Biden should channel Trump and talk to Putin

 

Democrats are using revelations of candidate Trump’s talks with Russian President Putin to bash him as a ‘Putin Puppet.’ Bob Woodward’s new book ‘War’, being published this week, claims there have been at least 7 such talks since Trump left the White House, including this year.

President Biden, unlike Trump, has spoken not a word with Putin for all 45 months of his presidency. That willful silence by Biden puts us all at greater risk of the US stumbling into nuclear war with Russia over the conventional war in Ukraine.

 

Had Biden picked up the phone to discuss Putin’s concerns over US sponsored NATO membership in 2021, war in Ukraine could have been easily avoided. Over half a million Ukrainian soldiers would be alive. Millions would not have been forced to flee to other countries or locales within Ukraine. The 20% of eastern Ukraine now forever lost to Russia would still be under Ukrainian sovereignty. Ukraine’s economy would not be on life support kept alive by NATO’s endless billions.

 

Biden was simply following US policy going back to the George W. Bush administration to keep Russia out of the Western European political economy by phantacizing Russia as a threat, not an economic partner. The linchpin for such isolation was NATO membership for Ukraine allowing a NATO military buildup on their Ukrainian border.

 

Isolating Russia was so important to the US that they supported a 2014 coup against the Russian leaning Ukrainian president because he was about to cooperate economically with Russia. That coup demonstrated America’s total hypocrisy championing democracy. It led the Russian leaning Ukrainians in Donbas to seek separation from the Kiev ultranationalists seeking to snuff out their Russian culture.

 

America’s response was not to support an end to Kyiv’s oppression but to fund it with hundreds of millions in US weapons. Putin’s Russia spent 7 years using diplomacy to stop Kyiv’s repression and keep Ukraine out of NATO. In November, 2021, Putin made his last overture to Biden to negotiate Russia’s NATO and Eastern Ukrainian separatists concerns. Instead of doing the sensible, diplomatic step of free and open negotiation, Biden, thru his emissaries, essentially told Putin to ‘Go to Hell.’

 

Instead Putin went to war, which has now largely destroyed Ukraine as a functioning country, spelling the end of US political dominance in Europe. Senseless US action provoking this unfolding catastrophe is possibly the worst diplomatic blunder in US history.

 

NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. What it should stand for is No Action Talk Only.