The U.S. and Russia are in intense conflict over Ukraine. Russia continues to build up forces along the border, and many fear they'll invade the country. The Biden administration is hoping to resolve things diplomatically, but they've also put some U.S. troops on alert and ordered families of diplomats to leave Ukraine's capital. Biden is also threatening major sanctions. There will be enormous consequences if he were to go in and invade, as he could, the entire country, or a lot less than that as well, for Russia, not only in terms of...
economic consequences and political consequences, but enormous consequences worldwide. Whatever happens next, Biden faces no easy options to avert this conflict, and Democrats worry that no matter how he handles this, he could end up looking weak. So what's likely to happen with this intensifying conflict? How is Biden's approach with Ukraine different than past presidents? And really, why does Ukraine seem to come up over and over again in modern American politics? This is Can He Do That, a podcast that explores the powers and limitations of American government in a time of deep division. I'm Alison Michaels. First, a brief history on the ways Ukraine has played an outsized role in American politics during the past few administrations.
In 2014, during the Obama administration, Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, a region of Ukraine. Pressure from Russia is growing. Large groups of pro-Russia troops surrounding Ukrainian bases ordering their forces off of them so they can occupy them. More unidentified pro-Russia armed militias controlling the streets of Crimea's capital. Cheering crowds greeting him, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first visit since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. We recognize the deep and complex history between Russia and Ukraine.
But we cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated. If that happens without consequences in Ukraine, it could happen to any nation gathered here today. And later, during the Trump administration, the former president had a call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, a call that Trump described as perfect, but that ultimately led to his first impeachment. Impeachment for that? When you have a wonderful meeting or you have a wonderful phone conversation? I think you should ask. We actually, you know, that was the second conversation. I think you should ask for the first conversation also. I can't believe they haven't. Although I heard there's a rumor out they want the first conversation.
It was beautiful. It was just a perfect conversation. Biden was a candidate back then, and the Trump team tried to paint his son Hunter's dealings with a Ukrainian energy company called Larisma as unethical. We've just learned through explosive documents published by a very fine newspaper, the New York Post, that Joe Biden has been blatantly lying about his involvement in his son's corrupt business dealing. Fast forward to today, and Ukraine has come up again as the threat of invasion from Russia looms.
That impending threat presents a political challenge for Biden, which we'll dive into more later in the show. But the impact that Biden's immediate decisions could have on global security are more dire. What do the U.S. and its allies actually hope happens next? And how did we get here to begin with?
So you have a situation where there's been an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014. You'll remember that in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. And so you have a situation where the Ukrainian government does not control the whole of the country. They've been living with that since 2014, and there's been an on-and-off peace process between Ukraine and Russia brokered by some of the European countries that has not.
reached any sort of definitive resolution. And now you have a situation where Putin has massed over 100,000 troops inside of Russia, close to Ukraine, and now in Belarus. And the idea is that he could be preparing for an invasion of Ukraine to go further inside of the country to bring Russian troops actually into the areas where the separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces and potentially to go to the capital, Kiev, and install a pro-Russian government there. And Putin has denied this. He said he has no intention of invading Ukraine. Do we have any insight into whether or not we should be skeptical of those words?
It's interesting because I was traveling with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week when he visited Kyiv. And really, there are these two dueling narratives that you have from Russia and the West. The West is accusing Russia of massing these forces and preparing for a potential invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, the Russian government is saying that it's the West, Ukraine and NATO countries that are encroaching on Russia, bringing forces to its borders and threatening its security. And so far, we haven't seen much of a convergence in those narratives. And I think the question is, can this diplomacy that the Biden administration is trying to spearhead together with the NATO countries, can it somehow get those two different worldviews to meet and find a way that they...
can compromise, potentially agree on some confidence building measures and ratchet the tensions down. So how does Biden's approach to Russia and Ukraine differ from what we've seen from Trump and Obama from the past two presidents? In comparison to President Trump, he clearly has a very different message on Russia. Trump was ready to side with Russia in regards to election interference and a number of different issues in a way that was pretty shocking, I think, even to most intelligence officials and career diplomats. We don't see anything like that, obviously. Biden has been pretty harsh in terms of his rhetoric about Putin and the way that he sees Russia's behavior on the world stage. At the same time, it's not a radically different policy that we've seen from the...
Obama administration, to the Trump administration, to the Biden administration. I think there has been a hope in each of those that they can use carrots and sticks to try to get Russia to be a more productive member of the global community, to try to prevent them from doing things like supporting autocrats in Libya or conducting chemical weapons attacks. But as Putin has appeared to become more emboldened and flagrant in what he's doing at home and abroad, I think that the ability or the confidence that actually can happen has been freed. And so while in 2014, the Obama administration shows to take a sort of gradual approach in inflicting economic punishment on Russia after the annexation of Crimea, what the Biden administration administration is saying, we're going to start with the big guns and there's not going to be any sort of incremental increase of pressure. We're just going to go for DEFCON 1 right away. So, you know, economic pressure, major economic consequences. But again, as I said before, there's no discussion of sending American troops to Ukraine. There is no appetite for war. I think the ball is really in Putin's court right now. The question is, how much does he care about potentially being cut off from the global financial system? How much does he care about these sector-wide sanctions, export controls that could be imposed on Russia? And will he just go for it anyway?
Meanwhile, though, Trump has recently said that what's happening now between Russia and Ukraine would never have happened during his administration. Is there a sense of truth in that? Like, how did his approach differ in the region? You know, Ukraine has been an object of desire in Moscow for a long time now. And Putin thought this was a good moment for him. Perhaps he felt emboldened by what happened following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer and from the political challenges and the economic challenges here in the United States. But you could also hypothesize that he might have seen a similar moment if Trump had been reelected because a lot of those conditions would be the same.
On that campaign trail, Biden really pitched himself as this calm and seasoned alternative to Trump. He branded himself as this expert in foreign policy who'd bring the decades of his experience to the White House and really bring stability to the larger world. Is that promise being tested now? Yeah, I mean, obviously a conflict in Ukraine, especially one that the administration can't control and doesn't have as direct a stake in, would be bad for Biden, to put it mildly, coming on the heels of the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal. One of the things that...
Biden ran on was competence. And that really undermines that narrative. The overall message is war in Ukraine, undermining of the Western security architecture that has governed the way we think about the transatlantic environment for the last 70 years, weakening of America's ability to deter illegal action like this would be potentially very damaging for global security. We'll be back after the break with a look at Biden's difficult political dilemma as he decides his next moves with Russia. When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. Trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.
While Biden contends with global security issues, he's also dealing with what this crisis could mean for his presidency. The White House insists that domestic politics have not been a factor in how they've approached Ukraine, but the politics are challenging nonetheless. In the last few weeks, the president has seen nearly his entire agenda stonewalled in Congress by two senators within his own party. Meanwhile, the administration has been hit with criticism from the left and the right over issues like inflation and the persistent threat of COVID-19. All of this has led to some worry that Biden is in the midst of a crisis of leadership, and he might be losing the faith of the American public.
So the overall perception of Biden's leadership, just looking at public opinion polls, and these are similar to what the White House and Democrats are seeing in private polls, is that it's not good. That's Ashley Parker, White House bureau chief for The Washington Post. His approval rating, sort of the average, is in the low 40s and a growing sense among voters, even some voters who voted for him and liked him, that he sort of didn't quite overtly say this, but in many ways people chose him because he was supposed to be the anti-Trump, right? His own campaign ads presented him as strong, stable, steady leadership and sort of competent government. And there has been a sense because of the coronavirus pandemic, of course, because of inflation, because of the economy tied to the pandemic, because of supply chain issues, and because of the very messy withdrawal from Afghanistan last year that has eroded that image that Biden was going to be the president where you didn't need to worry about the news. Is there a consensus then among Democrats about...
how Biden should handle this, about what his next step should be? I mean, what's interesting is there's a general, and again, there's certain notable exceptions, but there's a general consensus on Capitol Hill among- Democratic and Republican lawmakers and in the foreign policy establishment that faced with just about no easy choices, the administration is doing a fairly good job. We don't want to send troops into Ukraine directly. We don't want to cede to Russia's demand that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO and that NATO not expand eastward. Just about everyone wants de-escalation and diplomacy before full-scale invasion and more military measures. But because Donald Trump so scrambled the politics with his relationship with former President Vladimir Putin, the domestic politics are a little scrambled as well. So there should be this widespread consensus.
But for four years under former President Trump, Democrats, including Biden, hammered him, not incorrectly, for being soft on Putin and for frequently speaking favorably about the autocrat and for siding with Russia over the assessment of his own intelligence agencies. It's worth noting that on a certain level, while Trump himself was sort of admiring of Putin, a lot of people in his administration were actually quite hawkish and tough on Russia. But because of that, Republicans, especially former President Trump, now relish this idea that Biden might be the one who ends up being soft on Putin or at least appearing soft on Putin, which is something Biden and Democrats accused Trump of for four years. The fact is that I've gone head to head with Putin and made it clear to him we're not gonna take any of his stuff. He's Putin's puppy. He still refuses to even say anything to Putin about the bounty on the heads of American soldiers. So this moment really matters for him politically. It has a lot of implications depending on what happens next.
Yeah, absolutely. From a political point of view, Republicans were quite excited because if anything goes wrong with a crisis in Ukraine, there's a very good chance that it can just be another thing they add to the laundry list of why Biden is doing a bad job, why he's not up for the task. And even in talking to Democrats and people who generally approve of his handling of the crisis so far, there's a sense that there's very political upside for him. As one Democratic pollster put it to me, if he somehow manages to get Russia to deescalate, there's not going to be ticker tape parades for him in the streets of America. But if Russia invades, there's going to be all this second guessing of how could the Biden administration have handled it differently? What did they do wrong? And why is Biden so weak that he wasn't?
unable to stand up to Putin. You mentioned the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the bad fallout from that. How has that influenced and shaped the way the Biden administration is approaching this moment? The Biden administration maintains that in no way our domestic political considerations or the upcoming midterms in any way affecting the decisions they're making on national security and foreign policy. But in terms of just the landscape he faces and the challenges, there is, again, this perception of weakness, and that is fueled by the Afghanistan withdrawal, right? If this goes south or something unprecedented happens or Putin invades, this would sort of be the second very high-profile geopolitical conflagration that will have happened on Biden's watch and not had the outcome that many Americans hoped for. And I should amend that by saying Afghanistan was actually the outcome Americans hoped for in the sense that most Americans wanted our truth.
troops home, but they did not like the way it happened, right? They did not like the chaotic images of Kabul being overrun. They did not like the fact that the administration didn't seem to anticipate how quickly the Taliban would take over the country. They certainly did not like the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport gates that killed 13 U.S. service members. So that's what they didn't like about Afghanistan. So now we're at this moment where Biden has to make some decisions about what happens next. You talked to a lot of people in the White House to sort of figure out where their heads are at. What do you anticipate are the next steps here, what do you see happening?
The truth is it's a hard question for me to answer because right now it's a hard question for the Biden administration to answer because things are incredibly fluid. Putin hasn't spoken publicly about this or about his intentions since before Christmas. It's notable that Biden, you talked about how he really wants to get out in the country and travel and hit the road. And this week he has very little on his public schedule. And part of that is deliberate because they wanted to make sure to be able to stay loose and flexible to respond to what is a rapidly unfolding and somewhat argued deteriorating situation in Ukraine. All right, Ashley, last question for you. What's at stake here for Biden?
A lot is at stake for Biden here. This is another headache he doesn't want to have to deal with. Biden himself said if Putin were to invade Russia, it would be the most significant thing since World War II and a potentially massive land war. So those aren't just stakes for Biden. Those are stakes for the entire world. All right, Ashley, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, guys.
Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required. Uncle Bob can fix just about anything around the house, at least according to him. But when it comes to natural gas appliances, they should always be inspected by a qualified professional. Learn more at embridgegas.com slash safety.