Ukraine War, May 26, 2023: Putin’s red lines, Biden’s fear of Putin, and the supply of ATACMS to Ukraine

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Posted By: James Rowles May 26, 2023

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To see a list of previous articles, enter “Ukraine” in the Search Box on the upper right, and you will see a list in chronological order.

Dispatches

1) Daniel Block, “The Russian Red Line Washington Won’t Cross—Yet; Ukraine wants long-range missiles in order to regain Crimea and end the war. The Russian Red Line Washington Won’t Cross—Yet; Ukraine wants long-range missiles in order to regain Crimea and end the war. Why won’t Washington supply them?” The Atlantic, May 26, 2023 (7;00 am ET);

2) Javier G. Cuesta (Moscú), “Ucrania mantiene la tensión en las regiones fronterizas rusas con nuevos ataques de drones y misiles: Zonas cercanas al norte, este y sureste de Ucrania sufren incidentes. La ciudad de Krasnodar registra al menos dos explosiones en zonas residenciales. Moscú intercepta un misil en las inmediaciones de una base aérea en Rostov,” El País, el 26 de mayo 2023 (Actualizado a las 13:12 EDT);

3) Javier G. Cuesta (Moscow), “Ukraine maintains tension in Russian border regions with new drone and missile attacks; Areas close to the north, east and southeast of Ukraine suffer incidents. The city of Krasnodar registers at least two explosions in residential areas. Moscow intercepts a missile in the vicinity of an air base in Rostov,” El País, May 26, 2023 (1:12 pm ET);

4) “La multiplication des attaques ukrainiennes sur le sol de la Russie crispe les Etats-Unis et les alliés de Kiev; Washington a fermement rappelé l’interdiction d’utiliser ses matériels militaires « pour attaquer le sol russe », comme cela a été le cas dans la région de Belgorod cette semaine. Une position réaffirmée par la Grande-Bretagne et la France,” Le Monde,
Par Cédric Pietralunga
Publié hier à 16h56, modifié hier à 21h41
Temps de Lecture 3 mi

5) Cédric Pietralunga, “La multiplication des attaques ukrainiennes sur le sol de la Russie crispe les Etats-Unis et les alliés de Kiev; Washington a fermement rappelé l’interdiction d’utiliser ses matériels militaires « pour attaquer le sol russe », comme cela a été le cas dans la région de Belgorod cette semaine. Une position réaffirmée par la Grande-Bretagne et la France,” Le Monde, le 26 mai 2023 (modifié à 21h41);

Analysis

Sometimes one huge disastrous decision can have disastrous consequences for the future.

When we look at President Joe Biden’s record, his domestic record may look pretty good, but his foreign policy record is punctuated by disastrous decisions which had horrific future consequences.

Sometimes policies designed to deal with those consequences may look pretty good, until we remember the huge disastrous decisions that led to those disastrous consequences.

The big question here is whether the huge decisions which have created disastrous consequences can be forgotten, even if the president now dealing with those disastrous consequences is now doing reasonably well in dealing with those consequences.

Then there are the cases where the leader who mad huge disastrous consequences is not doing reasonably well in dealing with the disastrous consequences, or is not dealing with them at all.

Then there are the cases where a decision, however understandable or reasonable or understandable it might have been at the time it was made, continues to define policies which fail to take into account important developments which now define a situation and decision options very differently than they might have appeared at the time the original decision was made.

Looking at President Biden’s foreign policy record, several huge disastrous decisions stand out. We shall list a few, but the list is far from comprehensive.

The most obvious huge disastrous decision Biden made was his decision in April 1921 to withdraw all Americans and all American and U.S.-funded contractors from Afghanistan, complying with the very poor surrender and withdrawal agreement President Donald Trump made with the Taliban on February 29, 2020. While Biden moved the date from May to august 31, 2021, the consequences of his April 2021 decision to actually implement Trump’s 2921 agreement, that made no difference.

Biden’s April decision had catastrophic consequences in Afghanistan, and its consequences continue today and are horrific.

Biden simply turned his back on 40 million Afghans and consigned them to a bitter fate of living under the Taliban, a group of religious fanatics whose ideology is a strange mixture of the the Deobandi strain of Islam founded in India the 19th century, and Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia. They hold extreme views on the education of women and what women can do outside the house.

See Lauren Frayer, “The Taliban’s Ideology Has Surprising Roots In British-Ruled India,” NPR Morning Edition, September 8, 2021 (5:08 AM ET).

They wear their beards at a certain length because they believe that was the length of the beard which the Prophet Mohamed wore. They wear their pants at a fixed length, above their ankles, because they believe Mohamed wore his pants that way.

Biden’s decision has led to great oppression of women by the Taliban, who ban the from high school and college education and most jobs outside the home.

Other consequences if Bide’s huge disastrous decision include abandoning strategic air bases like Bagram Air Base down tbe road from Kabul.

Whike tge point is debated, it may also be tgat one of the factors tgat led Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine in Februart 2022 was the weakness he saw in Biden as a result of the withdrawal decision and its chaotic execution.

The Trenchant Observer

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About the Author

James Rowles
"The Trenchant Observer" is edited and published by James Rowles (aka "The Observer"), an author and international lawyer who has taught International Law, Human Rights, and Comparative Law at major U.S. universities, including Harvard, Brandeis, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Kansas. Dr. Rowles is a former staff attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States OAS), in Wasington, D.C., , where he was in charge of Brazil, Haiti, Mexico and the United States, and also worked on complaints from and reports on other countries including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. As an international development expert, he has worked on Rule of Law, Human Rights, and Judicial Reform in a number of countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Russian Federation. In the private sector, Dr. Rowles has worked as an international attorney for a leading national law firm and major global companies, on joint ventures and other matters in a number of countries in Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine), throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Japan. The Trenchant Observer blog provides an unfiltered international perspective for news and opinion on current events, in their historical context, drawing on a daily review of leading German, French, Spanish and English newspapers as well as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other American newspapers, and on sources in other countries relevant to issues being analyzed. Dr. Rowles speaks fluent English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and also knows other languages. He holds an S.J.D. or Doctor of Juridical Science in International Law from Harvard University, and a Doctor of Law (J.D.) and a Master of the Science of Law (J.S.M.=LL.M.), from Stanford University. As an undergraduate, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, also from Stanford, where he graduated “With Great Distinction” (summa cum laude) and received the James Birdsall Weter Prize for the best Senior Honors Thesis in History. In addition to having taught as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Dr. Rowles has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs (CFIA). His fellowships include a Stanford Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Development, the Rómulo Gallegos Fellowship in International Human Rights awarded by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and a Harvard MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. Beyond his articles in The Trenchant Observer, he is the author of two books and numerous scholarly articles on subjects of international and comparative law. Currently he is working on a manuscript drawing on some the best articles that have appeared in the blog.

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