Politics, even in a crisis
As Russian troops invaded Ukraine last week in a naked act of aggression, the condemnation of the president began. But not the president one would have thought.
It was President Joe Biden who was the target of blame for so many on the American right, not Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man who actually planned and executed this outrageous assault on Ukraine and humanity’s hope of peaceful coexistence.
It’s apparent that Russia needs to be isolated from the community of nations, and Mr. Putin made an international pariah for this attack on another country’s people and sovereignty.
Yet even as every other living U.S. president condemned the invasion, and many Russians took to the streets to criticize Mr. Putin’s actions, former president Donald Trump heaped praise on him, calling him “pretty smart,” “savvy” and a “genius,” as if this extraordinary crisis were nothing more than a business transaction involving a wily negotiator. Criticizing the invasion in passive, impersonal terms — “a terrible thing,” “a sad thing ” — he avoided attacking Mr. Putin, saying it’s Mr. Biden’s fault for failing to stop him. This, from the man who couldn’t even proin vide military aid to Ukraine without turning it into an act of political extortion and an impeachable offense.
And for New York’s U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, the priority was not to condemn Mr. Putin, but to bitterly attack Mr. Biden in a political screed issued not by her campaign, but from her congressional office. It was only after she was done savaging Mr. Biden that she devoted half as many words to Mr. Putin. She ignored, of course, Mr. Trump’s aid and comfort to the Russian despot, such as siding with him against the U.S.’s own intelligence community when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
One might have expected a pause in such petty political sniping while the world witnesses a confrontation of uncertain human, military, and economic consequences. One would think it unthinkable to praise an aggressor who has raised the possibility of this escalating into a nuclear conflict, as Mr. Putin did when he warned that “Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states.” His conjuring the specter of nuclear conflict terrorizes not just the people of Ukraine, but the world.
But there is no such pause. There are political points to be scored, especially a midterm election year, and Mr. Trump and Ms. Stefanik are not ones to waste the opportunity — however crass, however dangerous. Yes, dangerous, to have such leading figures in one of the nation’s two major political parties signal to Mr. Putin that America is as fractured as he could hope it to be and unable to unify around a cause even in this grave a crisis.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Stefanik are hardly alone. Blaming Mr. Biden rather than Mr. Putin almost immediately became a talking point across the Republican political spectrum and the ecosystem of right-wing media. This knee-jerk divisiveness is what our national discourse has devolved to.
How far we’ve come since June 1948, when Congress passed the Vandenberg Resolution that helped pave the way for the North Atlantic Treaty, a mutual defense agreement among Western nations against Soviet imperialism. The resolution was negotiated — in an election year — between the Democratic Truman administration and Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenburg, head of the Armed Services Committee and a presidential hopeful. It was Mr. Vandenburg who famously declared, “Politics stops at the water's edge.”
But that was another time, when those who would lead America put our shared interests above their own.