US President Joe Biden walks on the South Lawn to board Marine One at the White House in Washington, DC on March 11, 2022. (PHOTO / XINHUA)
United States President Joe Biden has a tightly scheduled itinerary for his Europe visit. In Brussels on Thursday, he will attend an emergency NATO summit, a meeting with the other G7 leaders, and address a European Council meeting. He is expected to travel to Poland the following day, where he will meet with his Polish counterpart as well as US troops deployed there.
Whatever else is on his agenda, his trip is to "coordinate on the next phase of military assistance to Ukraine … imposing further sanctions on Russia and tightening the existing sanctions to crack down on evasion and to ensure robust enforcement", according to US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
The rationale for these moves is to ruin Russia and turn Russian President Vladimir Putin into an "international pariah" as Biden has vowed to do.
So instead of trying to find a way to end the bloodshed and ease the humanitarian crisis on the ground, Biden will be seeking ways to ensure "Putin's back is against the wall".
Why? Because that is what the US does. Because it thinks it best serves its purpose. After all, it is what it has always done－from Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, and the Congo, to Nicaragua, Iraq, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the list goes on.
The jackals of its economy trot hungrily on the heels of war and they are never sated.
Yet, as many military analysts warn, the likelihood of an attritional stalemate is growing, which will not only be punishing for both sides, but also worsen the humanitarian crisis.
Many countries, including China, are closely following the development of the Ukraine crisis with concern and are frustrated with the way the US and its key allies are fueling the hostilities with their actions. Instead of addressing the security issue in Europe, which is the root cause of the conflict, they have let their cankered ideology transform legacied animosity toward Russia into unmindful hostility.
As a result, the crisis is developing in a way that threatens broader catastrophic spillovers. The Biden administration's simplistic approach of "friend or foe" and "black or white" is part of its purpose of dividing the world into "with us or against us" with the aim of maintaining the US-led global hierarchy and realizing the "end of history".
As such, the Ukraine crisis is a critical moment for the world as it can either preserve or reject the Cold War mentality of bloc confrontation. Beijing, despite the efforts of Washington to portray otherwise, has made it clear that it firmly rejects it.
A negotiated end to the conflict is in everyone's interest. Since the negotiators of the two warring parties are still at work and both are interested in a negotiated outcome, Biden should be trying to rally a consensus on promoting a negotiated solution to the crisis, rather than pushing to escalate and prolong the armed conflict.