It's not my intention to recount all the dumb reasons why Ukraine has been denied membership in NATO. All that information is available at Wikipedia and for those with a desire to learn it's an interesting read. My intention here is to say that, in my humble opinion, the Biden administration completely dropped the ball when it comes to the situation as it stands now. The world saw what happens in 1938, with Germany's invasion of Poland, when dictators are allowed to go unchecked. The world stood by and did nothing and when Hitler saw he could get away with it once he did it again and again. The same is true now. The world did nothing in the face of Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014, why wouldn't he assume he could get away with it again with the rest of Ukraine in 2022?
The Biden administration could have and should have stopped cold any plans of invasion two weeks ago by placing the entirety of the 101st Airborne Division smack in the middle of Ukraine and then telling President Putin if he wanted wanted Ukraine to come and fucking take it. At the very least, the bevy of sanctions we've now levelled should have been rolled out two weeks ago only to be lifted once it had been verified that all Russian troops massed along Ukraine's borders had gone back to their bases. Instead we relied on threats of sanctions after an invasion which had zero effect in stopping Putin based on the fact that he has been "sanction-proofing" the Russian economy for the past ten years. The only thing the United States can do at this point, along with our NATO allies, is to make damn sure the Ukrainian military doesn't run out of ammunition. If they run out of Javelin and Stinger missiles then the Ukrainians are well and truly fucked.
And, yes, I've heard Trump's toadies and others on the right saying "Things would be different if Trump were still President!" They're probably correct, but not in the way they mean it. After saying NATO is "obsolete," after saying during his campaign in 2016 that he would take the U.S. out of NATO, after never explicitly endorsing support for Article Five of the NATO charter, I do believe that the difference would have been that after Trump had unpuckered his lips from Putin's arse, he would simply have asked the Russian president if he wanted any help with the invasion. In fact Trump persists, to this day, in his hero worship for the dictator by continuing to say what a swell guy he thinks Putin is.
I'm a proud Democrat and will likely always be a proud Democrat, but I am massively disappointed in the Biden administration's handling of this crisis. My father recently told me a joke that was circulating at the end of World War Two that goes something like this: An American soldier and a Russian soldier were talking one day. The American soldier says, "In America we have free speech. I can stand in the street in front of the White House and yell at the top of my lungs, 'To hell with President Truman!'" "So what?" says the Russian soldier. "In Russia I too can stand in the center of Red Square and yell at the top of my lungs, 'To hell with President Truman!'" The Ukrainian people may well have forever lost their freedom to stand in the heart of Kyiv and yell at the top of their lungs, 'to hell with President Putin!' and it just didn't have to be that way.
