Biden channels Neville Chamberlain as Putin threatens Ukraine

No American leader with all his faculties would squeeze Ukraine into letting Russia take more of its territory unconventionally in exchange for Moscow promising not to conquer it by conventional invasion.

Joe Biden isn’t that kind of leader. If Ukraine simply makes more territorial concessions to Russia’s armed proxies in the besieged country’s troubled Donbas region, and Vladimir Putin makes the easy promise not to invade with his own army in return, Biden would consider it a fair deal.

The idea draws eerie parallels between Biden, who fancies himself a foreign-policy historian, and one of the weakest leaders of the past century: British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

Just days before World War II began in August 1939, Chamberlain thought he could convince Adolf Hitler not to invade Poland. Hitler accused Poland of violating agreements about the rights of the German Free City of Danzig and Poland’s minority population of ethnic Germans and vowed self-defense against the Poles. Today, Putin accuses Ukraine of violating the Minsk Agreement that imposed a cease-fire in the Donbas region, vowing to defend the Russian minority there while claiming his military maneuvers are purely defensive.

The reasoning Chamberlain sent to Hitler the day before the Führer’s pact with Stalin sounds almost like Biden’s reasoning with Putin more than eight decades later:

If such a truce could be arranged, then, at the end of that period, during which steps could be taken to examine and deal with complaints made by either side as to the treatment of minorities, it is reasonable to hope that suitable conditions might have been established for direct negotiations between Germany and Poland upon the issues between them (with the aid of a neutral intermediary if both sides should think that that would be helpful).

The comparison is no exaggeration. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, head of the British defense staff, warns that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to wider security implications for NATO on par with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

Russia violated a 1993 agreement not to claim Ukrainian territory — a deal brokered by the Clinton administration, with Biden’s full support as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — by persuading Ukraine to surrender its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal unilaterally to Russia. In exchange, the U.S. and NATO countries would assure the integrity of Ukraine.

Putin’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and its occupation of the breakaway areas of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas, violate that 1993 pledge.

Biden has stood inept before Putin since becoming president. He pawned away all the leverage that the Trump administration built against Moscow. This includes surrendering to Putin’s demand for an unconditional renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), without any controls on tactical nuclear weapons and Russian nuclear modernization, and lifting Trump’s sanctions that would have stopped Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany.

Biden has opposed every major effort to deter Russia since the Reagan administration’s arms buildup in the 1980s.

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