That conclusion is the result of a study by a Yale professor in business management (c.v. here) who advises CEOs and U.S. presidents. He’s not a neutral party; he encouraged companies to leave Russia after it invaded Ukraine.
But the chief organizer and proponent of sanctions against Putin’s regime has been President Biden, who rallied and unified the western allies. While the media, political pundits, and voters may be focused on the domestic economy going into Biden’s first (and perhaps only) midterm elections, it’s obvious Biden’s most important presidential legacy will be his response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.
Biden’s intelligent policy, based on decades of prior foreign policy experience, has been to keep the U.S. out of direct involvement in the war while giving Ukraine enough diplomatic and material support to stop Putin in Ukraine.
That’s so important because we know Putin didn’t intend to stop with Ukraine. You don’t have to speculate or take Biden’s word for it. In Putin’s own words, he intended to recolonize the former Soviet captive countries of eastern Europe. Those countries include, among others, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. And he intended to do it by military force.
But Russia’s conventional military forces are weak, as is becoming glaringly obvious from its struggles in Ukraine. If Putin started World War 3, he faced losing unless he resorted to nuclear weapons. And Putin is a dictator who can’t afford to lose a world war.
To any thinking person, it’s obvious this is a battle more safely fought in Ukraine than the countries of eastern European, most of which are now NATO members that western European has treaty obligations to defend, and almost certainly would defend, bringing NATO and Russia into direct armed conflict. No one knows what the odds are that such a war would go nuclear, and perhaps very quickly, but no sane person would want to find out. We do know Putin has no moral compunctions about bombing apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, or murdering civilians; which tells us he has no moral restraint against waging nuclear war.
Because of this, it’s crucial that Putin’s military aggression remain confined to Ukraine. The fact his forces are bogged down in the far eastern reaches of Ukraine is better still. That wouldn’t be possible without U.S. weaponry and the unified NATO response orchestrated by Biden and dependent on his diplomatic skills. Trump doesn’t have these skills, and given his and the GOP’s isolationist tendencies, containing this war wouldn’t have happened under a Trump second term.
The key factor that allows the U.S. and NATO to stop Putin in Ukraine without fighting him with our military forces is the sanctions. The Yale study confirms they’re “doing their job” of “decimating the Russian economy.” The study concluded Russian imports have “largely collapsed,” creating shortages and “denying the country crucial parts and technologies.”
“Looking ahead, there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure,” the study paper says. Well, yes, there is a path out: Stop their aggression against Ukraine. And that should be the only option Russia has, because no other outcome is acceptable. (I say “Russia” instead of “Putin” because he’ll never accept defeat in Ukraine, and that outcome is possible only if other parties in Russia decide they’ve had enough of his leadership and replace him.)
But the key phrase here is “as long as.” It’s crucial that the western effort not falter. The U.S. and NATO must keep up the pressure by maintaining the sanctions and supplying the weapons and other support that Ukraine needs to survive the Russian onslaught. Biden isn’t necessarily indispensable to that effort; a successor could carry on with what he started. But it has to be the right successor, someone who understands that foreign policy is more important than domestic politics right now, and preventing Europe from incubating a third world war matters far more to Americans’ wellbeing than waging domestic culture warfare.
That successor certainly wouldn’t be Trump, nor any Republican obsessed with the domestic culture war, or dependent on it for votes.
Biden perhaps hasn’t been as successful at focusing the American public’s attention on Ukraine as the peril of the situation calls for. I’m not sure he could do more in that regard; he can’t control media narratives, which are mostly focused on domestic politics and issues. (Ukraine hasn’t disappeared from the news, but you don’t hear as much about it now.)
The issue is simple: Ukraine is a buffer between a newly aggressive Russia and the rest of Europe. That buffer had better hold, because if it doesn’t, we’re looking at the possibility of World War 3. It won’t hold by itself, and America’s leadership and participation in efforts to bolster Ukraine is vital; the Europeans can’t do this without our help. This isn’t a question of Biden deserving or getting credit for his impressively good leadership on the most important foreign policy challenge of our times. What matters is that the decisions made are the right ones.
Defeating Putin in Ukraine will be a matter of wearing down his forces on the battlefield, and undermining Russia’s ability and will to keep fighting on its home front. That’s the job of the sanctions, given that attacking military targets in Russia or bombing its cities isn’t feasible. What the allies did to Germany in World War 2, today’s democracies must accomplish against Russia with economic pressures.
The study’s conclusion that those pressures are effective is reassuring; but more important, the study results underscore the need to continue what we’re doing. America’s voters may need a better understanding than they have now that while politicians come and go, either Biden or whoever succeeds him must stay on the policy course toward Ukraine he’s laid out. That’s something we as informed citizens should demand of whoever comes next in our national leadership.