Donald Trump’s refusal to engage in a smooth transfer of power during the interregnum in 2020-21 pales into insignificance compared with President Joe Biden’s sabotage of Trump’s election pledge to end the war in Ukraine in the transfer of power back to Trump in 2024-25.
During an interregnum the outgoing president and his administration are supposed to assist implementing the policies which the new president has been elected to pursue. It is simply not true, as Joe Biden apologists claimed, that he has a mandate to pursue his own foreign policy on Ukraine to the end of his term on January 20, 2025 despite its rejection by the electorate.
The interregnum between the election of a new president and his assumption of power was much longer in the early days of the Republic when it lasted from the date of the election in November to March 4. It was shortened to January 20 in 1933 because it was recognised that a newly elected president may need to implement his policies urgently. Abraham Lincoln faced a civil war in 1860 and Franklin D Roosevelt the Great Depression in 1932 but were unable to respond quickly to those crises.
The obverse happened in the crisis in the war between Russia and Ukraine because, although President Biden had no mandate to escalate the war in Ukraine, he did so regardless and plunged US-Russia relations into a dangerous path contrary to the wishes of the vast majority of Americans.
Trump and his running mate JD Vance were elected to end the war in Ukraine and Biden’s decision to authorise the use of long-range missiles on Russian territory knowing that this would change Russia’s nuclear calculus was as reckless as it was undemocratic. According to Donald Trump Junior, who is politically close to his father, the military industrial complex wanted to trigger World War III before his father has a chance to bring peace, which suggests he was not even consulted.
The danger of allowing the military industrial complex to disturb world peace was first raised by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address between the end of his presidency in 1961 and the beginning of the Kennedy administration: “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military industrial complex” he warned.
It seems that Biden, who is not always all there, allowed himself to be manipulated by the military industrial complex in cahoots with the UK government to escalate the war in Ukraine to frustrate Trump’s imminent peace initiative.
Unlike the Americans, the whole British establishment is hawkish on Russia. No sooner had Biden given the green light, USand British long-range missiles were launched by Ukraine at Russia. Unsurprisingly, the Russians responded by firing an intermediary ballistic missile (IBM) with multiple warheads at Ukraine that was very destructive as well as full of geo-strategic symbolism. Did all those clever people at the CIA and MI6 not anticipate that Russia would strike back hard?
As the old song goes, anything you can do I can do better, except that the IBM was followed by a warning from Russian President Putin that countries that arm Ukraine with long-range missiles to strike Russia are themselves targets against which Russia may retaliate.
World War III is now not as far-fetched as it seemed when Trump was elected on November 5 to stop the war. So much so that schoolchildren in the UK are beginning to show anxiety about its likelihood. And yet the British people are not being prepared for a possible war against Russia as they were during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s.
Most British people accept unquestioningly the government’s line that the Russians would not go to war with Nato as they are not as strong. It does not even occur to them that the UK’s involvement in marshalling the use of long-range missile against Russia might be thought belligerent in Moscow. So far as they are concerned, Russia invaded another country and the UK is doing no more than lawfully assisting Ukraine in defence of freedom and democracy in Europe.
The UK government’s reasoning appears to be that because Russia had previously allowed red lines she set to be crossed with impunity, she would do the same even when advanced American and British missiles rain down on her. It is an alarming state of affairs that shows a lack of understanding of the Russian character.
In a recent article on September 30, 2024 Nina Khruscheva, professor of international affairs in New York and great granddaughter of Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet Russian leader during the Cuban missile crisis, cited from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to make the point that Russians expect a forceful response to humiliation lest they be thought a “trembling creature.”
She warned leaders in the US and UK that they are gravely mistaken if they believe that Putin is too rational to go nuclear: “western observers seem largely convinced that Russia would not actually deploy nuclear weapons because there is no winning a nuclear war.” But, she warned, Putin may be prepared to risk nuclear retaliation as the price of standing up to those who seek to humiliate Russia.
Nina Khrushcheva is not oblivious to Russian aggression in Ukraine, but as the descendent of Nikita Khruschev, she knows very well that the reason why her great grandfather was deposed was the humiliation caused in Russia when he backed down in the Cuban nuclear crisis with America in 1962.
Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a former part time judge
