recent times. i think, for putin, the calculation was maybe a little bit of, you know, leftover intoxication with his boy donald trump, who was his be all and end all, and would manipulate the american political system in such a way that gave putin cover and gave putin michael steele, let s also go back to the previous president, barack obama. yup. in 2014, the ukraiians couldn t even get defensive weapons. exactly. the message was sent to putin, go in. there are not going to be any consequences. i think he s made the mistake that a lot of the people that were in the obama administration are now in the biden administration, and he made the miscalculation that they were going to act in the same way. my goodness, they have surprised him. i absolutely agree. that s why i say you re not by yourself in that realization. i think for putin, of everybody, he s realized that he may have been he may have out-foxed himself in the kinds of moves
and put together a strong response. joe biden has a lot of consequences that he can choose from. here are two of those notable op-eds in the wall street journal this morning about biden and his foreign policy first. jenkins says biden is the right man for his times. by the way, that s a screaming headline, that that came from holman. president biden has a few flaws, but he was a krield of the child of the cold war. he has discombobulated vladimir putin by his un-obama response, including tensions over ukraine. on monday, whipping a german chancellor into line. by sending military supplies to ukraine. preparing sanctions. the biden administration has orchestrated a set of signals that even mr. putin can t misinterpret. whatever the russian leader is thinking, he hoped to find the u.s. and its allies weak and
he s been making. now, again, you know, there s still the troop buildup. there s the possibility of incursion. i think it is less likely now than it was three, four months ago. because i think putin was looking for a signal from the white house that he didn t get. a signal that he got from obama eight or nine years ago. i think that s, right, now, his biggest mistake. he is playing old politics. biden is saying, okay, you want to do cold war? let s do cold war. willie, sorry, just one other point i want to bring in really quickly. the terrible miscalculation that the russians have made is they looked at the move in afghanistan as a sign of weakness by biden. right. i oppose the move in afghanistan, but i knew when he was running this summer he was going to make that move because he s made no secret that he s
hated karzai since 2009. he s hated the afghanistan government since 2009. he thought they were hucksters. he thought they were stealing our money. he thought they were corrupt. he thought americans needed to get the hell out of there. he told barack obama that in 2009 and in 2010. so the russians see this as a sign of weakness. no. this was afghanistan was the die was cast on that for biden 12 years ago. if you re looking at that going, oh, he s weak,trying to generalize that, it is another terrible miscalculation russia made. shouldn t have been surprised by it. joe biden campaigned on it during the 2020 campaign. obviously, the way it went down was another matter entirely, losing 13 service members in the hasty evacuation. the other wall street journal op-ed is by william galston. president biden is off to a good start. in the asian-pacific region, administration officials have