The One Ukraine Option That the Public Won't Abide [View all]

[Celerity]

Vladimir Putin’s potential invasion has exposed a rare point of agreement between Democrats and Republicans.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/02/russia-ukraine-war-biden/621422/




For decades, American presidents of both parties have relied on a go-to line when confronting foreign belligerents who won’t bend to their demands, a single sentence that serves as both euphemism and threat. How far would the U.S. go to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon? “All options are on the table,” President Barack Obama said in 2013, repeating verbatim a reply that his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush, had given in 2006. What about North Korea? “All options are on the table,” President Donald Trump, a man not known for adhering to rhetorical norms, said during his first year in office.

Those six words are diplomatic code for war, whether by military strikes or the deployment of ground forces. But they have yet to escape President Joe Biden’s lips, even as he has warned that a Russian assault on Ukraine would “change the world” and represent the largest invasion since World War II. The Biden administration has stepped up weapons shipments to Ukraine, prepared 8,500 U.S. troops to deploy to protect NATO allies in Eastern Europe, and threatened “severe” sanctions on Russia in response to an invasion. Biden himself has warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin would face “enormous consequences.” But the president has effectively ruled out a military offensive in which American forces would fight directly in Ukraine’s defense. “We have no intention of putting American forces in Ukraine,” Biden told reporters last week.

What’s striking is that after years of deep political divisions over foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world, hardly anyone with power in Washington has suggested otherwise. Putin’s potential invasion of Ukraine has instead exposed a rare point of consensus between Democrats and Republicans: The U.S. isn’t going to war to stop him.

“There are some things we have to be clear about, and one of them is that the American people, frankly, will not support sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to Ukraine,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee who visited Ukraine earlier this month, told me. “My constituents are not going to support an Afghanistan- or Iraq-level deployment of forces, and we have to be honest about that.” Another Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, told me that to threaten war with a nuclear power like Russia would be “a huge mistake.”

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