Always weak on Russia, Obama again misleads on his Ukraine record
Tom Rogan
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In an interview with CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour that aired on Friday, former President Barack Obama offered a creative retelling of his administration’s record on Ukraine. Obama rejected Amanpour’s suggestion that he might have imposed harsher consequences on Russian President Vladimir Putin following the latter’s 2014 seizure of Crimea.
Instead, Obama believes he and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel deserve praise for sanctioning Russia. Obama put it plainly, “We held the line.” Merkel has similarly claimed that her Ukraine policy was impressive. But as with Obama, the facts are not in her favor.
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Yes, it’s true that Obama had to deal with a European Union that was more skeptical of sanctioning Russia than the EU of February 2022, when Russia again invaded Ukraine. While Obama exaggerates in saying that he had to drag the Europeans “kicking and screaming” to agree to sanctions, the Europeans were more inclined to appease Putin. This was memorably manifested by the Russian leaking of a phone conversation in which then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland stated, “F*** the EU.”
That said, it is simply absurd for Obama to claim that “we challenged Putin with the tools that we had at the time, given where Ukraine was at the time.” The former president also gives himself undue credit for the improvement of Ukraine’s armed forces between 2014 and 2022. The reality of Obama’s Ukraine record is different. Consider two key points.
Obama systematically refused to provide Ukraine with anti-tank and other weapons systems, or what might be called “tools we had at the time,” to contest Russian forces. The most cogent rationale for Obama’s fear of escalation was that he simply didn’t care all that much about Ukraine. Regardless, these weapons would only be provided when President Donald Trump took office (Trump later ruined his otherwise auspicious Ukraine record by attempting to shake down the Ukrainians for his own political purposes).
Second, Obama blinked at great moral cost when, in July 2014, Russian-supported rebels used a Russian-provided air defense system to shoot down the MH-17 passenger airliner over far eastern Ukraine.
All 298 souls aboard that aircraft died in the attack. The Australian and Dutch governments, which lost many of their citizens in the incident, wanted to secure the crash site. This was necessary because intelligence reporting showed that the Russian GRU and associated forces were looting crash victims’ bodies and removing the evidence of the Buk missile that destroyed the plane. The need for action was real, the message to Putin of U.S. inaction would be telling. Yet Obama was paralyzed. He left the bodies to rot, fearful that even a limited multinational humanitarian military operation would agitate Putin. Put simply, he did not use tools at his disposal in response to a grievous war crime.
Top line: Obama’s Ukraine record is part and parcel of his Russia policy more generally. Obama might have avoided Trump’s delusional belief that he could befriend Putin in American favor. Still, measured by action in response to Russian aggression, Obama’s Russia policy was weakness incorporated.
Obama refused to follow through with his redline threat against Bashar Assad’s 2013 use of chemical weapons in Syria. Abandoning the French (who were ready to launch retaliatory strikes alongside the United States), Obama instead agreed to a patently ludicrous deal that would supposedly see Assad give up his chemical weapons. Assad gave up a few and then kept using the rest. It was not until 2017, when Trump ordered military action, that Assad saw Obama’s red line finally enforced. Obama did next to nothing in response to increasingly aggressive Russian actions against U.S. government and military personnel stationed in Moscow. In 2016, a CIA officer was attacked and seriously wounded at the U.S. Embassy entrance after he evaded an FSB surveillance team. Another CIA officer suffered a similarly unpleasant incident. The Defense Attache had his dog killed. Former Democratic presidents knew how to deal with these Russian antics during the Cold War. Sadly, Obama and his creative writing major/foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes blinked. A good lesson of Russia-related spy games: Never ever blink with the Russians unless they blink with you.
Want more examples? How about these three:
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Obama tolerated Russia’s escalating interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. After incidents such as the GRU’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee and its subsequent release of numerous emails, all Obama could bring himself to do was to warn Putin at the September 2016 G20 summit to “cut it out.” Putin, of course, did not. Obama took no substantive measures in response to Russia’s repeated breaches of the INF missile treaty. Obama took no substantive measures in response to repeated Russian attacks on Syrian civilian aid convoys.
Top line: Obama’s Ukraine rhetoric has as much relationship to reality as Trump’s rhetoric at his 2018 Helsinki summit with Putin. Which is to say, not a lot.