After Sanctions on Russia Fail, Biden Lies About Why He Imposed Them

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After over fifty years in public life, Old Joe Biden has a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty, and he added to it Thursday while trying to save face after Vladimir Putin ignored his sanctions threats and invaded Ukraine. The sanctions, you see, were intended to stop Putin in his tracks. When they failed to do so before the eyes of a watching world, Biden did not, of course, admit that he had miscalculated or underestimated Putin. Instead, he simply changed his story, with all the insouciance he displayed as a young Syracuse University College of Law student plagiarizing a law review article. He must think no one is paying attention.

Biden emphasized Thursday that the sanctions were not meant to stop Putin from invading Ukraine or to get him to call off the invasion. “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” he claimed. “This could take time and we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them, this is what this is all about. This is going to take time, it’s not going to occur … he’s gonna say ‘Oh my God, these sanctions are coming, I’m gonna stand down.’”

Well, all right, Joe, but why does no one on your team seem to know this? That noted lodestar of foreign policy expertise, Kamala Harris, contradicted you on Sunday when she said, “The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence.” She asserted that this was a “shared perspective among our allies. And the Allied relationship is such that we have agreed that the deterrence effect of these sanctions is still a meaningful one, especially because … we still sincerely hope that there is a diplomatic path out of this moment. And within the context then of the fact that that window is still open although it is absolutely narrowing — but within the context of a diplomatic path still being open, the deterrence effect, we believe, has merit.” Well, great, but either it does or it doesn’t, and why don’t the putative president and vice president have their story straight?

Harris wasn’t alone among the Bidenites in saying that the sanctions would deter Putin from striking Ukraine. On Feb. 11 — you know, way before Canada became a dictatorship for a week and Putin decided that Biden’s handlers were so weak that he could essentially do whatever he wanted — National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan attributed a belief in the deterrent power of sanctions to Biden himself: “The President believes that sanctions are intended to deter. And in order for them to work — to deter, they have to be set up in a way where if Putin moves, then the costs are imposed….

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