Biden's High-Risk Brinksmanship In Ukraine
NATO has just attacked Russia with long-range missiles. What could go wrong?
There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump. The missiles up the ante considerably against a nuclear power for a simple reason. As Putin noted:
experts are well aware, and the Russian side has repeatedly emphasized this, that it is it is impossible to use such weapons without the direct involvement of military specialists of the countries producing such weapons.
The tiny tsar continued:
We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities. And in case of escalation of aggressive actions we will respond also decisively and mirrored.
And he looked on edge, bedraggled and belligerent, his arms and hands not moving a millimeter in what sure looks like AI.
There was a time when a NATO missile strike on Russian territory, followed by a Russian threat to attack NATO “military facilities” in response, would have caused the world to stop dead, paralyzed by the fear of nuclear armageddon. Yet here we are, blithely preoccupied by Pete Hegseth’s sexual exploits and Congressional bathrooms.
Others are not so sanguine. “I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun,” Ukraine’s former military chief, Valery Zaluzhny, warned yesterday, noting both the new involvement of NATO troops and the involvement of North Korea. Our own president, having brought us much closer to the brink as a lame duck, seemed unconcerned. He was last seen wandering off-stage in the vague direction of the Brazilian rainforest. Not optimal.
The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was even punchier, and pledged to allow Ukraine to use British long-range missiles as well: “We need to double down. We need to make sure Ukraine has what is necessary for as long as necessary, because we cannot allow Putin to win this war.” When asked if he was prepared to risk the UK forces or Ukraine or a third country like Poland being nuked in response, as Putin has threatened, Starmer simply ignored the question.
Meanwhile, just to keep things from escalating, the deputy chief of the British defense staff told a parliamentary committee yesterday:
If the British Army was asked to fight tonight, it would fight tonight. I don’t think anybody in this room should be under any illusion that if the Russians invaded Eastern Europe tonight, then we would meet them in that fight.
There seems to be a general impression that Putin is of course bluffing, that NATO can keep lobbing missiles into Russian territory with minimal consequences, and nothing could possibly go wrong.
But Putin has responded by launching a long-range missile that could be used to carry a nuke but didn’t, as well as lowering the bar for the use of nukes in his military “doctrine”. And ask yourself: if Russia were found to have had its own troops assemble a long-range missile and help launch it into the United States, do you think a US president would feel able to let it slide? Here’s what the British missile, the Storm Shadow, did in hitting an underground military facility in Kursk, according to unverified Russia media sources:
[The strike] resulted in the Death of 18 Russian Officers, including a Senior Commander, as well as 3 North Korean Officers. In addition, a Dozen other Soldiers and Officers were Wounded in the Attack, including one of North Korea’s most Senior Generals.
I can’t verify that, but it’s perfectly possible. To have NATO’s fingers on the targeting and launch of that missile puts us in a whole new category of conflict.
The job of a president is to keep us far, far away from any risk of nuclear conflict, as Biden seemed to understand until now. And any student of history will know that blithe complacency as two sides trade military escalations is often exactly the precursor to something going very, very wrong. Accidents happen; misjudgments occur; the point of never getting to this point is that this point contains a host of unknowables, some of them globally existential.
I assume that this is all about strengthening Kyiv’s hand in what will be grueling negotiations to end the conflict once Donald Trump gets back into office. Or the intelligence is worse than we know and it’s about avoiding an Ukraine collapse before Biden leaves office — which, after Afghanistan, would be a final, damning verdict on his foreign policy. Or the intelligence is better than we know and the Russian economy is so weak and his military so depleted that NATO thinks this extra pressure will force Putin to crack. Or it’s a norm-defying attempt from an outgoing administration to derail any peace process the incoming one might want to start. The latter possibility — with Biden rolling the dice because he thinks someone else will have to face the music — is not a minimal risk.
Whatever the reason, it’s an odd position for a superpower to be in: simultaneously ramping up aggression against Russia to a new, nuclear-tinged level while signaling it will soon try to end the war anyway. And it implies an end to what we used to believe was mutually assured destruction: the idea that nuclear war is so unthinkable that we should avoid any direct conventional conflict between nuclear-armed powers at all costs. NATO has now decided it can risk the furthest edge of outright conflict with a nuclear superpower and have no serious worries about catastrophe. And that opens up a world of possibilities for conflict between nuclear powers that we once believed would be forever forestalled.
The brinksmanship over Ukraine will set a precedent for brinksmanship over Taiwan. What Putin and Biden have done — by allowing this conflict to persist, despite no chance of a conventional military victory for either side — is to render the world far less stable and far more dangerous than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Quite a legacy for a president we were assured was a foreign-policy master.
New On The Dishcast: Reihan Salam
Reihan is a writer and the president of the Manhattan Institute. Before that he was the executive editor of National Review and worked at publications as varied as the NYT, The Atlantic, National Affairs, Slate, CNN, NBC News, and Vice. He’s the author of Melting Pot or Civil War? and Grand New Party — a 2008 book he co-wrote with Ross Douthat that pushed a policy program for a GOP connected to the working class. He was also my very first assistant on the Daily Dish, editing the Letters page, over two decades ago.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on finding “Americanness” out of immigrant diversity, and Trump vs the education system. That link also takes you to a bunch of commentary on my talk with Anderson Cooper on grief. We also hear from many readers on the trans debate in the wake of the Democrats’ defeat, including a dissent from the dad of a trans son.
Heads Up
I’m back on Real Time tonight for the season’s closer, talking to Bill with Donna Brazile. It’s why the Dish is a little later than usual today. West Coast time!
Grace vs Mace
As an act of political grace, it doesn’t come much better than this:
I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.
That, of course, was newly-elected Congresswoman Sarah McBride’s response to the Speaker’s decision to bar transwomen from the common women’s bathrooms in the House. It came after a manic social media campaign by Congresswoman Nancy Mace to keep the sole transwoman in Congress from bumping into her in the loo.
Instantly, Mace looked like an asshole — and deserved to. And she picked the wrong fight. With respect to bathrooms with stalls, it really is petty to grandstand so self-righteously in favor of a largely unenforceable rule for what has always been, practically speaking, a non-problem. Stalls guarantee privacy; and if men want to enter women’s restrooms in order to abuse women, they don’t need to put on a dress to do so. Mace’s personalization of this is also worse than callous; it’s ill-mannered.
But McBride is wrong in her other gambit: to dismiss the issue because it’s so marginal and “remote”, to use Harris’ word. Since the election, mainstream Dems have been grappling with ways to respond to the damage that trans extremism inflicted on them in November. The first has been to insist that the issue — of, say, biological men in women’s sports — is so rare it doesn’t matter. And the second is to say this issue is peripheral for most voters — compared with, say, the economy — and so it doesn’t matter. Next question, please!
I’m sorry but these things do matter to many voters and, at some point, you have to stop dodging the issue and answer two basic questions. 1) Is it fair for boys to compete with girls in competitive sports or not? And 2) Is there any solid evidence behind fast-track sex reassignment for children who are on the verge of puberty or not?
Empirically, the answers are clear: 1) it’s unfair in every circumstance; and 2) no, there isn’t. (New Zealand is the latest country to put the brakes on puberty blockers for these reasons). What to do in each case is therefore pretty obvious: keep women’s sports for biological women and girls (unless there’s no competition and no physical risk to biological women and girls); ban the Wild West medical experiments and set up a serious clinical trial to test the best way to treat children — gay, trans, and autistic — with acute gender dysphoria.
But note that both these questions — co-ed sports and “gender-affirming care” for children — have nothing to do with trans civil rights or human dignity as such. (Trans people already have full civil rights since Bostock, and most Americans have no desire to be callous or discriminatory toward trans people.) These are simply empirical questions to which there are empirical answers. It says nothing about a transwoman’s dignity and right to be seen as a woman that she has, willy-nilly, an unfair advantage over women in sports. It’s just a fact. (It’s also a fact that transmen, i.e. biological women, can participate with biological men and boys in any competitive sports — so long as their own physical safety is protected. So this has nothing to do with “anti-trans” discrimination, just the protection of women.)
And it’s far from respectful of the dignity of trans, gay, and autistic kids that they be made guinea pigs for irreversible medical treatments that will sterilize them and remove their capacity for sexual pleasure forever. Lowering the standards of medical and scientific proof for a minority is, in fact, a form of prejudice. And subjecting children to irreversible treatments to which they cannot meaningfully consent is a form of abuse. It is important to note that McBride’s policy positions on these questions are to facilitate more and faster medical transing of children, to abolish all same-sex spaces for biological women, and to allow biological boys to compete in all sports against girls. Her grace is matched only by her radicalism.
But her radicalism does not have to define this debate. We can affirm the equality and dignity of transpeople without denying biological reality and scientific truth. It is perfectly possible. We can defend the rights of trans adults while protecting all children from indoctrination and experimental, irreversible medical intervention. This, in fact, is where the American people are. But can our polarized political culture even begin to acknowledge and adopt that moderate, liberal center?
Aye, there’s the rub.
The View From Your Window
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 10.30 am
Money Quotes For The Week
“I’m unsettled by the fact that we’re being asked to simultaneously believe that 1) Putin will NEVER push the button, that’s hysterical/disinfo, and 2) Putin is an existential threat to the entire West, and must be defeated at any cost. These two points sit very uneasily together,” - Lily Lynch.
“He is unfit to be our commander in chief,” - Tulsi Gabbard on Trump in 2019 after he deployed troops to Saudi Arabia.
“Looking back, when the post-pandemic boom cooled and businesses no longer needed the additional labour help, as a federal team we could have acted quicker and turned off the taps faster,” - Justin Trudeau as his government finally starts to limit unprecedented levels of mass immigration.
“Don’t lecture me about women in combat. Women have been in combat, and it doesn’t matter if that 7.62 [caliber round] hits you in the chest. No one gives a shit if it's a woman or a guy to pull that trigger, you’re still dead,” - Mark Milley, contra Pete Hegseth.
“Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s actually true,” - Jennifer Rubin on Trump’s Cabinet picks.
“Why is it that these celebrities who are obsessed with talking about racism always move to a country whiter than ours? Why not Chad? Haiti? Pakistan? Mongolia?” - Ryan James Girdusky on Ellen Degeneres and her wife fleeing to the UK because of Trump’s win.
“[N]ot only are younger children able to discuss sexuality-related issues but the early grades may, in fact, be the best time to introduce topics related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, gender equality, and social justice related to the LGBTQ community before hetero- and cisnormative values and assumptions become more deeply ingrained and less mutable,” - Future of Sex Education, an NGO.
“That long left tail gets you — act more normal, everyone!” - Matt Yglesias on a chart showing how Dem elites are far more left-wing than GOP elites are right-wing.
“Sam Smith has clarified that he is SELF-PARTNERED, which means that ‘they’ are not single, but he is actually in a relationship with themselves! Okayyyyy then,” - Leanne Spurs.
Cool Ad Watch
Bud Light is re-centering itself after the Dylan Mulvaney embarrassment:
Dissents Of The Week
A reader responds to my latest column:
On the trans issue, the rejectionist argument is that ALL claims to be a different gender than one’s birth gender — that “women can have penises; men can have wombs” and so forth — are ridiculous, and indulging these irrational claims will lead to all manner of unpredictable bad consequences. This rejectionist position may sound “extreme”, but polling suggests the American people favor it in the majority, according to Pew. While opposing job and housing discrimination and favouring some legal protection for trans-identified persons, Americans think that you ultimately cannot change your birth gender.
You seem to flirt with the rejectionist argument sometimes, but then you retreat to calling Rachel Levine “she”, etc. It’s obviously okay to disagree with the rejectionist argument, but you should at least explicitly address it.
I do reject it — because I believe that trans people exist and are not making it up, and because I believe that for a very small number of people, their psychological gender really does contradict their biological sex. The distinction between sex and gender is the critical one for me — and it’s the elision of it by the transqueer movement that concerns me. A transwoman can indeed have a penis; but in so far as she has a penis she remains a biological man. We can treat her as if she were a woman even if she is not biologically so.
Another reader writes:
In your latest, you make it seem like Kamala’s campaign was all about trans rights. Did she ever mention it outside of the ACLU questionnaire from five years ago? No. But Trump’s commercial, funded by right-wing oligarchs like Musk, put it in front of voters as if this were her top concern. This, like inflation and immigration, were blown way out of proportion by a very well-funded, right-wing media operation.
But this is the entire problem with the Democrats. They take extremist positions dictated by the various groups and then attempt to appeal to the center by downplaying these positions. But you can’t have it both ways. And this particular battle was initiated by the trans activists who pushed sex changes for children — something previously almost unheard of. Do you think I want to be debating this? Either own your position or don’t.
Another quotes me:
Moulton’s view is shared by 69 percent of the public, and a slight 48-47 majority of Democrats. There are very few issues with public support as broad and bipartisan as this.
I’ll bite! Raising taxes on the rich and large corporations: 79%. Federal action to address climate change: 70%. Abortion legal in all or most cases: 70%. Mandatory background checks for all gun sales and transfers: 86%. Gun licensing requirement: 73%. Medicare negotiating drug prices: 75%. (I could go on.)
So there are, in fact, many major issues on which Americans broadly agree. And while the trans issue is real, and as you say, the scale of the issue does not “resolve the essence of it,” when you put it in the context of these other much more impactful issues, the scale turns out to be quite relevant.
Good debater’s point. But 69 percent support in a fiercely contested culture-war topic is pretty impressive. One more dissent:
Yes, I get it. Portions of the Democratic Party are way too woke. The Dems were late to recognize how the border was a huge issue to so many voters. All the talk about how good an economy we had was falling on deaf ears because so many Americans were struggling. Etc.
But here’s the thing. The number of Democrats who are “woke” is a minority — a small minority, in my opinion, compared to the share of the GOP that is truly radical. (A large majority of the GOP House would not certify the last election!) The Dems and Biden may have been late to the party on the border, but they compromised and came up with a solution, working with a very conservative Senator. Then Trump torpedoed the deal because he wanted the issue during the election. In what way is that acceptable?
Yeah, I know you’re a conservative, so your inclination is to criticize the left. I’ve been reading you for over 20 years and usually think you have something valuable to contribute to the conversation, but lately I want to pull out the few remaining hairs I have. Why do Democrats have to be perfect to get elected? They were apparently “tone deaf” on the economy — an economy that is the envy of the West, with lower inflation and unemployment, and higher growth than any other industrialized nation.
We were all wondering what Trump was going to do if he got reelected. With his recent Cabinet appointees, we now know. We may not have an election in two years if he gets his way and “purges” the military. (No, the purge isn’t about a “woke” military — that’s window dressing. It’s about having military commanders loyal to Trump who will do his bidding without question.)
So please stop writing about “wokeness” and the other crap you have been focusing on lately, because maybe the “left” hasn’t gotten it, but the great majority of Dem politicians and voters have. They’ve experienced their “come to Jesus” moment. Time is running out and it’s time to get back in the game!
There will be plenty of time for the Dish to tackle the second Trump administration. But trust me, we will! And as always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
PSB covers Bowie. Sorry not sorry:
In The ‘Stacks
The UK’s crackdown on “non-crime hate incidents” is a big step closer to 1984.
Park MacDougald is incredulous over the ICC’s warrants for Bibi and Gallant.
Greg Sargent finds that a ruling against overtime pay “exposes Trump-MAGA hypocrisy on the working class.”
Will birthright citizenship end under Trump?
Holly Jean Buck details “the rise of green MAGA.”
How much should we be worried over vaccines?
Noah Millman dissents over Damon Linker’s concern over “conservative moral decline” under Trump.
Chris Rufo chronicles how Biden’s equity agenda “was a boon to consulting firms.”
Mark Oppenheimer asks, “Why is the National Book Award going to a publisher of antisemitic books?” (Ta-Nehisi’s dad)
Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme?
“Hollywood sucks at portraying religion,” writes Zaid Jilani, but Heretic is “the rare film that gets it right.”
Drug ads used to be insane.
Bluesky is the new Tumblr — “the perfect place for woke ideas to be metabolized into the culture.”
Meghan McCain recently joined Substack. Welcome!
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you the Friday after next. Happy Thanksgiving!