{"id":1315478,"date":"2019-10-09T22:36:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T04:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/thiessen-column-joe-biden-is-a-hypocrite-on-ukraine\/"},"modified":"2019-10-09T22:36:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T04:36:00","slug":"thiessen-column-joe-biden-is-a-hypocrite-on-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/thiessen-column-joe-biden-is-a-hypocrite-on-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Thiessen column: Joe Biden is a hypocrite on Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WASHINGTON \u2014 Former vice president Joe Biden has said that in holding up vital military assistance to Ukraine, President Trump \u201cused the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia \u2026 to subvert the rule of law in the express hope of extracting a political favor.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s rich. The aid in question is lethal military assistance that the Obama-Biden administration refused to give Ukraine.<\/p>\n

In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and began arming separatists in eastern Ukraine with tanks, armored vehicles and rocket launchers, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to Washington to plead for weapons to defend his country. In an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress \u2014 with Biden sitting directly behind him \u2014 Poroshenko said his country appreciated the nonlethal assistance he was getting, but declared \u201cone cannot win a war with blankets.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Obama-Biden administration was unmoved. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that \u201cPresident Barack Obama stuck to his refusal to provide weapons or other lethal military gear to Ukraine, despite a passionate appeal Thursday for help in fighting pro-Russian rebels by Ukraine\u2019s president.\u201d Why? The administration feared that lethal aid would provoke Moscow.<\/p>\n

So what did the administration give him? Instead of RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), we provided MREs (meals ready to eat) \u2014 food rations. As one frustrated former Pentagon official put it at the time, \u201cWhat kind of message does that send anyway? We are sending MREs while they are being invaded by an aggressor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Answer: a message of weakness.<\/p>\n

When Trump took office, he delivered a message of strength. In December 2017, the new administration announced that the United States would send the lethal aid to Ukraine that Poroshenko requested and Obama and Biden refused \u2014 the sale of $47 million worth of Javelin antitank missiles. In May 2018, after Ukraine tested its new Javelin missiles, Poroshenko exulted on Twitter, \u201cFinally this day has come!\u201d and personally thanked Trump \u201cfor supporting Ukraine and adopting a decision to provide Javelin antitank missile systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Biden to now attack Trump for a temporary delay in a new round of lethal military aid reeks of hypocrisy. It was on Biden\u2019s watch that the United States refused to deliver military aid at all. Yet the same vice president who sat there impassively while Ukraine\u2019s president begged for weapons now dares to cite the Russian threat to Ukraine in castigating Trump? Talk about chutzpah.<\/p>\n

And since Biden raised the Russian threat, let\u2019s recall that the Obama-Biden administration bears much responsibility for the annexation of Crimea that necessitated the delivery of lethal aid to Ukraine in the first place. Russia\u2019s military intervention in Ukraine came in the aftermath of the Obama-Biden administration\u2019s failure to enforce its red line against Bashar al-Assad\u2019s use of chemical weapons by Syria. In March 2013, Biden declared, \u201cBecause we recognize the great danger Assad\u2019s chemical and biological arsenals pose to Israel and the United States, to the whole world, we\u2019ve set a clear red line against the use or the transfer of those weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assad responded by using chemical weapons on innocent civilians not once, but 16 times. And yet Obama and Biden did nothing, failing to carry out even \u201cunbelievably small\u201d military strikes \u2014 a decision Biden publicly defended. \u201cWe can easily say we should have bombed and gone in and taken out their air defense system,\u201d Biden said, \u201cWell, you know, big nations can\u2019t bluff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bluff is what Obama and Biden did \u2014 and Assad called their bluff. Not only that, they turned to Russia for a face-saving way out, letting Russian President Vladimir Putin broker a phony deal to have Syria disarm. It was one of the most embarrassing foreign policy debacles of the post-Cold War era. So it should come as no surprise that, when Obama threatened to impose costs on Putin if he invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin called his bluff, too. Putin knew Obama and Biden did not have the will to stand up to him in Ukraine. And he was proved right when they refused to give Ukraine lethal aid for fear of further provoking him.<\/p>\n

None of this excuses Trump\u2019s delaying a new round of lethal military aid to Ukraine. But if this military assistance was as vital to countering the Russian threat as Biden says, then it\u2019s fair to ask: Why didn\u2019t the United States provide it when Biden was the Obama administration\u2019s point man on Ukraine?<\/p>\n

Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Former vice president Joe Biden has said that in holding up vital military assistance to Ukraine, President Trump \u201cused the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia \u2026 to subvert the rule of law in the express hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 19:38:40","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}