Imagine if Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seized its most important strategic region, and all the U.S and international community did was apply sanctions and kick the country out of a feckless international organization.
No provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, and certainly no unlimited, 100-plus-billion-dollar outlay of U.S. taxpayer funds to the eastern European country for its struggle against Putin’s aggression.
No virtue-signaling Ukraine lapel pins, no sanctimonious Presidential visit to the country with fake air-raid sirens blaring, no junkets to Kiev by U.S. lawmakers, actors and rockstars to kiss the ring of the Ukrainian leader, no joint address to a fawning Congress by the tracksuit-clad ruler with a jumbo-sized Ukrainian flag draped over the dais behind him as he demands billions more from U.S. taxpayers.
That’s exactly what happened close to a decade ago, the first time Putin invaded Ukraine on Biden’s watch. In 2014, Putin’s forces and their proxies took over the single most strategic land mass from that country, the Crimean Peninsula, home to the largest naval port on the Black Sea.
In the face of that aggression, Obama and his point person on Ukraine, Vice President Biden, said no to arming the Ukrainians, despite authorization from Congress to do so, and provided a total of $320 million to the country, or two-thousandths of the U.S. taxpayers’ spend on the latest Putin invasion of Ukraine, that now stands north of 160 billion.
Two years later, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, Obama explained his thinking on their decision not to engage in a meaningful way on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”
Describing their position on Ukraine as “realistic,” Obama noted, “…[T]his is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”
Yet somehow no one in the media called Obama and Biden “Putin stooges” for their anemic response to the Russian leader’s forceful annexation of Crimea.
Fast forward to today, when Biden takes precisely the opposite position from 2014 on Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine on his watch, and now steps on the interventionist accelerator and pours more than $160 billion in U.S taxpayer funding – along with countless weapons – to Ukraine with no audit or accounting, and no end in sight.
Thanks to Biden’s flip-flop to a policy of over-engagement, China is now joining hands with Putin to assist Russia in its conflict in Ukraine, making the prospect of a nuclear war more real than it's been since the 1950s. Never mind that Biden’s weakness on the world stage in Afghanistan and toward China clearly emboldened Putin to launch his newest assault on Ukraine in the first place.
Yet when President Trump calls for a rapid negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict, the media descends into full freakout mode, calling him and anyone else who opposes this latest endless war a Putin puppet.
In the wake of Trump’s advocating for a Ukraine deal in last month’s CNN town hall, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough led the regime-media eruption. Calling Trump’s comments “breathtakingly dangerous,” Scarborough screeched that the former President was “…[b]asically saying he would turn over Ukraine to Vladimir Putin…[Trump] was a propagandist, and it was a propagandist spewing lies repeatedly over and over and over again…”
The New York Times echoed Scarborough’s take: “The second-term vision Mr. Trump sketched out…would represent a sharp departure from core American values that have been at the bedrock of the nation for decades: its creditworthiness, its credibility with international allies and its adherence to the rule of law at home.”
To date, no one in the media reports that Trump’s position on Ukraine largely mirrors that of Obama and Biden from nine years ago, namely, that Europe should shoulder most of the financial burden for helping its neighbor, and that we need to save thousands more lives by ending this endless war promptly through a negotiated settlement
To be clear, most Americans feel bad for the Ukrainian people, but early on, this was going to be a short engagement – lasting several weeks or a month – not a full-year-plus war with no end in sight.
Now, with Biden’s unlimited commitment to supporting Ukraine, many Americans have had enough and are looking for an off-ramp to this deadly and costly conflict, one that would allow our country to refocus on its real priorities, including fixing the economy, countering China, getting serious on crime, ending homelessness and securing our border.
To that end, it’s time for the regime media to stop the bloviating and simply admit that, rather than shilling for Putin, calls to limit our engagement in Ukraine in fact reflect a sober view that mirrors precisely where Biden and Obama stood on the conflict less than a decade ago.
John Ullyot is a U.S. Marine veteran and former spokesman for the National Security Council.