Few things have led to more misery in the 21st century than the knee-jerk liberal impulse to “do something.” President Joe Biden has, to his immense credit, continued to resist calls from his own party and from many Republicans to charge straight into Ukraine and a shooting war with Russia. No one has ever accused Biden of being a genius, but right now this decrepit president is one of the only people who stands between us and world war three.
Biden resists calls for war
Interventionists in both parties have been demanding a no fly zone since the war in Ukraine started. According to some polls, a strong majority of the American public supports these demands.
Those polls might be fraudulent, but the national hysteria isn’t. Even if isn’t as solid a majority as polling claims, Biden would have strong bipartisan support for declaring a no fly zone.
Supporters of the president denounced a post on Biden’s Twitter account which emphatically ruled out the possibility and stressed that it would mean world war three.
“Do something” continues to be the refrain even after the White House affirmed its opposition to world war three. Of course, it should be noted that anyone upset with Biden’s decision is still free to volunteer for Ukraine’s international legion.
There’s no need to give Biden too much credit. We can assume that the president (like most sane people) is personally opposed to being incinerated in a nuclear exchange and is unwilling to risk this fate just to decide whether a citizen of Kharkov pays his taxes to Kiev or Moscow.
No one is trivializing the horrors of the war in Ukraine, but any sober observer can acknowledge that the risks of direct intervention vastly outweigh the benefits for everyone.
I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO.
But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine.
A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 11, 2022
Can he withstand the pressure?
Biden has been criticized for not acknowledging that world war three is already here and that Vladimir Putin intends to wage wars of conquest across the rest of Europe and Asia.
The conflict in Ukraine, it should be remembered, is in fact a regional war being waged between two rival governments over control of land and resources.
It is horrible for the people who have to suffer through it, but it’s a reenactment of something that is as old as recorded history. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” is the eternal reality of international relations.
The 2020 bloodbath in Nagorno-Karabakh did not inspire any of the hysteria that has surrounded the Ukraine invasion; COVID-19 was still relatively fresh, so that war never had a chance to become the “current thing.”
Voters and public figures demanding that Biden intervene in Ukraine aren’t seriously thinking about the repercussions of that action. Yelling “do something” in response to footage of bombed-out apartments on CNN isn’t a foreign policy.
Biden has made his stance clear, but he will now have to stick to it as his approval ratings drop even further and calls for war from his allies grow louder. Billions of lives could depend on his questionable ability to resist this pressure.
