Personally, the terms "savvy" and "genius" are not being used correctly when they are applied to the leader of a huge, militarily powerful nation deciding to bully one of his weaker neighbors by setting up a false pretense before invading the country for the purpose of installing a puppet government friendly to him. With ten times the military power, triple that in missiles, tanks and air superiority, it doesn't take much genius to launch an invasion and win quickly. If he were "savvy," he'd have come up with a better accusation with which to label the Ukrainian government that claiming they are Nazis, and a better pretext than visibly non-existent attacks on Russian nationalists living in an already Russian occupied part of the country.
But I would call the way the Biden administration has handled this whole situation, from the very beginning, both "savvy" and "genius." I'd add the term "brilliant." The Biden Administration is full of people who are experts in foreign policy, and who have studied and observed what's been happening in Russia and Eastern Europe for decades. They understand how this all works. There are always gambles and uncertainties, but the way they've handled this situation is a demonstration of learning from past gambles that didn't work, careful examination of the reality of the situation, understanding the impact this will have on the people and keeping the ultimate goal in mind.
Lessons From History
History is so relevant in so many ways, the failure of our current educational system to teach it and help our people interpret it is tragic and at some point in the future, with nuclear warheads around everywhere, could be deadly. It's an old saying, but knowing it and learning from it are ways to prevent it from repeating. We live in the 21st century, and we are now far enough away from the disaster and destruction of the Second World War to have forgotten about it, and to think that something like that can't happen again.
When Nazi Germany was running amok in Europe, had conquered France in a month and was sitting at the English Channel, armed to the teeth, seething to cross, Winston Churchill made some remarkable moves after learning from previous mistakes. The British were facing the Germans across the narrow channel because a prior British administration had not seen what might be coming, and lost an opportunity to form a military alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union before Hitler did. Once free of the threat of a two-front war with the Soviet Union, Hitler turned on the West, vanquishing the Netherlands, Belgium and France in short order.
Churchill decided to trust British and American intelligence coming from Eastern Europe which indicated that Hitler was planning to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union. Even though Britain looked like Hitler's next target, Churchill and his advisors put the intelligence of German troop build-ups together with Hitler's own words in Mein Kampf. Hitler's ambition was "lebensraum" in "the East," meaning Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic and Western Russia. The British correctly guessed that Hitler and the German general staff had weighted the cost of trying a channel crossing and decided to go east instead, after the "lebensraum."
The British disclosed their intelligence to Stalin, who, because of past history, didn't trust them. Post war memoirs indicate that he and his advisors thought the British were planting those stories to get Russian help against the Germans. Soviet intelligence was faulty, though there was plenty of evidence that the German army was moving literally millions of men and military equipment into Poland, Czechoslovakia and along the Ukrainian border all the way to the black sea coast in Romania. History records that Stalin was "surprised" when three million German soldiers launched the invasion into his country. The British gained back a lot of trust they had lost from prior problems by being right on target about the intelligence they shared.
Were you bored with the history lesson? Too bad. You need to read and understand more of it. I recommend A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn.
A "Savvy Genius" Publicly Discloses the Intelligence Reports
Biden's decision to disclose everything they were getting through intelligence reports was key to winning the trust of most of the rest of the world and pulling the NATO alliance, which had lost its trust of the United States during the Trump administration, back together. American intelligence is the best in the world and they got this right, down to the specific plan of attack, the pretext Putin would use to launch his invasion and direct reports from the Donbas and Crimea that what Putin claimed was happening wasn't really happening.
This might be going much differently had Ukraine been a NATO member. But even that card is playing into Biden's hand. NATO's credibility and the support that it is gathering, even from the reluctant neutrals, is the fact that Putin has made all of the aggressive moves in this campaign. He's bombing civilian neighborhoods, creating the humanitarian crisis, taking out his frustration over Ukraine becoming a freedom-loving country by damaging and destroying its cities. The time may come when some kind of military intervention is warranted, like a no-fly zone, but right now, all of the aggression and destruction, and the humanitarian crisis that has developed, is all on Putin.
The Biden administration is also working to put enough pressure on Russia, specifically via what are economy-crippling sanctions, looking at another historical event in the recent past--the collapse of the Soviet Union. What we're seeing in Russia is a Soviet-style government, with a twisted blend of Czarist imperialism. The elitists run the country and are massively wealthy as a result of their position. The Soviet Union collapsed because the economy could not sustain the nation. That's what these sanctions are aimed at and in a relatively short time, they've had a crippling effect on the Russian economy, particularly when it comes to the value of their currency, which affects the amount of wealth they have.
There's no guarantee here, but the historical record does provide some indication of how sanctions, especially the ones that are as deep as these, will work. At some point, experience will inform the Biden administration when there needs to be an offer of an exit ramp made to Putin, and the likelihood of his taking it to get off. Hopefully that will come before Kiyv, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Odessa are mostly ruins.
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. --Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Thankfully, the President of the United States is Joe Biden. And that gives me confidence that this will turn out well, and we will move forward toward a more peaceful world after it is over, having learned yet another lesson from history.
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