By F. Michael Maloof
Director of the Legacy National Security Group
The Democrat Party led by President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is at a crossroads. It faces a huge dilemma that could profoundly impact U.S. involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
House Republicans increasingly resist rubberstamping approval of new FY2024 funding for U.S. involvement in that conflict. As the United States continues its involvement, there will be growing calls to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden’s involvement in alleged corruption in Ukraine through his son, Hunter Biden. At the same time, the senior Biden was vice president under then-President Barrack Obama.
The Democrats cannot afford either the issue of U.S. support for the war or any investigation into alleged Biden corruption in Ukraine to bang into the Election 2024 campaign season.
It has been clear, especially since the beginning of the conflict, that U.S. proxy involvement through Ukraine by providing tens of billions of dollars in funding and equipment stems from a Biden policy, perpetuated by his current acting deputy secretary of state, Victoria “Torie” Nuland, ultimately to contain Russia and launch regime change in that country.
This fixation on Russia raises the question as to why this is happening, prompting the conflict to lower our critical military supply depots. The ability to replenish those supplies could take years, coupled with increasing supply chain issues.
Biden administration policies also have driven up inflation costs, ending U.S. energy independence and allowing our strategic oil reserves to dwindle to critically low levels. Given the $32 Trillion plus debt, the U.S. cannot afford another military conflict anywhere.
The net effect of these actions has lowered U.S. readiness as the Biden administration has managed to drive Russia into a strategic and economic alliance with China, creating an even more significant strategic threat.
How has all of this happened in just two and a half years?
Most people see only where events between Moscow and Washington are now. However, the buildup of this crisis has been years in the making. In effect, it was a long-term, orchestrated process.
To be clear, then-Assistant Secretary of State neo-conservative Victoria Nuland and then-Vice President Joe Biden were very instrumental in collaboration with neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine and Europe to create the Ukraine crisis beginning with the 2014 coup (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ukraine-tape/leaked-audio-reveals-embarrassing-u-s-exchange-on-ukraine-eu-idUSBREA1601G2014020700).
Their efforts led to overthrowing a legitimate, democratically elected government, admittedly Moscow-leaning.
The Biden administration’s motive, however, isn’t just about Ukraine. It’s also about containing Russia if not regime change, while eliminating what it perceives as its main adversary in maintaining the so-called U.S.-led unipolar world order.
Nuland comes from that part of the political spectrum that advocates using military power to instill a U.S. version of democracy. We’ve seen it most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, two prime examples of abysmal failures that have racked up almost $10 Trillion at last count.
Nuland herself has a family history that goes back to Czarist Russia, where her family lived in what now is Ukraine.
If it weren’t for the Biden administration pushing what it perceives to be its leadership role in a revived NATO, the Europeans never would have initiated this conflict. European Union countries collectively find themselves on the verge of a massive economic recession by having voluntarily severed vital oil and natural gas supplies from Russia.
The Biden administration has responded by offering such supplies but at vastly inflated prices. The Europeans feel betrayed.
To begin down this road to disaster, the U.S. had to illuminate what it perceived as Russia’s strategically adversarial role. The Democrats concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory.
It was the now disproven hoax in the lead-up to the 2016 election. That hoax said that Moscow conspired with the campaign to elect Donald Trump as president. Using Moscow as an excuse, Clinton and the Democrats sought to reclaim her lead over Trump. But it ultimately didn’t work.
That narrative was developed by then-2016 Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, creating the fabricated Steele Dossier. As now is known, even the Obama administration knew from the beginning that it was a false narrative. The motive was to elect Clinton as president and for Democrats to retain power and control following eight years of the Democrat Obama administration.
That hoax, however, was later disproven by at least two separate investigations. But it took three years and created major disarray, political chaos, and two impeachments for then-President Donald Trump.
Yet, the Biden administration and the Democrats not only owned this disproven hoax but decided to perpetuate it to create a picture of Russia as the ultimate boogie man.
In doing so, the Biden administration also decided to tear up some 32 years of a half dozen significant agreements, centering around “indivisibility” between the East and West. “Indivisibility” concerns security between East and West (https://www.ft.com/content/84a43896-2dfd-4be4-8d2a-c68a5a68547a). The idea of “indivisibility” is that the West would not increase its security at the expense of the East.
While the Warsaw Pact went away following the end of the Cold War in 1991, NATO continued edging ever closer to the borders of the Russian Federation by ignoring those agreements.
This basic tenet of indivisibility was embodied in:
The Helsinki Final Act of 1975.
The 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe.
The 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security.
Istanbul Protocol of 1999.
Astana Agreement of 2010.
A 06 March 1991 document(https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/german-media-fetch-1991-document-on-nato-commitment-to-non-e) pointing to an agreement on no-NATO expansion. Since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, the document, which reflected meeting minutes, was recently discovered in the British National Archives. Despite these agreements, NATO has expanded (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early) to the border of the Russian Federation on at least seven different occasions during the 1990s and into the 2000s despite assurances from three former U.S. presidents and a US secretary of state not to do so.
While Ukraine, for some time, had sought to join NATO, it didn’t become a high priority until after the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021. Just weeks later, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, went to Georgia and Ukraine to encourage them to join.
Zelinsky first gave it a priority, but after the Russian military operation began in February 2022, he began to walk back that ambition, even though Ukraine all wasn’t even eligible to join NATO.
And even joining also would have violated the terms by which Ukraine became an independent country with the 16 July 1990 Declaration on State Sovereignty of Ukraine, which gave assurance of the country’s non-alignment.
Even though Kyiv had been shelling the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region since the 2014 coup because its predominantly Russian-speaking citizens wanted to remain autonomous, Ukraine and Russia sought to resolve the dispute with the Minsk I agreement in 2014 and Minsk II in 2015.
France and Germany joined Russia and Ukraine under the Normandy Format to negotiate a settlement, which was signed by their leadership and the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, both of which comprised the Donbas region.
Despite these agreements, there was no implementation, largely at the behest of Washington https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/04/09/is-the-us-hindering-much-needed-diplomatic-efforts/).
Moscow warned Washington on the breach of indivisibility by offering NATO membership to Ukraine. Despite repeated warnings by Moscow of crossing its national security redline, Kyiv only intensified its shelling of the Donbas and the leadership there then asked for Russia’s help.
Another immediate cause occurred when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky in 20 February 2022 threatened to renounce.
(https://www.farsnews.ir/en/news/14001201000618/Ukraine-Threaens-Rennce-Is-Nn-Nclear-Sas) its non-nuclear status under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
Under the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up some 1,900 nuclear weapons (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/12/05/why-care -about-ukraine-and-the-budapest-memorandum/), which had made Ukraine at the time the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
When Zelinsky made that threat, Ukraine still possessed the industrial capacity and know-how to rebuild its nuclear arsenal, which Russian President Putin saw as an immediate threat.
At the urging of Nuland, the Biden administration decided to implement its Russian containment policy using this Ukrainian standoff as a catalyst.
But events haven’t worked out, and now the Ukraine crisis poses a dilemma for the U.S. and NATO countries, which are having to confront energy shortages that are crippling their industries in the long term and their ability even to provide heating this coming winter.
Some European Union countries have begun to question their commitment to Ukraine. And the Biden administration has never explained to the American people the national security imperative for undertaking an undeclared proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
This poses a fundamental question: Does America and Europeans intend to continue waging a conflict in Ukraine to support a broader effort to contain Russia during this post-Cold War period spawned from an elaborate political hoax by Washington ideologues and Biden’s Democrat Party? We’ll see.
F. Michael Maloof is a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He also serves as head of SUA’s Legacy National Security Group.
