Many in the U.S. media enjoy claiming that former President Donald Trump’s return to office would lead to a surrender of key American interests to Russian President Vladimir Putin. These same people like to argue that President Joe Biden has been a bulwark against Russian aggression.
History does not support either contention.
Yes, Biden warned before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that the invasion was coming. Yes, he helped prepare the West’s response to that invasion. Yes, he has maintained support for Kyiv against pressure from elements of the Republican Party. But this is only part of the story of Biden’s Russia policy.
Recall, for example, that Biden held back American arms from Ukraine in advance of the invasion. Recall that it was Republicans in Congress taking the lead there. Recall also that the president prevented American allies from supporting Ukraine with their own stocks of U.S. weapons until late January 2022. This reticence against bolder action reflected an extension of the Obama administration’s refusal to provide Ukraine with anti-tank weapons. Yet, too many in Washington forget that Biden’s general policy toward Russia was one of appeasement prior to Putin’s invasion.
Take Biden’s policy on energy security in Europe. Biden first waived Trump-era sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, the critical component of Russia’s energy export strategy. Next, Biden cut an energy agreement with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel that was farcical on its face. Then, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approached, the White House warned only that Nord Stream 2 would be sanctioned if an invasion occurred. It did not immediately sanction the pipeline in what would have been a significant, proactive step to deter an attack on Ukraine.
Biden also tolerated Russian ransomware attacks, such as the highly disruptive May 2021 Colonial Pipeline incident, accepting the Kremlin’s spin claiming criminals beyond government reach. That spin was and remains belied by the fact that ransomware gangs flaunt their wealth openly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They do so because they provide a cut of their earnings to the FSB security service and act as contract agents for the security intelligence services. Thanks to the U.S. intelligence community, Biden always knew as much but preferred to pretend otherwise.
In 2024, of course, things are different. The United States remains Ukraine’s most important source of military aid and a key element of its financial aid donor base. The Biden administration has rightly asserted it will maintain support for Ukraine until the war can be ended on terms acceptable to Kyiv. Even today, Biden’s deference to Putin remains significant.
Consider Biden’s refusal to allow Ukraine to use Western weapons against military targets inside Russia. This authorization would be of crucial value in enabling Ukraine to strike logistics, fuel, and command-and-control forces at longer range. An additive Ukrainian missile threat would require Russian forces to take time-consuming and expensive precautions to avoid detection and associated vulnerability to attack.
The United Kingdom has been pushing the Biden administration to allow it to provide Ukraine with its Storm Shadow cruise missiles for more than a year. It understandably wants to ensure that any decision is made with a trans-Atlantic unity that deters Russian escalation. But Biden still says no, openly embarrassing U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who traveled to the White House last week under the expectation an agreement would be forthcoming. While Biden fears escalation, Putin is highly unlikely to use nuclear weapons against the West or Ukraine. Doing so would destroy his critical relationships with India and China and invite Anglo-American annihilation. Moreover, it is Russia that is escalating this conflict with its strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets and its campaign of assassination and sabotage across Europe.
Other signs of Biden’s timidity?
The president has failed to introduce secondary sanctions on entities and governments that allow Russia to skirt or mitigate the impact of Western sanctions. U.S. spy planes over the Black Sea are kept further away from Russian forces than their British counterparts. And the Biden administration opposes conventional sabotage operations inside Russia, arrogantly claiming that those operations do not serve a clear military utility. This claim is rejected by the havoc that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and other targets have caused.
Even where Biden has had some success, his Russia policy still has holes. Russia’s March 2023 seizing of American journalist Evan Gershkovich was incentivized by Biden’s prior willingness to trade for the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner. Griner was arrested in February 2022 and traded for arms dealer Viktor Bout in December 2022. Put simply, Putin learned that Biden negotiates with hostage takers and thus realized that he should keep taking Americans hostage.
So, yes, while Biden has provided important support to Ukraine and orchestrated necessary Western unity in Ukraine’s support, he has failed to meet Putin’s varied aggression with the necessary strength.
That takes us to Trump.
Starting with the principle that Trump is a happy footrest for Putin is unhelpful. For one, Trump introduced new, low-yield nuclear weapons designed to match similar Russian threats. Biden opposed these capabilities during the 2020 presidential campaign but later came to support them. Trump also reduced Obama-era restrictions on risky operations by the CIA and National Security Agency against Russia — restrictions that Biden subsequently reintroduced. When Russian intelligence officers launched a nerve agent attack in the U.K. in 2018, Trump expelled dozens of spies from Russia’s embassy in Washington. Also in 2018, when a Russian intelligence service-led mercenary force attacked U.S. forces in Syria, the Russians were destroyed. Trump sent the U.S. Navy to challenge sensitive Russian territorial claims. And as noted, Trump sanctioned Nord Stream 2.
That said, Trump has shown a sustained delusion as to Putin’s nature. Disinterested in Russian history and culture, Trump assumes that Putin is the caricature that he presents himself to be: a straight-shooting strongman — someone who wants to forge compromises with other strongmen to maintain a mutually beneficial balance of power. This perception partly underlines why Trump is obsessed with “respect” as a condition for effective leadership. The problem is that Trump obsesses over simplistic presentations of strength while neglecting other leaders’ nuts-and-bolts agendas. Trump’s effervescent praise of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban offers a case in point. It is brutally obvious that where Putin views Orban as a useful idiot, Chinese President Xi Jinping sees him as his top political prostitute in Europe. Still, Trump deludes himself that Orban is a nationalist strongman who has America’s and Trump’s interests at heart.
As an extension, Trump deludes himself into thinking that Putin wants to find a compromise with America. This makes Trump vulnerable to Putin’s political traps, as at the two leaders’ summit in Helsinki in 2018 and with Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship rhetoric. Trump does not recognize that Putin despises the U.S. for its defeat of the Soviet Union, Putin’s philosophical and professional touchstone. Putin’s rhetoric aside, his actions prove his agenda. But Trump does not recognize that Putin wants to weaken American military, economic, and political power and the U.S.-led alliance structure.
He should recognize this reality. It isn’t exactly a secret that Putin undermines American power everywhere he can. Dialogue with Putin is fine as long as it’s grounded in reality. Treaties with Russia are fine as long as they do not tolerate Russian breaches, as with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The problem is that grand bargains with Putin would require the abandonment of American allies in the Baltics and Poland, all of which spend significantly more than 2% of their GDP on defense, and American acquiescence to Russian intimidation of democracies from Europe to Japan. The economic costs alone of America accepting this gambit would be profound. A central benefit of the U.S.-led alliance structure is its provision for vast trade flows under the rule of law. Russia seeks only bolstered cronyism in, and economic dependency of, those it deals with.
Trump’s desire for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia looms large here. Putin has no interest in Trump’s art of the deal. That means any early peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would be impossible without forcing Ukraine to surrender its sovereign existence.
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The question is whether a second-term Trump policy toward Russia would be similar to that seen in his first term. And it’s a very open question.
But to suggest that history shows Trump is an easy stooge of Russia and that Biden is Putin’s toughest nemesis isn’t serious. It’s patently facile.