I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Just a quick reminder that we’ll be Zoom Chatting today at 12:30 PM. If you have any questions you want to ask or topics you want me to address please leave them in the comments sections below. Here’s the link for the call.
In the meantime, I have a new piece up for the New Republic on why President Biden may have found a way out of the Ukraine crisis not by doing something, but rather by doing nothing. The crux of the argument is that by making clear that the US has no intention of militarily defending Ukraine or granting NATO membership to Kyiv, Biden has, at least implicitly, told Russian President Vladimir Putin that he is accepting the idea that Ukraine is part of the Russian sphere of influence in its near abroad.
If Putin’s goal in this crisis was to seek clarity on the West’s ambitions with NATO and the alliance’s views on a Russian sphere of influence in its near abroad, he has his answer: The U.S. and the West will do the bare minimum to stop him.
That might seem overly simplistic because sanctions are not nothing. But when it comes to the question of whether the West will put real skin in the game, it’s clear that—with the possible exception of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—NATO countries are not willing to go as far as the Russians might have feared. If the West isn’t willing to defend Ukraine now, when the potential for Russia invasion and occupation could not be more real, it’s hard to imagine when it might.
Indeed, the very fact that the U.S. is sending troops to Romania and Poland, creating in effect a cordon sanitaire, shows that Biden is far more concerned about spillover from a war in Ukraine than Ukraine itself.
This also sends an explicit message to Kyiv: that the U.S. and Europe will offer rhetorical support but not much more.
Read the whole thing here!
See you at 12:30
Excellent stories!!