With new aid to Ukraine, Biden is now deliberately following FDR’s footsteps into World War

(Originally published May 10 in “What in the World“) U.S. President Joe Biden has asked Congress to rush approval of almost $40 billion in new aid to Ukraine separately from $10 billion in anti-pandemic funding, warning that the $13.3 billion already committed to Ukraine was running out.

Biden also marked the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany to sign the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act, an updated version of the 1941 Lend-Lease Act signed by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to supply weapons to the United Kingdom in its defense against Hitler.

Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941, and eventually expanded it to provide weapons to the Soviet Union. Nine months later, Germany’s ally Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II.

Biden is reportedly struggling to avoid actions that Putin can use to justify escalating the war. The U.S. President is apparently unhappy about leaks confirming that U.S. intelligence has guided Ukrainian attacks against Russian generals and its successful sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva. Vyacheslav Volodin, chjairman of the lower house of Russia’s legislature, has accused Washington of coordinating Ukraine’s military operations.

While Washington’s efforts to camouflage U.S. aid to Ukraine as purely defensive are more immediately an attempt to avoid being drawn into direct conflict with Russia, they have already been conflated with a sort of Cold-War style debate about America’s credibility abroad. Some U.S. foreign policy experts are thus fretting about giving Putin ammunition that supports his narrative that the war in Ukraine as a proxy battle in a global war against U.S. political expansionism, rather than a naked attempt to seize Ukrainian territory.

But this is merely part of an emerging Cold War newspeak. Putin has been saying from the start that the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization across the former Warsaw Pact represented an unjustifiably aggressive posture against a post-Soviet Russia and that Ukraine’s attempt to join NATO were an unacceptable threat to Russian security and its historic cultural and political kinship with Ukraine.

Russia has appealed for—and largely won—support from countries beyond NATO, especially China, India and the developing world, by pointing to this NATO threat as part of longstanding American imperialism, in which the U.S. works to further its interests under the cloak of human rights and democracy, resorting to military force to achieve regime change where diplomacy fails (i.e. Afghanistan and Iraq). This is conversely what Washington has termed the battle of Democracy vs. Authoritarianism.

Both sides have, confusingly, invoked their historic fights against Nazism to justify their positions in Ukraine. This all may seem like harmless semantics, but it sets the stage for the U.S. to invest real money in real military hardware to support allies everywhere in a new battle to ward off imagined threats to Democracy anywhere. Until, that is, war breaks out with nuclear-armed Russia or China.