The Great Whitewash is Starting

But it wont work

Hello All,

As many of you know, I would have supported Biden over Trump in 2024 if that were the choice. I wanted Biden not to run or pull out far earlier than he did, to allow the Democrats the chance to have an actual primary competition, but if the choice were Biden or Trump, it would have been easy for me. I will always support the candidate that stands for Democracy.

However, it will also come as no surprise to readers of this substack that I believe the Biden administration’s policy towards Ukraine and the Russian full-scale invasion was a catastrophic failure. In fact, its turned into one of the worst set of policy choices in US foreign policy history.

Its not that it was definitely wrong of the Biden administration to have thought that Ukraine would be conquered quickly. That was what they were being told by the IC and the think tank world. Certainly it would have been better if they had the intellectual ability to challenge this view, but that they didnt, cant be held against them too much.

No, the catastrophe was how the reacted after Feb 24, 2022. The Biden administration was handed a golden opportunity to provide for a more secure Europe and a more secure USA—and through that the world, and blew it entirely. I will be writing more about this in the coming months, but safe to say that the Biden administration made a catalogue of extreme errors that it did not have to make, from being too timid in its aiding of Ukraine, from making meaningless pledges (As Long as it Takes!), to allowing Putin to escalate with impunity. Their policy choices have lengthened and expanded the war, meaning that it has spilled out into a global confrontation taking in the Middle East and arguably parts of East Asia and Africa.

Overall the Biden administration took the greatest opportunity the US had been offered to bring stability to an important part of the world, and through bad choices has created a global crisis.

The other thing we have learned is that the Biden Administration will go to any lengths to protect its reputation, even to the point of rewriting history to try and expunge failure. If there was one moment that crystallized this more than anything else, it was Jake Sullivan literally re-writing an article about how the Biden Administration had “de-escalated” the Middle East, which he released in Foreign Affairs in October 2023, just a few days before the Hamas attack into Israel.

Justifying failure?

This still deeply bothers me—as it was Trumpian beyond Trump. I wrote a piece about it at the time, which I will now release as free to everyone so that they can see what happened. He was utterly wrong, but instead of simply admitting it, he changed the online version of the article (the one most people will read). Thankfully the hard copy has been preserved so the mendacity cant be completely successful.

Now, however, the Biden administration is starting to pull a “Sullivan” on the whole war, and whitewash their failure. The key