Biden is pulling the reverse ferret
Dominic Green
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The Ukraine war is President Joe Biden’s war. Like all foreign misadventures, it is coming home as a domestic issue. It’s impressive how fast and early this is happening. The Ukraine war is just over a year old and Super Tuesday just under a year away. This week, former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the front-runners for the Republicans’ 2024 nomination, denounced the Democrats’ Ukrainian proxy war as doomed, expensive, and strategically dim. So did the pack of single-digit candidates, though former Vice President Mike Pence and onetime U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley still approved.
It used to be that candidates expressed policy statements at the time of their choosing and a place such as a think tank lecture or a black-tie dinner. Now, it is Fox News host Tucker Carlson who asks the questions and the candidates who jump to attention. That shows how narrow the debate over Ukraine has been and how irreversible the changes of 2016 are. The Republican Party is a two-ring circus, the party against the people. Trump and Carlson are the ringmasters of the base. DeSantis is the girl on the flying trapeze, charming the crowd without losing her momentum. The party in Washington are the clowns. Send in Pence, Haley, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), calling for more war on Russia’s doorstep.
It would be especially clownish to go all in now when the administration is belatedly beginning to acknowledge the extent of its folly. This week, Politico reported “growing difference behind the scenes” between Washington and Kyiv. Unnamed “White House officials” are complaining that Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t shown “appropriate gratitude” for all the cash and weapons. The Ukrainians are sapping U.S. patience and supplies. They seem determined to retake Crimea. They insist on fighting for Bakhmut, a city Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says has “more symbolic value” than “strategic and operational value.”
Last week, unnamed “U.S. officials” told the New York Times that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion was likely the work of a “pro-Ukrainian group.” The same officials suggested that “Ukraine and its allies” had “the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines.” But isn’t Ukraine’s biggest ally the United States? Or was that last week?
The English call this a “reverse ferret.” You send a ferret up your enemy’s trouser leg, but when public opinion turns against you or the narrative just won’t fly, you have to recall the ferret. The reverse ferret orders haven’t yet gone out on Ukraine, but the leaks to Politico and the New York Times show the White House is preparing for retreat. The voters don’t want war with Russia, and their primary concern is the economy. If, as Biden, Trump, and DeSantis all say, the economy is suffering because of the war in Ukraine, then stopping the war is good for the economy.
Biden’s sub-Churchillian talk of fighting “for as long as it takes” is worse than strategic madness that could lead to a nuclear exchange. It’s an electoral liability.
Austin at least sees the Ukraine war in the right categories: the hierarchy of operational, symbolic, strategic. As Politico belatedly reports, the administration has never had a clear idea of what operational victory would look like. Perhaps our brave media could ferret out how exactly that happened. No wonder Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have hurried to claim a symbolic victory: rallying the forces of democracy, reviving NATO, and so on. But this is either false or only partially true.
Germany now says its promised increase in defense spending may take decades to implement. France remains committed to de Gaulle’s “independent” policy, which means sending French ferrets up American legs whenever possible. Beyond toothless Euroland, major democracies such as Brazil, India, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey are either wholly opposed to America’s war or restricting themselves to symbolic gestures. The same goes for midtier nondemocratic allies such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
The strategic disaster of the Ukraine war is part of a bigger failure. The Biden administration’s Eurasian strategy is an energy strategy, and it has collapsed. Biden promised “no more drilling” at home, to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah,” and to open Iran’s energy exports to the West by reviving the Iran deal. But the Ukraine war’s squeeze on energy markets sent him begging the Saudis to turn on the oil taps, which they refused to do. It tipped Iran into a military alliance with Russia. It has united Iran and Saudi Arabia in an energy alliance with China.
As the war comes home, this week Biden, in a reverse ferret that would shame the most shameless of ferret-reversers, approved the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. Meanwhile, on the frontiers of democracy, Russian jets had a near miss with an American drone in international airspace over the Black Sea. U.S. European Command condemned a Russian jet dumping its fuel on the drone as “environmentally unsound.” Laugh at the clowns while you can.