Biden’s National Security Advisor is Setting Up a Global Catastrophe
On May 30, U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters that America would not supply Ukraine with weapons that might be used to strike targets in Russia.
This would be catastrophic because Ukraine must have long range weapons, including rocket artillery such as the truck mounted HiMARS, tracked-vehicle MLRS mobile rocket artillery systems, as well as fighter aircraft if it is to repel Russia’s ongoing genocidal invasion.
It’s possible that the HiMARS and MLRS will still be sent, but only with medium range (up to 70 km) M31 rocket ammunition. These are useful and necessary for battlefield combat. But the essential long range ATACM rockets and F16 fighters that Ukraine desperately needs will be denied.
If Ukraine had ATACMs, which can deliver a 500 lb. conventional warhead on targets as far away as 300 kilometers, its forces could smash up all Russian helicopter and fighter aircraft bases within effective operational range of Ukraine (Russians do not use aerial refueling). ‘
Ukraine’s army would also be able to strike the port city of Sevastopol, destroying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea fleet. This is essential if Putin’s grain blockade, which is wrecking Ukraine’s economy and threatening the world’s poorest with starvation, is to be broken.
If supplied with fighter aircraft, Ukraine could intercept the bombers and cruise missiles Russia is using to terrorize Ukraine’s cities; provide its troops with air cover and close air support; respond quickly to surprise attacks anywhere across its long border; and strike selected critical targets out at sea or deep into Russia. It would also be able to deter Russian war crimes because it would have the capacity to retaliate.
In short, with adequate provision of readily available rocket artillery and fighter aircraft, Ukraine would win the war. Without it, Russia’s great superiority in numbers and conventional artillery firepower, combined with the devastating economic impact of its naval blockade and its constant unanswered air strikes on cities all across Ukraine, risks succeeding.
The decision to deny Ukraine long range weapons is a decision to allow genocide.
I have it on solid authority from a senior source within the U.S. national security establishment that President Biden was actually inclined to provide Ukraine with the desperately needed weapons, but was dissuaded from doing so by his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
It is true that as President, the buck stops with Biden, and he bears ultimate responsibility for the thousands – perhaps millions – of deaths his acceptance of Sullivan’s advice will cause. But Biden has been elected by the American people, and only they have the right to dismiss him should they ultimately deem him unfit.
In contrast, Sullivan is simply a White House employee, and he can and must be dismissed should he fail at his job. In fact Sullivan has not merely failed, he has been a total disaster.
A political operative, within the first seven months of his appointment as national security advisor, Sullivan managed to mastermind the rout of American forces in Afghanistan by the Taliban. His job performance at that time was so bad that Barack Obama’s former Director of Global Engagement Brett Bruen called for his immediate dismissal.
Saying that Sullivan had failed in all aspects of his position, Bruen denounced him as a “political type” and “a reflection of the arrogance that has accompanied the arrival of this team.”
But the problem with Sullivan’s actions weren’t just that they humiliated Biden in front of America, then America in front of the entire world, nor that they delivered 20 million Afghan women and girls into enslavement by the Taliban, but that they sent a message to would-be aggressors everywhere that America wouldn’t fight.
Putin got the message. Within months, he was openly assembling large invasion forces on all sides around Ukraine. By November 2021, it was obvious that an invasion was on the way. But the Russians wasted time getting everything ready before launching the least surprising surprise attack in human history some three months later.
Any competent strategist would have taken advantage of those three months of advance warning to rapidly deliver Ukraine all the arms needed for an effective defense. Had that been done, the invasion might well have been deterred. But it was not.
Instead, only token arms were sent to Ukraine, with not even a single Stinger short range anti-aircraft missile included. To further undermine deterrence, the administration issued repeated assurances to Putin that, in addition to denying Ukraine arms, the U.S. would not intervene with its own forces “under any scenario.”
With any semblance of deterrence thus obliterated, the dam erected and sustained by generations of soldiers and statesmen that had held back war in Europe for three quarters of a century was broken. As a result, the invasion flooded forward as a matter of course.
The consequences have been the death of perhaps a hundred thousand people – so far – with over ten million made homeless, hundreds of millions in developing nations threatened with starvation, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of property destroyed, and trillions of dollars of wealth – including the savings of innumerable Americans – wiped off the world’s stock exchanges.
This is a global catastrophe of a magnitude not seen since World War II. Sullivan could have prevented it. But he did not. Instead he invited it, and is now in the process of greatly amplifying it.
Let us consider the implications of the two principle pillars of the Sullivan policy. These are:
- America won’t fight; and
- America won’t let those under attack strike back.
In the case of the current war, these principles virtually guarantee Ukrainian defeat, because even if the Ukrainian army should somehow succeed in the face of massive Russian numerical and artillery superiority to push the invaders back, Russia will still be able to continue to bomb Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv – indeed all of Ukraine – forever, with absolute impunity.
You cannot win a fight by letting your opponent punch you all over your body in the hope that he will wear out his fists.
If Sullivan imagines he can, he is welcome to walk into any Irish pub, pick a quarrel, and test out such a strategy for himself.
But Sullivan’s policy is to turn Ukraine into Putin’s punching bag. Under such conditions, Ukraine could never thrive as a nation. This alone would achieve Putin’s primary goal, which is to prevent a successful Ukraine from serving as an example that might incite Russians to overthrow his tyranny and join the West.
Furthermore, any outcome ranging from such a crippled to a fully conquered Ukraine would leave the West with a choice to either accept matters and drop the sanctions or maintain a perpetual state of siege against Russia. If they chose acceptance, then Russia would dominate Europe. If they chose siege, then China would come to dominate all of Eurasia, because a Russia under siege by the West would become totally dependent on China, and China is not a charity operation.
So either way, Ukrainian defeat means disaster for the West. Yet Ukrainian defeat is Sullivan’s policy.
But it gets worse. Because the Sullivan policy serves Taiwan to China on a platter.
Under the Sullivan policy, China doesn’t even have to invade to conquer Taiwan. All China needs to do is to start bombarding Taiwan with its numerous DF-15, DF16, and DF-17 short range ballistic missiles and wait for Taiwan to surrender. Since the U.S. won’t fight, and won’t provide Taiwan with arms to retaliate, the outcome is inevitable.
So China will take Taiwan, and with America thus totally discredited as an ally, Japan will have no choice but to rearm. That will unleash chaotic forces in the Far East that will almost certainly lead to World War III.
So, viewed as strategy, the Sullivan policy is as imbecilic as the previous appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain that caused the Second World War.
It is also equally morally depraved. Chamberlain handed whole nations over to Hitler. But while the Nazi leader had spelled out his genocidal intentions in “Mein Kampf”, at the time of the Munich Pact he had yet to demonstrate them in practice. In contrast Putin, Xi, and the Taliban have already provided samples of what they have to offer. Yet Sullivan, knowing this, would hand whole nations over to them.
Alexis de Tocqueville famously said “America is great because America is good.”
Jake Sullivan is not good. If he is retained, America will continue to be defeated and disgraced, and millions of people around the world will be subjected to horrors beyond measure.
He needs to be fired.
Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer. His latest book The Case for Space, was recently published by Prometheus books.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
