“The Biden administration will impose a range of retaliatory measures against Russia on Thursday in response to Moscow’s alleged election interference, a widespread hacking campaign and other malign activity,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Using a new executive order, the measure will expand the existing prohibitions on U.S. banks trading in Russian government debt… Previous prohibitions targeting portions of Russian sovereign debt shook Russia’s markets and added to its economic woes.”
George Packer: “If the purpose of the Afghan War was to prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan to stage attacks on the United States, America could have declared victory and gone home years ago. But if the purpose was also to help build a durable state—to prevent the Taliban from taking power again, destroying the hard-won progress made by millions of Afghan citizens, and perhaps allowing radical Islamists to regain a base on Afghan soil—then the longest war in U.S. history is ending in defeat.”
“President Joe Biden’s announcement that all American forces will be withdrawn by September 11—a neat two decades after the attacks that propelled the U.S. into Afghanistan—simply gives a date after which the clock on the demise of the Afghan government will begin to tick.”
Eliot Cohen: “This is, then, a humbling moment for the United States.”
President Joe Biden has proposed a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in a third country “in the coming months,” following a marked cooling of relations between Washington and Moscow, the Financial Times reports.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports Russia called the United States an adversary and told U.S. warships to stay well away from Crimea “for their own good.”
David Ignatius: “Biden sometimes comes across as a genial gaffer, pliable in the way of a career politician. But Tuesday’s announcement shows that he is also a stubborn and resolute man. Friends say he was bruised by the Afghanistan battles of a decade ago and took away some grudges. When convinced he’s right, he’s prepared to take big risks — as he has this week.”
“Can the CIA maintain a clandestine force in Afghanistan that’s strong enough to operate against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups? Will drones be effective, if they must now be based in the Persian Gulf, with long flight times to Afghanistan and much shorter periods over potential target areas? We don’t know the answers. Biden is rolling the dice.”
George Packer: Biden can redeem his mistake.
New York Times: “The United States will increase its military presence in Germany by about 500 personnel to better defend Europe, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said during a visit to the country on Tuesday.”
“The statement not only reverses the previous administration’s plans to withdraw up to 12,000 of the roughly 36,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany. It also expands the U.S. footprint at a time when Europe is growing uneasy over Russian troop movements near the border with Ukraine.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) slammed President Biden’s plans to fully withdraw all troops from Afghanistan, calling the decision “dumber than dirt and devilishy dangerous,” The Hill reports.
He added: “President Biden will have, in essence, cancelled an insurance policy against another 9/11.”
President Joe Biden on Tuesday spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, directly raising concerns about the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border, the Associated Press reports.
Biden also told Putin the U.S. would “act firmly in defense of its national interests” regarding Russian cyber intrusions and election interference.
“President Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, people familiar with the plans said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that first drew the United States into its longest war,” the Washington Post reports.
New York Times: “The operation raised the question of whether Israel was acting on its own to strike Iran and undermine American diplomacy as the Biden administration seeks to reconstitute a nuclear agreement. Or, alternatively, whether Israel was operating in concert with American interests, carrying out dirty work that would weaken Iran’s negotiating position in the talks.”
“The White House was saying almost nothing in public on Monday about the apparent explosion inside Iran’s Natanz facility, below more than 20 feet of reinforced concrete, which destroyed the power supply that keeps the centrifuges spinning at supersonic speeds, enriching uranium. … White House and State Department officials said they had no idea whether the Iranians would show up in Vienna again on Wednesday, when the talks were scheduled to resume.”
The Biden administration is vetting Ken Salazar, a former senator and Interior secretary, to serve as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Axios reports.
“The Biden administration recently decided to keep the Trump-appointed US ambassador on the job in Moscow for the foreseeable future, demonstrating a willingness to nurture areas of stability in the US-Russia relationship after it got off to a tumultuous start,” CNN reports.
“John Sullivan has been on the job for almost a year and a half. He is viewed by administration officials as a steady hand as the administration ramps up the pressure on Russia for taking actions to undermine the US and democratic values broadly.”
President Biden is preparing to nominate a slate of ambassadors, and among them will be Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and a key Biden backer in Arizona last year, Politico reports.
McCain is being vetted as the U.S. envoy to the United Nations Food Programme in Rome, a “coveted ambassador post in Western Europe in what would be his administration’s first Republican appointee to a Senate-confirmed position.”
“Iran’s foreign ministry has blamed Israel for an attack on a nuclear plant, as US intelligence sources claimed the incident would set back Tehran’s nuclear program by nine months,” The Guardian reports
“Israel has not confirmed it was behind a cyber-attack on the heavily guarded Natanz facility, but its security officials have done little to dispel the notion.”
Politico: “Jennifer Davis, the de facto chief of staff to Amb. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, is a career Foreign Service officer who has worked at the State Department for 18 years.”
“The decision to revoke Davis’s clearance came after a three-year administrative investigation conducted by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized China’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in a Meet the Press interview, arguing that the country’s “failure” to cooperate in the early stages of the virus led to the situation getting “out of hand.”
Said Blinken: “I think China knows that in the early stages of Covid, it didn’t do what it needed to do, which was to, in real time, give access to international experts, in real time to share information, in real time to provide real transparency.”
He added: “One result of that failure is that the virus got out of hand faster and with, I think, much more egregious results than it might otherwise.”
“The head of China’s Centers for Disease Control admitted that the efficacy of Chinese coronavirus vaccines is ‘not high’ and they may require improvements, marking a rare admission from a government that has staked its international credibility on its doses,” the Washington Post reports.
Politico: “Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses abroad while trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine made using the previously experimental messenger RNA, or mRNA, process.”
New York Times: “At least 300,000 more people died last year during the coronavirus pandemic than were reported in Russia’s most widely cited official statistics.”
“Not all of those deaths were necessarily from the virus. But they belie President Vladimir V. Putin’s contention that the country has managed the virus better than most. In reality, a New York Times analysis of mortality data shows deaths in Russia during the pandemic last year were 28 percent higher than normal — an increase in mortality greater than in the United States and most countries in Europe.”
“For much of the last year, Russia has appeared more focused on the public-relations and economic aspects of the pandemic than on fighting the virus itself.”
“Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear facility lost power Sunday just hours after starting up new advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium faster, the latest incident to strike the site amid negotiations over the tattered atomic accord with world powers,” the AP reports.
“As Iranian officials investigated the outage, many Israeli media outlets offered the same assessment that a cyberattack darkened Natanz and damaged a facility that is home to sensitive centrifuges. While the reports offered no sourcing for the evaluation, Israeli media maintains a close relationship with the country’s military and intelligence agencies.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.