing: “Did the state and city give thought to how this insane scheme would impact the arts, theater district and event venues? Probably not.”
Gov. Murphy’s Law . . .
New Jersey resident Steven Sarfaty is suspicious about Gov. Phil Murphy’s motive for opposing New York’s congestion tax.
He writes: “Murphy’s only problem is about what his cut is going to be. He has never seen a tax he didn’t love.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
