Katerina Schwartz11:32, 04.01.25

The lack of major escalations in Ukraine has led critics to argue that the Biden administration should have been bolder, the magazine writes.

The approach of US President Joe Biden’s team to helping Ukraine in its war against Russia resembled a common “salami-slicing” strategy, undermining Russia’s “red lines” in such small steps that any significant retaliation became unjustified. The strategy did not produce the big victories many had hoped for, but it did provide an important rebuff, writes Foreign Affairs .

As noted, critics who believe the Biden administration has overestimated the risk of escalation are wrong because they underestimate how difficult it is to navigate crises.

“Washington deployed a strategy to counter a highly motivated revisionist adversary. And it worked,” the publication says. “The irony is that Washington’s salami-slicing strategy has now become a casualty of its success. The lack of major escalations in Ukraine has led critics to argue that the Biden administration should have been bolder and abandoned the gradualism that likely helped prevent escalation.”

Foreign Affairs added that Biden’s critics believe Putin’s threats were a bluff, but they rarely talk openly about what Russia’s real “red lines,” if any, might be.

“Instead, they simply assume that because the United States regularly crosses Putin’s lines without causing serious escalation, it would be justified to go much further and faster,” the article notes.

It also points out that one of the main lessons that can be drawn from the Biden administration’s policy towards Ukraine is that measuring success is more difficult than it seems at first glance.

“If the most important measure is whether Ukraine has the means to regain all of its sovereign territory, then Biden’s policy has been a partial failure. Although Western aid has enabled Ukraine to put up a significant fight, the results remain uncertain. But if the measure of success is whether U.S. policy has prevented the outbreak of a new world war, then the Biden administration’s approach has been better, though even here it is hard to see whether the same result could have been achieved with more rapid aid,” the magazine writes.

Another way to measure success is to assess whether the Biden team has effectively countered Putin’s attempts to redefine escalation thresholds that could set a dangerous precedent for the future.

“This conflict is not just about Ukraine or the rules-based international order. It is also about how the United States and the West more broadly should think about escalation thresholds in a new era of great-power competition that often bears little resemblance to the Cold War. From the start, Putin has sought to enforce red lines designed to keep the status quo parties — the United States and NATO allies — from helping Ukraine. Slowly, carefully, and deliberately, Biden has succeeded in undermining those red lines,” the newspaper stated.

Russia’s Nuclear Threats – What’s Reported

Recall that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said that Russian threats of nuclear weapons were taken seriously enough by the Joe Biden administration . He said that it was probably China that kept Putin from using them against Ukraine. 

Blinken said Washington was “very concerned” about Russian threats because, according to the Americans, Putin was at least “considering” the option of using nuclear weapons against Ukraine

(C)UNIAN 2025