Gadfly: Biden’s Lame Ukraine Game

The Biden “game plan” on Ukraine “appears to be to intermittently try to sound like Winston Churchill while sending weapons systems at a snail’s pace, months and months after the Ukrainians have said they need those weapons systems,” grumbles National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “Biden’s rhetoric is a lot more triumphalist than the reports on the ground.” And it turns out “Washington’s foreign-policy establishment actually has a lot of gripes about how the Biden team is handling the crisis. It just doesn’t want to say so on the record,” per a Puck report that suggests the administration has no real strategy. It’s reportedly telling Kyiv: “Future aid packages may well be considerably smaller than originally promised.” Fact is: “‘As long as it takes’ turned out to be a lot briefer, and more conditional, than Biden was willing to say. Speak loudly and send the Ukrainians a small stick, half a year after they asked for a big one.”