That crisis has striking similarities to the one unfolding today, especially Biden’s role as foreign-policy problem-solver. Russia has mobilized more than 100,000 soldiers and threatens an attack on neighboring Ukraine, a larger deployment of troops than during its 2014 offensive.
That year, Obama’s team badly misjudged the ferocity of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was naive about resetting relations with Russia, and it didn’t anticipate the pernicious tactics Russia would pursue against Ukraine and, ultimately, the United States. Those mistakes from eight years ago are informing the White House’s response now.
The Obama team was slow to rebuke Putin and sloppy in coordinating with European allies. “The 2014 crisis was one that sharpened a lot of minds,” said Max Bergmann, who was a State Department official at the time. “What I think you see now is the effort to get the ducks in a row right away, to send very clear messaging about what the cost would be to Russia.”
Blinken, about one year out of the Obama administration, said they had “misjudged” Putin, whom he ultimately concluded was a kleptocrat and rogue. By the time he invaded Crimea, “we really were in the zero-sum world where, from Moscow’s perspective, Russia’s strength was our weakness, and our gain was their loss,” said Blinken, who now serves as Biden’s secretary of state.
The Biden team learned that Putin will advance his goals with “asymmetric” tactics, or military and non-military approaches that operate within a gray zone, to trip up the United States. In 2014 and onward, Russia leaked a phone call to embarrass US diplomats, spread fake news, and sowed disinformation, which culminated in unprecedented attacks on the 2016 election in the US. It’s led Biden to grapple with “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin,” as was the title of a 2018 essay he co-authored for Foreign Affairs. He argued that the US must “impose meaningful costs on Russia when they discover evidence of its misdeeds.” He also said that, despite Russia’s belligerent tactics, “Washington needs to keep talking to Moscow,” to avoid unintended escalations of conflict.
Smith is now the US ambassador to NATO, and has focused on a united front in Europe. “I can’t remember a situation where we have seen such dogged diplomacy, day by day, almost hour by hour, to try to prevent a war in Ukraine. It really is all hands on deck,” said Charles Kupchan, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who worked in the Obama White House from 2014 to 2017.
The Biden team internalized the lesson that allies count. Blinken in 2016 acknowledged that sanctions against Russia were more effective when “we rallied others” to participate.
Several former ambassadors to Europe told me that they were impressed by how quickly the Biden administration has employed old-fashioned diplomacy. “They have clearly inspired a purposeful, thorough, robust engagement with allies around this crisis that has already paid dividends,” said Dan Baer, an ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe from 2013 to 2017, who is at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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