Reportedly... Allegedly... Privately... In some form or fashion, former United States President Barack Obama had warned that U.S. President Joe Biden could be dangerous to himself and to the Obama administration. Yet, the residual glow of that era was Biden's main asset during his presidential campaign, and one that he frequently invokes today. But political anecdotes have it that Obama repeatedly tried to prevent Biden’s running for president, saying that Biden would “embarrass himself.”
Biden remaining content with embarrassing only himself would be more than welcome; but in the first international crisis his administration has faced, during which he was supposed to act as the leader of the so-called free world, he dropped the ball, thus allowing Russia's President Vladimir Putin to take on the role of the Russian Bear, bringing death and destruction to Ukraine. We don’t yet know the exact dimension of destitution the Ukraine war will bring on the Ukrainian and Russian people.
What can one say in the middle of this tormenting news flow, in this delusional-and-foggy environment?
If the U.S. had someone else other than Biden and his cohorts at the helm, anxiously itching to remap the world left, right and center, then he or she would have surely managed the Minsk process properly and everybody would be around a conference table instead of bunkers and tanks. Granted, Ukraine is a unitary state, and separatist attempts in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions and the Russians’ annexation of Crimea cannot be accepted; but the best (and most peaceful) way to state and assert that case would be to have the rebels who control the Donbass region, Russia and a couple of friendly ears and lips around a table. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should know this better than anyone else because he grew up in a Russian-speaking region in southeastern Ukraine. No one should try to teach Ukrainians how to set up the administrative divisions in their countries, but the best way to quell a separatist fire in a region, especially when the Russian Bear tries to dismember your country, is not to defy and challenge it boldly in order to intimidate. “Oh, but the mighty United States and the European Union and the valiant Boris Johnson of the U.K., with boiling Turkish blood in his veins, are behind us! We don’t care about what Putin says or does.” Under normal conditions, you could’ve said, Mr. Zelenskyy, you should know better when Putin denies the existence of a nation that is as old as his own.
Perhaps, Putin’s narrative about NATO no longer acting as a defensive organization, turning into an aggressive military alliance (as proven by its attacks on Serbia during the Kosovo war and on Libya's late toppled leader Moammar Gadhafi during the civil war in his country) fooled globalist, Western-oriented, pro-NATO and pro-EU groups around him. They must have taken those words literally, thinking that NATO would come to their assistance. They should know better: Turkey has been a dues-paying member of NATO since its inception, but this fact meant nothing when PKK terrorists started waging trench warfare on the Syrian border regions with the help of Syria’s regime leader Bashar Assad. Quite the contrary, the U.S. has been aiding and abetting the extensions of the PKK under the guise of fighting Daesh.
Mr. Zelenskyy himself has no political experience other than playing the role of the president of Ukraine; his political party, created by the employees of his TV production company, tried to heal the wounds opened by the 2014 Revolution of Dignity (also known as the Euromaidan protests) that culminated in the ousting of elected president Viktor Yanukovych and the overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Not only his inexperience, but also the “revolutionaries” flooding his party made the healing process fruitless.
He could have approached the suspicious and restless Putin to overcome his “siege syndrome” mentality. The rapid enlargement of NATO, accepting in 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, in 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, in 2009 Albania and Croatia, in 2017 Montenegro and in 2020 North Macedonia, and now towing Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine into the organization, spooked Russia, in general, and Putin, in particular. The narrative that “Biden doesn't do military interventionism” was not going to explain away the existence of that “NATO Crescent” now encircling the Russian Federation. The possibility of Ukraine’s and Georgia’s NATO membership in particular has been viewed as “daggers going into the heart of Russia.” Putin, like everyone else, saw that Biden has been cramming the White House with former U.S. President George W. Bush-administration remnants of the “new world order.” Those who invented the rallying cry for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, that “you are either with us or against us,” were now spitting in Putin’s face with their insistence on “the open-door policy of NATO.”
I hope Obama’s ears are burning because he was right; the Ukrainians underestimated Joe's ability to botch things up. Once Putin saw that Ukraine would not be an easy win for Russia, and Ukraine understood that someone who does not accept the existence of a nation and a country could actually try to make his theory a reality, both sides needed someone who considered them both friends and could speak to them, someone who knew NATO from inside yet would not repeat its messages by rote. In short, they needed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
With the help of Erdoğan, Zelenskyy and Putin would be shown the way to the table where they could achieve a peaceful solution. As the Yiddish saying goes, “a bad peace is better than a good war.” In fact, there is such a thing as a good war.
