The Biden Regime's Parting Shot at Russia
President Biden orders that American long-range weaponry can be used to target Russian and North Korean troops inside Russia by Ukraine
Just because Donald Trump is looking to staff his next regime with neoconservatives like Marco Rubio and deranged Israel-supremacists like Pete Hegseth does not mean that President Joe Biden is unable to do plenty of damage on his way out. The New York Times is reporting that Biden is allowing the Ukrainian government to use long-range missiles supplied by the United States to target Russian and North Korean troops in Russia itself for the first time.
President Biden has authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said.
The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said.
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
The truth is that I do not expect that this move by President Biden will draw the United States into World War III or direct military conflict with Russia as some people are saying, because Vladimir Putin knows that Donald Trump is about to take office in a few short months and that he has promised to negotiate an end to the war between Ukraine and Russia. So any escalation by Russia toward the U.S. as a result of this decision by Biden would likely force Trump, and Rubio and Hegseth, to take a harder line toward Russia when he gets back into office. A qualification I might make to my prediction, however, is that there really is no knowing how the North Korean government might respond to their soldiers being deliberately targeted by American weapons. From the Times:
While the officials said they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war, one of the goals of the policy change, they said, is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.
Escalation is the M.O. of the Kim dictatorship, and being purposely targeted by the U.S. is unlikely to go by without a response whatever the status of the American presidency is. The purpose of this decision by a lame-duck regime may be to undermine their successor who has promised to take a different approach to the Ukraine-Russia war and engage in diplomacy rather than arming and funding one side while openly calling for regime change in the other. And, on some level, it will probably work. Assuming that Trump really does intend to engage in diplomacy with both sides and attempt to negotiate a peace deal in good faith, he will now likely have to make more concessions to Russia than he otherwise might have done.
The other side of this equation is that Donald Trump cannot be trusted to actually engage in diplomacy to end this war as he said he would. For one, he has given absolutely no specifics about how he intends to end the war and remember that he was the one who began arming Ukraine in the first place, drawing the ire of Vladimir Putin, after Barack Obama had largely refused to do so during his presidency. And after Trump met with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky back in September, I wrote:
According to Zelensky himself, Donald Trump seems to have given him assurances of continued U.S. backing of Ukraine in their war with Russia.
You can hear Zelensky make the claim himself here.
And here is Michael Tracey reporting on X that Trump’s next National Security Advisor Mike Waltz explicitly advocated the exact policy that the Biden regime is enacting right now.
I would urge you to go to that tweet directly and listen to Waltz make the case himself for allowing Ukraine to use American long-range weaponry against Russia. Waltz claims that this would have the goal of getting Russia to the negotiating table, but seems far more likely to escalate the situation and make diplomacy more difficult. Trump’s idea of “diplomacy” seems to be not negotiating a peace deal with Russia, but rather dictating to Russia and threatening them with further escalation if they refuse. Biden may have jumped the gun, but his actions here seem to be perfectly in line with what the incoming Trump regime is publicly advocating which is a harder line toward Russia and further escalation.