Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
In this photo released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on November 19, 2024, a Russian Uragan self-propelled multiple rocket launcher fires toward Ukrainian positions from an undisclosed location in Ukraine.
Joe Biden has finally found a relatively risk-free way to give Ukraine longer-range missiles, the ATACMS. They’re tactical missiles with a range of about 190 miles, thus bringing more Russian military encampments into range, but no major Russian cities.
This is the kind of escalation against which Vladimir Putin has been brandishing the threat of using Russia’s nuclear weapons, which he again brandished earlier today. That said, the impending Trump presidency has effectively negated such threats. Putin knows that Trump will be happy to help arrange a cease-fire in which Russia gains vast Ukrainian territories and perhaps can even engineer the installation of a more pro-Russian Ukrainian government. After all, Trump’s favorite European government is Hungary’s, a pro-Russian illiberal semi-autocracy, so why would Trump oppose the elevation of a Ukrainian Viktor Orbán if that’s the outcome that Putin seeks?
Going nuclear, however, would screw up such a scenario; not even Trump could ignore the backlash against a Russian nuclear attack. This has rendered Putin’s threats even less real, and more of the saber-rattling variety, than they were before. In that sense, Trump’s ascent has freed Biden to give Ukraine a weapons system that previously appeared to run the risk of at least some kind of Russian escalation.
Terribly, but not surprisingly, Biden also has doubled down on his other war policy: his refusal to do anything to mitigate, much less halt, Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the attendant slaughter and starvation of its residents. On October 13, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu saying that the Israeli government’s obstruction of food and medicine to Gaza meant that “essential survival needs” were not being met. The letter gave Israel 30 days to increase such deliveries tenfold.
Those 30 days have now come and gone, and our government now says that Israel has earned a “fail” grade on meeting any of the quantitative goals for increasing deliveries of food and medicine. The Israeli government’s own metrics bear this out. Despite its own data and Israel’s own data, however, the Biden administration has still insisted that Israel is not blocking the delivery of life’s essentials to the point that requires the U.S. to stop selling it arms.
U.S. law flatly forbids the unrestricted provision of military aid to nations that block humanitarian assistance. “Infuriatingly and bewilderingly,” wrote J Street—the liberal Zionist organization that generally represents the viewpoints of the majority of American Jews—in an impassioned statement it released on Sunday, “the Biden Administration has said it cannot see any violation of our laws.”
“While we expect Trump to break our laws,” J Street continued, “we expect Democratic administrations to uphold them.”
So, one would hope, would Senate Democrats, and perhaps even a Senate Republican or two. Tomorrow, the Senate will vote on a resolution authored by Bernie Sanders, the only member of the Senate to have lived and worked on a kibbutz, to block the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. As the incoming Trump administration shows every sign of letting Bibi continue to run amok and letting Israel annex as much Palestinian territory as it desires, this could be the last moment that our legislators could even just signal their disapproval of mass slaughter. That rising to this occasion is considered politically courageous is evidence of just how profoundly warped and sick this discussion has become.
