It is time for President Joe Biden to use one countermeasure to Russia’s military menace at the Ukraine border that he has so far failed to deploy. It’s way past time, in fact.
But luckily there is still time for America’s president to shift into his people gear and deliver a straight-talk message that can prove meaningful to its prime target — not Russia’s president, but Russia’s people.
So far, Biden has made clear in his public statements that if Russia invades Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies will retaliate with “severe economic sanctions” — that’s typical government-to-government dugout chatter. And when Biden has sought to humanize his threat, the human he chose was Putin: “He’s never seen sanctions like the ones I promised will be imposed if he moves.”
But what America’s president and his speechwriters really haven’t done is speak in terms that really speak to the ordinary Russians who will be their country’s ultimate Russian victims if Putin invades Ukraine.
What America’s president needs to do now is to start by channeling his inner Scranton Joe, yet again. He needs to talk to the same sort of folks halfway around the world that he has proved adept at reaching where they lived, here at home.
Biden’s best and brightest can start by pondering what would be the dinner table conversation in the homes and apartments of Russia’s families who are spread across their huge nation’s 11 time zones. They’re probably not talking about Ukraine. Most of them have never seen Ukraine, will never see Ukraine and frankly don’t give a damn about Ukraine.
But they do care about the fact that they are already struggling to just barely make it in a weak economy. And they won’t like anything their president does — such as invading Ukraine — if they later discover what he did just made their lives a lot tougher.
New polling this month by the Levada Center, an independent public opinion organization in Moscow, showed that almost half (47%) of Russians think the political situation is “tense” and 41% say the economic situation is “bad.” Asked what they expect to happen in the next few months, more people answered negatively than positively: 49% expected economic deterioration, 44% expected political deterioration.
But the polls also show there is one thing on which Russians are not divided: Russians believe the United States and NATO are responsible for starting this Ukraine crisis. How can that be? Here’s how: On Wednesday, the government news agency, Tass, reported to Russians that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said: “The West, of course, is inflaming hysteria, evacuating (the diplomats). … About sanctions, we see that our Western colleagues are quite literally in a state of some militaristic frenzy.”
Foil-check: Journalists know it was the Russia Embassy in Kyiv that began busing its personnel back to Moscow from Ukraine, well before the U.S. Embassy began evacuating. And of course the entire conflict originated when Russia blatantly sent its 120,000 troops to Ukraine’s border in invasion posture.
No wonder talk about sanctions has become the West’s only way to generate the sort of pressure and public opinion wave that even a dictator cannot simply ignore. And that brings us back to Scranton Joe.
Biden’s best hope may be to lay out an information highway paved with hard truths and clear consequences. Russia’s struggling families in cities, towns and rural lands need to know just what trouble they will face if Putin orders an invasion of Ukraine.
They must be told that the West will move as one to isolate Russia from the global economy. Russia will be disconnected from the world’s banking and finance systems. Russia’s corporations, companies, small businesses and consumers will no longer be able to do any of the dollar-based commerce and consuming they have long taken for granted.
Russia’s families will find they can no longer get the things, large and small, they have always taken for granted. Oh, there will be workarounds: China may be able to come to Russia’s economic rescue. Russia may be able to survive by becoming a dependent of the land they once considered their communist junior partner. But families will have to get used to living without the globally connected conveniences and comforts.
Putin’s once-proud superpower will survive by adjusting to an existence as the world’s largest banana republic, of sorts. Except with no bananas. But nuclear weapons by the bunch.
Or, Vladimir Putin can return to the presidential ways he once preferred — back when he was all set to host the 2014 G-8 economic summit at Sochi. Until it had to be canceled because, practically on the eve of the summit, Putin felt compelled to seize Crimea from Ukraine. Which caused the G-8 to blackball Russia. Which brought us to the mess we see today.
Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at martin.schram@gmail.com.