We knew that as the war in Ukraine ramped up, President Biden’s critics — particularly Republican politicians — would oppose whatever actions he took, either by accusing him of doing too much or not enough.
Biden and his administration have chosen a cautious approach to aiding Ukraine; so his opponents insist he should do more.
We understand how tempting it is to say the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine keep Russian invaders at bay. Especially after Russia has callously bombed residential areas, humanitarian corridors and even a maternity hospital. Such inhumane and cruel actions should be met with righteous anger — but it does not mean that America should break its careful military neutrality.
Every country in the West is playing a game of what-if, with heads of state and advisors gathered around maps and intel, spinning out a million possible permutations of cause and effect, with every decision weighted against the worst-case scenario: Global thermonuclear war. (Maybe someone could convince Putin to settle this with a nice game of chess, instead.)
How many weapons can NATO countries provide to Ukraine before Putin decides it’s too many and attacks bordering nations? If Russian forces conquer their current target (and even if they don’t), will they move on to other former Soviet countries? How much can the West do to prop up Ukrainian and Eastern European resistance before it all devolves into World War III?
Of all the Western countries Putin so despises, he has his eye trained most carefully on the U.S., and he will react strongly to even the most subtle hint that America plans to do more than impose economic sanctions and send some weaponry to Ukraine.
Which means, for now at least, the Biden administration and the Pentagon made the right decision to not allow Polish fighter jets to pass through a U.S. base in Germany. Mind you, Poland shares over 300 miles of border with Ukraine. But the plan was to send Polish MiG-29 (Russian-made, Soviet-era) fighter jets to the U.S. Air Force’s Ramstein Air Base, then have the planes flown through contested airspace into Ukraine.
It seems that the U.S. had been having quiet conversations with Poland about the logistics of getting fighter jets to Ukraine without provoking Russia, but Poland then made an unexpected public announcement last week essentially saying, “We’re ready to hand these jets off to you. You can figure out what to do from there.” And the Pentagon, quite reasonably, said no.
Putin has made it incredibly clear that declaring the air over Ukraine a “no-fly” zone would be considered a military act of war by NATO. (A no-fly zone, as reported by The Guardian, “is a prohibition on all or certain types of aircraft flying through a designated airspace, over a country or region.” Enforcing a no-fly zone involves having multiple parties able and willing to shoot down offending aircraft.) Flying NATO planes, from a NATO base, through Ukrainian air — even if they are being flown by Ukrainian pilots — comes uncomfortably close to Putin’s moving line of what the autocrat may consider escalation. One wrong move by any Western nation, and Putin will be ready to take his “special military operation” into NATO lands.
Every decision Biden and his administration make is done with one goal in mind: Preventing the U.S. from joining — or worse, starting — World War III. Even Biden’s most vocal critics should support decisions made to that end.
