By W. James Antle, The Week

President Biden’s former boss might have told him that the 1980s called to ask for its foreign policy back. There was a heavy dose of Reaganesque “trust but verify“ in Biden’s response to Russia’s professed drawdown along the Ukrainian border.

Biden is walking a careful line: The United States does not want Russia to invade Ukraine, but neither does it want to go to war against nuclear-armed Russia over this non-NATO member. Ukraine is peripheral to our interests, but the norm that stronger countries should not routinely overtake weaker ones is worth upholding even apart from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s general bad-guy status.

These positions are correct but pursuing them will require a delicate mix of diplomacy and plausible threats that do not careen out of control. To that end, Biden has dabbled in a strange mix of restrained and hawkish rhetoric. “If Russia proceeds, we will rally the world to oppose its aggression,” he said, later adding, “While I will not send American servicemen to fight Russia in Ukraine, we have supplied the Ukrainian military with equipment to help them defend themselves.”

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