- BOSTON HERALD - PETER LUCAS - FEB 24, 2022 -
That will teach Joe Biden to hug a thug.
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he never would have allowed Vladimir Putin to run circles around him, which is what Putin has done to hapless Joe Biden.
And he certainly would not have appeased Putin and given the Russian president everything he asked for from the START treaty to greenlighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, without getting something in return. All Biden got from Putin was grief.
Trump is a businessman and that is what businessmen do. They do not give things away without getting something in return. He is also a bully who knows how to deal with other bullies.
The only thing bullies like Putin understand is a bloody nose, metaphorically speaking, but Biden has no punch. He is a veteran Washington politician who made a career of going along to get along. Trump demanded respect; Biden seeks to make nice.
Putin is a tough former KGB operative with blood on his hands. And unlike Biden and other Western leaders, Putin has a vision, and that vision is to force former Russian provinces like Ukraine back into the bosom of Mother Russia, whether they like it or not.
And Joe Biden has given Putin a window of opportunity to make that vision, or at least a part of it, a reality.
Biden, in his war on fossil fuel, early on shut down the Keystone XL pipeline and reversed Trump’s oil drilling policies. Yet, in a gift to Putin, Biden removed U.S. sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline that allowed it to be completed. This pipeline will bring additional energy into Germany, a NATO ally. He got nothing in return.
On Tuesday Biden, as part of his sanctioning of Russia for invading Ukraine, re-established the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Had he not removed them in the first place, he might have given Putin second thoughts about invading Ukraine.
Nevertheless, in just a year, Biden has turned the U.S from an energy independent nation into a country that now imports oil from Russia.
Now, in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Biden, to avoid responsibility for his failed energy policy, is already blaming Russia for the higher gas and energy prices that Biden’s policies initiated.
What he should have said in his Tuesday remarks in response to Putin was to order the reopening of the Keystone pipeline as well as a relaxation of his anti-oil drilling policies in the U.S. That would have caught Putin’s attention.
Instead, his weak response to Putin’s aggression is a signal to NATO, Putin and the world that Biden has written off Ukraine. It is another gift.