Feehery: Biden’s weakness on Ukraine invited Russian invasion

It’s all Joe Biden’s fault. 

OK, maybe not everything. Maybe not the shelling and shooting of innocent Ukrainians. That’s clearly Vladimir Putin’s fault. 

But Biden is not blameless in this whole affair. 

Bob Gates, the former Defense secretary and well-respected foreign affairs specialist, once said of Joe Biden, “I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

The streak continues.

When Biden became president, he immediately set out to make America less energy secure.  He did that by stopping construction of the Keystone pipeline and by making it far more difficult for American energy companies to drill in places that had ample supplies of natural gas and oil.

Biden did that to please the hard-left of this political coalition, a group that lives in a fantasyland where America lives on solar and wind energy alone.

America is not the only country that has suffered from these delusions. The Green Party in Germany worked hard to eliminate nuclear power and coal from its energy portfolio and now the Germans are dependent of Russian energy imports.

Making the United States less energy secure has clearly put us in a vulnerable position. That’s Joe Biden’s fault. 

Biden also took two steps to weaken America’s military. First, he appointed Lloyd Austin as Defense secretary, and he immediately embarked on a plan to purge Donald Trump supporters from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. 

Second, he imposed a vaccine mandate that caused even more strife within the military’s ranks, forcing thousands of them to take early retirement. 

It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to train many of the Air Force pilots who quit rather than take the jab. Biden’s efforts weakened the military and military readiness. This did not go unnoticed among our enemies.

Biden is no rookie when it comes to getting involved in Ukrainian politics. I am sure Hunter briefed his dad every time he cashed a check from his service on the board of Burisma, one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine.

Biden famously told the Ukrainian government that if it didn’t fire a prosecutor who was starting to investigate the head of Burisma for corruption that he would withhold a billion-dollar aid package. The prosecutor was fired hours later. 

I am sure there was no connection between Hunter and the fired prosecutor. Nothing to see here. 

When Donald Trump told the new and current president of Ukraine that he wanted a probe of Biden’s involvement in the region, he was impeached for his efforts.

If all of this makes your head spin even just a little, don’t worry. You aren’t alone.

When it became clear that Putin was contemplating an invasion of the Ukraine, Biden misplayed all of his cards. 

Instead of calling Putin’s bluff and sending as much military assistance to Ukraine as quickly as possible, Biden basically invited the Russian dictator to take the northeast portion of the country for his own.

And then Biden raised the stakes while revealing that he wasn’t going to be playing any of his trump cards. He revealed intelligence which showed that Putin was planning to invade and then said to the world that we weren’t going to put any American troops on the ground. 

When Putin hinted that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to achieve his goals, Biden said that we weren’t going to use ours, which seems to me to defeat the purpose of having those weapons in the first place. If we refuse to use them, why do we have them?  

Biden wants to get credit for mobilizing the international coalition against Putin’s aggression, but he doesn’t deserve any of that credit. He was pushed to be more aggressive on sanctions by the European Union, which has performed admirably and aggressively to counter Russia. 

Most Ukrainians don’t look at Joe Biden and see a hero. Instead they see a guy whose weakness and misplays have brought about an unthinkable and tragic invasion into their country and who is doing the bare minimum to help them in their time of need. 

Joe Biden doesn’t deserve all the blame. Just most of it.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).