Biden is something of a Ukraine expert, and now a negotiator with expert knowledge of Putin, having been deeply involved with both for many years.
When serving as Obama’s vice president, he made numerous trips to Ukraine at the time it was breaking free of Russian domination under a pro-Moscow lackey ruler, who was overthrown by a popular uprising in 2014, which was followed by Russia’s forcible seizure of Crimea and then its armed subversion in Ukraine’s Donbas region bordering Russia, which included Russian forces shooting down a Malaysian Airlines civilian airliner.
“That year, Obama’s team badly misjudged the ferocity of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was naive about resetting relations with Russia, and it didn’t anticipate the pernicious tactics Russia would pursue against Ukraine and, ultimately, the United States,” Vox says (here). “Those mistakes from eight years ago are informing the White House’s response now.
In short, Biden saw those mistakes happen, and learned from them. Forced to be a realistic, his approach is different from Obama’s.
“The Biden team learned that Putin will advance his goals with ‘asymmetric’ tactics, or military and non-military approaches that operate within a gray zone, to trip up the United States,” Vox says. For example, “Russia leaked a phone call to embarrass US diplomats, spread fake news, and sowed disinformation, which culminated in unprecedented attacks on the 2016 election in the US.”
In 2018, Biden wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs titled, “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin” (read it here). Whether right or wrong, he at least thought about it, and made efforts to formulate a coherent response for the next time.
That next time is now here. And Biden’s plan is, “the US must ‘impose meaningful costs on Russia when they discover evidence of its misdeeds’ [but] he also said that, despite Russia’s belligerent tactics, ‘Washington needs to keep talking to Moscow,’ to avoid unintended escalations of conflict.” His response to the current Ukraine crisis follows that blueprint.
Biden is very involved in that response. He personally runs the meetings, and himself talks with European leaders and also Putin, not delegating these discussions to underlings. The author of the Vox article writes, “Several former ambassadors to Europe told me that they were impressed by how quickly the Biden administration has employed old-fashioned diplomacy. ‘They have clearly inspired a purposeful, thorough, robust engagement with allies around this crisis that has already paid dividends,’ said Dan Baer, … who is at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.” A former Obama White House aide adds, “They are leaning into diplomacy big time, and they’re confronting the prospect that diplomacy might fail.”
He’s also arming the Ukrainians, sending them “free weapons,” because “he cares about Ukrainian democracy” having personally witnessed their struggles to attain it back in 2014. Obama was reluctant to do that, “for fear of agitating Russia,” but Biden isn’t and now “many Obama-era officials who took the hawkish position in advocating for sending weapons to Ukraine are in positions of power.” Biden himself believes “helping Ukraine in its defense … is critical to checking further aggression down the road.” Putin may have thought “the Obama holdovers on President Biden’s team would be reluctant … last time, but if so, he “miscalculated.”
That doesn’t mean Putin won’t invade Ukraine, if that’s his intention. If so, Biden can’t prevent it, short of committing American combat troops and potentially risking nuclear war — two things he clearly won’t do. But he’s raising the costs to Putin if he does — and offering him a peaceful way to resolve this crisis, if he wants it. And that’s an American president at the top of his game. Probably no U.S. leader could do more, or do it better.