Heading into tonight’s State of the Union Address by President Joe Biden, the world continues to be on edge thanks to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
The president’s announcement of significant sanctions against Russia for the incursion was met mostly with supports from Democrats, and calls from the right that the president isn’t doing enough.
Tuesday, Minnesota Third District Congressman Dean Phillips (D) talked to WCCO’s Chad Hartman about the situation in Ukraine, the responsibility of the U.S. and how it got to this point.
Phillips says one of the challenges the U.S. has faced was rebuilding international relationships, and he laid the blame for those poor relations at the feet of former President Donald Trump.
“Our approach to Vladimir Putin has been in the works for many, many months,” Phillips said. “The last Administration, the Trump Administration, left our relationship with our allies in shambles, particularly NATO.”
NATO is a collective security defensive alliance, with all member states duty bound to come to the defense of any member state whose “territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.” It includes 28 European countries along with the U.S. and Canada. Ukraine is not currently a member of NATO.
Phillips says the Biden Administration deserves credit for reestablishing trust among the NATO allies and that has allowed the sanctions against Russia to be effective so far.
“We are seeing it play out right in front of us right now in an unprecedented fashion, NATO countries and frankly the free world coming together in opposition to the madman who is Vladimir Putin,” says Phillips. “With a sanctions regime that is the most strangling that has ever been deployed in history.”
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Phillips also told WCCO’s Hartman that those who expect the U.S. to go further into conflict with Russia are off-base.
“There are some voices arguing that we should deploy military force, which in my estimation, would be an invitation to World War III, which nobody wants.”
He does add that if the conflict were to expand beyond Ukraine, the conversation would be different.
“That said if any of the NATO nations were to be attacked or this were to spill over, we would be obligated to come to their rescue just as they would to ours,” says Phillips. “But I believe we're handling this quite appropriately in an unprecedented fashion, and I think it will take some time for the sanctions to play out. But it will be crippling to the Russian economy and ultimately Putin. But we cannot risk the lives of young men and women in America on what we unfortunately believe would be a provocative issue to Putin if we were to deploy forces.”
Putin issued a directive to increase the readiness of Russia’s nuclear weapons this week, raising fears that the invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war, whether by design or mistake.
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Former Congressman from Minnesota, Vin Weber (R) also joined Hartman to discuss Ukraine and he agrees with Phillips assessment that sanctions are the best defense against Putin and Russia. However, he says Biden made some mistakes in the runup to Russian invading Ukraine.
“I would say in the run up to this crisis, the president did some things that were not good,” Weber explains. “The withdrawal from Afghanistan, the immediate support for the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline were mistakes. The Europeans this week, particularly the Germans, have acknowledged that they made some mistakes and they've changed their policies substantially.”
Weber does say, however, that the president has been correct in how he’s handled Russia so far.
“The president has led well through this crisis, regardless of what we think about some of the mistakes, in my view, that were made that could have contributed to it,” Weber said. “He's done well in pulling the NATO coalition together, standing firm against Putin throughout the aggression, standing up strongly for Ukraine, changing some of our policies. We're now supplying the lethal weapons that, in my view, we should have supplied earlier. But, let's focus on here and now. He's doing a good job now.
Weber adds that now is the time for bipartisan support for what the U.S. is trying to do in Ukraine.
“I hope my Republican friends would acknowledge that. They don't have to say he did everything right in the past. But right now the important thing is the unity of the West and the unity of America behind President Biden.”
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