Blinken blinks when asked why Putin would invade under Biden, not Trump: ‘Ask him’

No one has noticed, but Biden’s handlers’ Russia-Ukraine narrative completely contradicts the Democrats’ “Trump was a tool of Putin” lie. If Trump enabled and emboldened Putin, why didn’t Putin move against Ukraine while Trump was president? And of course the hapless Blinken can’t answer when asked why Putin is supposedly about to invade now, instead of under Trump. The real answer is because he sees Biden’s handlers for the weak and feckless empty suits that they are, and Biden himself as a fossilized shell who is propped up for appearance’s sake. Blinken couldn’t tell the truth; he would have been out of a job. So he punted.

“Blinken Desperately Scrambles When Asked Why Putin Would Invade Under Biden, Not Trump,” by Nick Arama, Red State, February 20, 2022:

Watching the Biden Administration do foreign policy, particularly in the middle of a crisis, is like watching a slow train wreck. You know they’re going to hit that car that’s lying up ahead in the tracks, but they just keep speeding headlong into it.

Unfortunately, we saw what a horrible debacle that turned into in Afghanistan — and it doesn’t seem like they learned anything from that with the way they are responding to the Russian threat on Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been begging for the West, and specifically the United States, to put in pre-emptive sanctions to back Russia off. While Joe Biden has claimed that an invasion is imminent, he has refused to do that, which makes no sense — unless what he wants is war.

Blinken reiterated that approach on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, saying they wouldn’t impose sanctions until “the tanks are actually moving, the planes are actually flying, the bombs are actually dropping.”

“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen, and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had said. “Why would we need those sanctions then?”

As we also noted earlier, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin indicated that the sanctions being contemplated might be harder on the Russian people than on Putin himself.

Blinken tried to justify the Biden approach.

“Biden has said while we believe President Putin has made the decision, until the die is cast, until that die actually settles, and until the tanks are actually moving, the planes are actually flying, the bombs are actually dropping, we’re going to do everything we can with diplomacy and with deterrence and persuasion to get President Putin to reverse the decision that we believe he’s made,” he said.

“The purpose of the sanctions in the first instance it to try to deter Russia from going to war,” he continued. “As soon as you trigger them, that deterrent is gone. Until the last minute, as long as we can try to bring a deterrent effect to this, we’re going to try to do that. As to laying out in detail what the sanctions will be, two things – first, Russia generally has a pretty good idea what we’re going to do, but we don’t want to lay out the specifics in advance, because that would allow Russia to try to plan against them.”

But, that makes no sense. You wouldn’t do anything to put them off, but then you’ll drop the sanctions on them after they are already invading and committed to it? Can we say that the folks in the Biden Administration are not terribly bright here? This doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand, and it’s no wonder that Zelensky is infuriated by all this weakness. Indeed, they already relaxed sanctions, such as on Nord Stream 2, in 2021….

Blinken also appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, where he was asked a good question about why is Putin making moves now, when he didn’t under President Donald Trump?

 

Because the whole thing about Trump being a Putin stooge was just so much nonsense. Biden, and Obama before him, are the ones who have bent over for Putin at every turn, and he knows that he can just walk all over them and they wouldn’t respond. Biden keeps showing that again and again. But, folks on the left don’t want to deal with that reality. When you show weakness as Biden constantly does, people will have you for lunch.