‘President Biden’ Would Be Music to Russian and Taliban Ears It is laughable for Biden, of all people, to claim that Trump’s administration has been a gift to Putin.National Review, Jul 4, 2020, Andrew C. McCarthy
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As I recount in
Ball of Collusion, the Obama/Biden team entered office with Moscow just having invaded Georgia, which had broken away from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1989. The new administration’s reaction — communicated by, among others, notorious Mr. Tough Guy Joe Biden — was to “reset†relations, shelve Bush administration plans for missile-defense installations in Eastern Europe, and swoon over the possibilities of strategic partnerships and new arms treaties with the Kremlin.
Yet, the Obama/Biden administration pressed ahead, certain that appeasing Putin was the best approach. The Kremlin’s cooperation, after all, would be essential to achieving the Obama/Biden crowning “achievement,†the Iran nuclear deal. In stark contrast to the Trump/Pence administration’s pattern of extricating the U.S. from treaties with Russia because Moscow habitually violates them, the Obama/Biden administration entangled the U.S. in the so-called New START Treaty to reduce strategic offensive arms. Naturally, Russia is widely suspected of violating New START by adding new missiles.
The Obama/Biden administration also signed off on the Uranium One deal, Russia’s acquisition, through its energy giant Rosatom, of a fifth of America’s stock of uranium ore, even though we do not produce enough uranium for our needs, and even though the Obama Justice Department had a viable racketeering prosecution against Rosatom’s U.S.-based subsidiary for its corruption of the
As Obama and Biden campaigned for reelection in 2012, the president had his now infamous “hot mic†moment with Putin’s factotum, Dimitri Medvedev — assuring that if the Kremlin would just keep its usual provocations to a minimum in the run-up to Election Day, he would have more “flexibility†to accommodate Putin in his second term. Putin, predictably, thumbed his nose at Obama. He joined Iran in vigorously backing the monstrous Assad regime in Syria. He then stepped up his aggression against another former Soviet satellite, Ukraine, by annexing the Crimean Peninsula and waging a separatist war in the eastern Donbass region — exploiting, as part of his rationale, the Obama/Biden administration’s ham-handed meddling in Ukrainian electoral politics.
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