Phillips Payson O’Brien writes:

Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but also throwing away a remarkable chance to improve America’s global standing and democratic powers’ position in the world.

In defending themselves far more effectively than expected, the Ukrainians showed a capacity to deal Russian President Vladimir Putin a major military defeat, but again and again, Biden and his experts have constrained Ukraine’s ability to fight until it was too late. Just recently, only after his party lost the presidential election, Biden finally gave Ukraine the tightly limited ability to use American weapons on military targets in a small part of Russia. The president’s decision comes after 33 months of war, during which Russia has launched long-range attacks anywhere in Ukraine it wanted, in many cases using Iranian-made weaponry.

Biden has promised the Ukrainians that he will stand by them “for as long as it takes”—but he has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to.

Nearly three years in, the conflict is becoming ever more grotesque, and the number of war crimes keeps rising. The conflict has also become more global in nature, as Russia, by economic and military necessity, deepens its alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea. When Putin was gathering his invasion force in late 2021 and early 2022, the United States had good intelligence and tried to warn Ukraine about Russia’s plans. A far harder call was what would happen when an invasion began, and in that respect, the Biden administration didn’t understand what it was looking at. U.S. officials assumed that if Putin went ahead with his plans, Ukraine would stand no chance and the Russians would prevail in short order. Stung by the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan just months earlier, Biden reacted to the new crisis with self-pity: According to the journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, War, the president complained, “Jesus Christ! Now I’ve got to deal with Russia swallowing Ukraine?”

In fact, the United States had greatly overestimated Russian might. [Continue reading…]