Biden’s European balancing act

Biden’s European balancing act
Joe Biden will head to Europe later this week for a series of emergency meetings with Western leaders. In addition to attending a trio of summits in Brussels — one between NATO leaders, one for the G7, and a special session of the European Council, Biden will travel to Poland.

Of the trip to Ukraine’s neighbor, Jen Psaki said in a statement Sunday: “He will hold a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda. The president will discuss how the United States, alongside our allies and partners, is responding to the humanitarian and human…

Biden’s European balancing act

Joe Biden will head to Europe later this week for a series of emergency meetings with Western leaders. In addition to attending a trio of summits in Brussels — one between NATO leaders, one for the G7, and a special session of the European Council, Biden will travel to Poland.

Of the trip to Ukraine’s neighbor, Jen Psaki said in a statement Sunday: “He will hold a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda. The president will discuss how the United States, alongside our allies and partners, is responding to the humanitarian and human rights crisis that Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created.”

This will be the first major in-person diplomacy Biden has undertaken since Russia shocked the world with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly a month ago. And it comes at a time when analysts report that the frenetic early stages of the war are giving way to a bloody stalemate.

On Saturday, Washington’s Institute for the Study of War released its analysis of the campaign that found that Russian forces, having failed in their objective of a swift capture of Ukraine’s major cities, “are digging in around the periphery of Kyiv and elsewhere, attempting to consolidate political control over areas they currently occupy, resupplying and attempting to reinforce units in static positions, and generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward positions for an indefinite time.”

For all that Vladimir Putin’s thwarted ambitions are a welcome development, assessments of the new stage of the conflict contain grim warnings of what is to come. The Wall Street Journal reports that US officials expect Putin to continue “pummeling” Ukrainian cities “calculating that it will lead Mr. Zelensky to abandon his hopes of joining the West and agree to a neutral status and other Russian demands.”

In the weeks following Russia’s invasion, it was easy to get carried away by the pleasant surprises that punctuated the horror: Ukraine’s brave resistance, Russia’s stalled advance, Zelensky’s emergence as a heroic wartime leader, Germany’s abandonment of decades of Ostpolitik, a united West, swift and firm economic sanctions. What was true of the macro was true of the micro too. How could you not cheer the footage of Ukrainian farmers towing abandoned Russian tanks with their tractors, for example?

But, as Harry J. Kazianis puts it in a sobering assessment of the state of the conflict for The Spectator, “fairytale endings never happen in war.” If that isn’t already obvious, it will be come clearer during a stalemate defined by indiscriminate assaults on Ukrainian cities. In the rest of the West, the exhilaration of the war’s first weeks, complete with empty hashtag diplomacy and pointless cancellations alongside the more meaningful support, will give way to the anxieties of a prolonged standoff against a nuclear-armed tyrant. If peace is to come, Kazianis warns, it will likely be a compromise that pleases no one.

Writing in the New York Times, strategist Tanner Greer points out that a peace deal might need to include a rolling back of Western sanctions: “Mr. Putin will require a partial face-saving victory to end this war,” he argues. “A promise to decrease sanctions might meet this need. This outcome would not be just, but it would hold the best potential for saving the most Ukrainian lives.” Greer calls for foreign policy informed by a “logic of consequences,” that is to say an assessment of its costs and benefits, rather than a “logic of appropriateness,” which is driven by “the moral imperative to do the right thing.”

On his trip to Europe, Biden must find a balance: offering the symbolic leadership expected of the leader of the free world but remaining focused on that “logic of consequences” in the prosecution of a foreign policy at a fraught moment in world history.

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