Shortly after President Biden took office, I gave a speech wondering whether President Biden’s tough-on-Russia rhetoric would be matched by his administration’s actions.
I wondered that because the actions of the Obama-Biden administration were dangerously weak.
When it comes to Russia, weakness is provocative. It encourages aggression.
Russians follow the maxim attributed to Lenin, “You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.”
The same is true when dealing with Iran and China.
Only six months after Russia invaded and occupied portions of the Republic of Georgia, then-Vice President Biden went to Munich to deliver a speech calling for the United States to hit the “reset button” with Russia.
When Russia invaded, the Republic of Georgia was westernizing. Georgia had gone out of its way to cement close ties with our country, even sending soldiers to fight and die alongside American soldiers.
But that support from Georgia was quickly forgotten to“reset” relations with Russia.
Secretary of State Clinton actually did “hit the reset button,” in an embarrassing, chummy ceremony with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
As part of the Obama-Biden reset, the United States unilaterally cancelled planned missile defense cooperation with our allies, the Czechs and Poles,doing so on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.
All these actions sent the exact wrong message to both Russia and to our allies.
No doubt the Obama-Biden administration thought our unilateral show of goodwill would be warmly received and reciprocated by Russia.
Instead, we know, Russia under Putin invaded and occupied Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula and chunks of eastern Ukraine.
The Obama-Biden administration responded with angry words but refused to send Ukraine defensive weapons of any kind.
President Obama urged Ukraine not to fight the 2014 Russian invasion.The priority was to avoid escalation.
The Obama-Biden administration backed negotiations and a diplomatic solution.
We all know that Russia has a history of using negotiations to create frozen conflicts that it can use to destabilize and control its neighbors.
Historically, Russia will snatch a piece of land, then demand ceasefire and negotiations, allowing it to keep the ill-gotten gains indefinitely. Meanwhile, Russia builds up for its next aggression, while weakening its target.
The Obama-Biden reset and subsequent Ukraine policy was a disaster for peace and security.
In August 2013, the regime of Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons. By doing so, they crossed President Obama’sred line.
When nothing happened, the world took notice.
Meanwhile, the Obama-Biden administration sought to strike an Iran nuclear deal at all costs, alienating regional partners and emboldening the Iranian regime.
In June of 2019, President Trump repeated a version of President Obama’s red-line mistake.
At that time, Iran had shot down a U.S. drone, and the U.S. military had prepared a retaliatory strike, as you would expect our defense to do.
But President Trump stepped in, called off the strike and publicly announced that he had done so ten minutes before that attack was to be launched.
President Trump’s aborted retaliation then led to further escalation by the Iranian regime, including attacks on U.S. soldiers.
That is, until President Trump finally took some solid action, making the bold decision to restore deterrence by killing QassemSoleimani as he was plotting further attacks against U.S. forces.
Iran responded with a token missile barrage, but the dramatic escalation of conflict with Iran predicted by some never materialized.
In fact, Iran was deterred.
Then, the Biden administration came into office and began negotiations to resurrect the Iran deal.
Of course, who can ever forget the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In time, we will learn more about the decisions that led to such enormous loss of American military equipment to the Taliban, while leaving many Afghans who worked with our military under Taliban control.
Both of these losses sting to this very day. Influencing others to see us as weak, or someone that can’t be counted on.
But, there is another loss that is harder to quantify: That’s the loss of the reputation of the United States.
Like it or not, stacked on top of the other expressions of American weakness I have described, the Afghanistan debacle led to the perception that the United States is weak and unwilling to stand behind its commitments.
After the Afghanistan embarrassment, our allies and partners worried that we were no longer reliable. And, those countries that have long sought America’s downfall no longer feared us.
Our enemies were emboldened.
According to Russian opposition journalist Mikhail Zygar in his recent book, the fall of Kabul was a turning point in Putin’s mind.
Putin became convinced then that he could conquer Kyiv, President Zelenskyy would flee the country and the United States would do nothing to stop that takeover of Ukraine.
Today, we face the consequences of an emboldened Russia and an emboldened Iran.
China is increasingly aggressive in the South China Sea and the Strait of Taiwan. To be sure, our responses are being closely watched by all three of these adversaries- Russia, China and Iran.
This is a critical time when sending more messages of weakness would be very dangerous.
Today, some people even in my own political party, are reverting to the Obama era stance, arguing that we cannot afford the actions necessary to deter all three would-be adversaries of our country.
I am convinced that we must deter further aggression from our enemies.
We must restore credible deterrence before we reach a point where we have to expend much more in both American blood and American treasure.
Estonia’s Prime Minister is in town this week. Remember, that country was taken over by the Soviet Union in 1940, and until the early-1990s, was still under their control. Now they’re a free nation. We ought to listen to them about what freedom really means.
So, I recommend my colleagues to listen to Prime Minister Kallas if you have any chance to do that.
She has shown remarkable clarity and leadership since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
She often points out, “If Putin wins, or if he even has the view that he has won this war, his appetite will only grow.”
Meanwhile, that old impulse to deter ourselves is still evident in this present administration.
When the U.S. National Security Advisor says he is worried about starting World War III, that’s a way of convincing Putin to hang on a little longer.
We should have learned by now that escalation of aggression happens when the United States demonstrates weakness.
Telegraphing that we are afraid to give Ukraine what it needs to win is deeply counterproductive to freedom and, most importantly, to the Ukrainian people.
Remember, for Russians, weakness -- not strength -- is provocative.
I urge members of both political parties to discard the failed Obama policies of weakness toward Russia and give Ukraine what it needs today.
The reset didn’t work, and ignoring Russia’s ambitions in that area is harmful for peace around the world,and particularly for our national security.Our national security is as tied to NATO, as Europe’s national security is.
The more advanced weapons that Ukraine can obtain quickly, the faster that war will be over.
When it comes to quick decisions to send needed weapons to Ukraine to defeat Russia, several countries have showed great leadership -- the United Kingdom, Poland and the three Baltic countries, for example.
For sure, yes, the United States has provided many advanced weapons to Ukraine --the most of any country helping Ukraine -- but usually, only months after they are needed to have maximum effect that these good weapons provide.
Ukraine didn’t get the tanks needed to launch the counteroffensive until after the Russians had months to dig in and fortify their front lines.
After months of dithering, President Biden finally gave permission for the Dutch and Danish to send their F-16s to Ukraine, but it will still take months to train the pilots.
The United States military would never launch a ground campaign without controlling the skies, but that’s what Ukraine has been forced to do without F-16s.
After all the public hemming and hawing, President Biden finally approved sending a version of the ATACMS missile to Ukraine, but the shorter-range cluster munitions variant.
Meanwhile, President Biden is still withholding the long-range version needed to take out Russian supply lines in the Crimean Peninsula.
Now, I can only assume this is another example of the self-deterrence that has proven so misguided in the past.
The Ukrainians are making steady progress, but they could be doing it faster and at less cost in American dollars and Ukrainian lives if President Biden would not be so hesitant to take bold action.
The United States has spent roughly $44 billion on military aid to Ukraine. That happens to be roughly five percent of the U.S. military’s own budget.
Ukraine remains in control of roughly 83 percent of its territory and the U.S. intelligence community believes the war has severely degraded Russia’s military power and its ability to threaten NATO allies.
That is a victory not just for Ukraine’s independence, but for our own national security, as it’s tied to invoking Article 5 of the NATO alliance.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine sent a wakeup call to our military that we need to increase our capacity to produce munitions.
We have ramped up production and are already investing in new capacity so we will not be caught flatfooted in any future conflict.
I am glad to say that this is already in evidence at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in West Burlington.
The dedicated workforce in Iowa is cranking out 155-millimeter howitzer shells and a host of other key munitions.
Ground was recently broken for $1.2 billion in upgrades to the Iowa plant paid out of the Ukraine funding package passed by Congress.
I know people talk like the money Congress allocated was literally sent over to Ukraine, and every dollar of it spent within that country.
But the reality is that most of the money stayed right here in the United States to produce arms and ammo and build production capacity.
I am proud that the portion of Ukraine funding sent to Iowa will help keep the United States the “arsenal of democracy” for years to come.
Ramping up our military production capacity is good news for U.S. military readiness.
It is also good news for Taiwan.
The closed production line for the Stinger air defense system has meant Taiwan’s orders have gone unfilled for years.
That Stinger line is now reopening.
I do not believe that the United States is incapable of addressing the multiple international challenges we face, and I fear the consequences if we don’t face those challenges strongly.
The United States believed that it could ignore World War I and World War II until those wars became so large that we got dragged in.
Once the United States joined the fight, our participation was decisive, but at enormous cost in American lives and American dollars.
We learned our lesson after World War II and helped form NATO to keep the peace in Europe for 70 years.
Putin’s Russia is continuing the Russian tradition of imperial conquest and will not stop unless they are stopped.
All you have to do is look at what Putin himself has said in addresses going back to 2008 and a couple times since then. He’s said that his goal was to reestablish the old Soviet Union, and that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.
So, you know he’s going to welcome the support he’s receiving from Iran, which happens to be sending drones to Russia to attack civilian areas of Ukraine.
Iran also funds and backs Hamas as it inflicts a reign of terror on innocent Israeli civilians.
And for all those people who are demonstrating around the country over the last four weekends against what’s going on in Israel and Gaza, it seems to me it ought to be pretty clear that there wouldn’t be a single killing going on today in that region in if Hamas hadn’t invaded Israel. This seems to be forgotten by the people demonstrating.
I know that they’re peacefully demonstrating, for the most part, and that’s their constitutional right. And I defend that right.
But we have Iran involved in this as well, as it funds and backs Hamas and inflicts a reign of terror on innocent civilians.
Iran is firing rockets at U.S. soldiers in the region, which is resulting in injuries. Approximately 48 instances of attacks against American soldiers have been reported. Thankfully, no one has been killed at this point, but there’s been serious injuries.
We have not responded accordingly to these attacks, again showing weakness to Iran.
China is backing Russia diplomatically, economically and with technology that is being used to attack Ukraine.
So, I hope you see the China, Iran and Russia axis acting against the interests of NATO, against the interests of peace, against the interests of liberty and independence of countries, which is something we should take very seriously.
China is deterred from attacking Taiwan and dominating other neighbors in Asia, largely based on its assessment of American military strength and political will.
So, whether it’s Russia, Iran or China, it ought to be a concern of all of us. It’s not just Russia versus Ukraine.
What would China make of the United States throwing in the towel again so quickly?
It’s pretty clear from history, we must not find out. We know what Russia’s up to.We know what China’s up to.We know what Iran’s up to. We have to make sure that they don’t succeed.
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