President Biden may yet achieve an FDRlike legacy. The latter confronted global fascism head-on, while the former, as he has unceasingly warned, is wrestling with a world engaged in a soul-saving struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.
Hence these threats to the West, past and present, are not unalike: Roosevelt faced a two-front menace, Germany and Japan; Biden, Russia and China. As with Roosevelt, Biden's more immediate challenge lies in Europe. What's unalike is that Biden's resolve there — expressly, in Eastern Europe — could, perhaps, forestall a conflict in Asia, where China's aggressiveness is vastly incomparable to mid-20th-century Japan's. Today's resolve is tomorrow's deterrence. And so, for President Biden, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has taken center stage — with sudden, astonishing resolve.
By that emphasis I mean the Pentagon's remarkably monitory press conference of yesterday, held hours after Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, virtually begged the United States to cease its amplifying warnings of a Russian invasion. The U.S. Defense Department's press timing was extraordinary. Although Zelensky had asked the U.S. to tone it down — all this talk of war in Ukraine — the Pentagon dialed it up.
"I think you’d have to go back quite a while to the Cold War days to see something of this magnitude," said the visibly alarmed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin surveyed Russia's "bristling array of ... combined arms formations, artillery and rockets assembled at the Ukrainian border," as the Times put it, which Austin himself described as "far and away exceed[ing] what we would typically see them do for exercises." Added the Pentagon's press secretary, John Kirby: "We continue to see ... more accumulation of credible combat forces arrayed by the Russians in, again, the western part of their country and in Belarus."
Unwarranted alarm? Hardly. Of particular worry to U.S. officials is that roughly 35,000 Americans are in Ukraine, with many residing in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital — a potential military target by Russia's unpredictable, possibly trigger-happy autocrat. Especially given the recent uproar over Americans "stranded" in Afghanistan, DefSec Austin was somewhat duty-bound to open the prospect of deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine, for Americans' evacuation. And God only knows would could ensue from there.
Any such scenario would not be by American choice, of course. But the scenario is, prospectively, a real one. And Americans at home deserve an awareness of the danger, beforehand. So when Ukrainian President Zelensky admonishes the U.S. for its ramifying talk of war — "In my opinion, this is a mistake," he complained — there can be little mistake that such talk is inescapable.
Zelensky's principal and understandable concern is that billions of foreign-investment dollars in Ukraine are drying up amid the potential of war. Yet his remarks, understandable as they may be, have also bolstered Russian propaganda: "The Americans have started to so blatantly and cynically use Ukraine against Russia that even the regime in Kyiv has become alarmed," said Putin's foreign minister yesterday. Could any development be stranger? Yes.
Taken together, circumstances in Eastern Europe present not only a triangular, but a quadrangular, mind-bending, nerve-racking puzzle. As the U.S., Russia and Ukraine each attempt to gain whatever advantage, with Zelensky attempting to stamp out even the talk of war, his own defense minister and a northernmost European neighbor are becoming increasingly, well, let's say, troubled.
Zelensky's defense minister? He has warned that Russia's military presence in Belarus could menace "all of Europe," while in one of NATO's Baltic states, Latvia, its foreign minister has come close to ringing the ultimate bell: "We are reaching the point where continuous Russian and Belarusian military buildup in Europe needs to be addressed by appropriate NATO countermeasures," he tweeted this week.
Alarm is spreading, and deepening. Eastern Europe is ground zero in the — for now, and let us hope it stays that way — ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Chances are, say military and foreign relations analysts, probably less than 50/50 that the struggle could turn hot. But hot it could indeed turn. And in that eventuality, President Biden would face Rooseveltian choices — and, one would also hope, Rooseveltian outcomes.