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U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about Ukraine in the East Room of the White House, on Feb. 15.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press

Once again Joe Biden is discovering not the prerogatives of the presidency but the limits of his office. Once again the person inevitably described as the most powerful figure on the face of the Earth is discovering that he is all but powerless – to rally Americans to find common ground at home, to shape global affairs, perhaps even to stop a resurgent Russia from invading Ukraine.

As 150,000 armoured troops mass on the border separating Russia from Ukraine, Mr. Biden sits 7,800 kilometres away with the greatest military force ever assembled at his command but neither the will nor the means – nor the taste – to deploy it. As he confronts a nation defying the nostrums and norms of diplomatic life, Mr. Biden is confronting how circumscribed he is. And as Russia threatens war, the U.S. President is forced to come to terms with watching the Russian President show his capacity to exert his will without restraint.

That’s how it looks on the surface, and that’s how it has played out – thus far.

Ukraine shows unity as West sees no sign of Russian pullback

In Ukraine, the drums of war beat softly

Then again, maybe the tough-talking Russian President, beset by internal critics, is a strongman who isn’t as strong as he appears. And maybe the U.S. President, with his own domestic divisions, is making a virtue of his constraints, perhaps doing so artfully enough to defuse this crisis and confound his critics domestically and globally.

This week Mr. Biden pleaded for continued negotiations (“We should give the diplomacy every chance to succeed”), sought to exert moral suasion against Russian President Vladimir Putin (“The world will not forget that Russia chose needless death and destruction”) and mustered support for economic sanctions (“long-term consequences to undermine Russia’s ability to compete economically”).

Mr. Biden has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to fight Russians in Ukraine. Just as some French citizens on the eve of the Second World War recoiled at the notion that they should “die for Danzig,” Americans have no motivation to be killed for Kyiv.

Armaments, yes. Troops on the ground, no – unless, the President warned, Americans are targeted by Russian forces or if Russia invades any of the NATO countries. And the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? A sure victim of a Russian invasion but a powerful pawn if Russia doesn’t.

Not since Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 – an offensive that drew France and Great Britain into the conflict and triggered the Second World War – has one major European country attacked another. Though unspoken, one of Mr. Putin’s rationales echoes Adolf Hitler’s: the need to create a buffer against a rival bloc. For those in the West, this possesses eerie resonances of an earlier Hitler initiative, his seizure of the Sudetenland, which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain characterized in 1938 much the way public opinion in North America might regard the Ukraine imbroglio today: as a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.”

Many analysts believe Mr. Putin is motivated not only by concerns about being surrounded and squeezed by hostile states but by dissent at home. There is perhaps an element of Shakespeare in this crisis, a leader willing, as the Bard wrote at the end of the 16th century in Henry IV, Part 2, to “busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels.”

And yet historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his classic 1987 book The Age of Empire, warned that “insecure regimes are well advised to avoid adventurous foreign policies.”

That has not stopped Mr. Putin, at least to the point of threatening aggressive action that perhaps is designed to mask his domestic insecurity. At the same time, Mr. Biden surely has reason to feel insecure, with his 2020 rival threatening a rematch in 2024 and with a Democratic majority in the Senate only by virtue of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s ability to break a 50-50 tie.

As a result, Mr. Biden is taking a page from the traditional American playbook, speaking of rights and values and the prerogatives of small nations – the stuff of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, heady words of idealism, but so airy that France’s Georges Clemenceau dismissed them at the Versailles treaty negotiations by noting that “God Almighty has only 10.”

Right now Mr. Biden has few cards to play and is likely gambling that Mr. Putin himself is gambling, for it may well be the case that the Russian leader is employing the movement of troops he does not intend to send into battle as a means of winning separate concessions from the West.

The principal concession Mr. Putin may be seeking: a pledge that Ukraine not be admitted to NATO.

That may be easy enough to grant, though it would be a blow to Ukraine – but far less a blow than the movement of lethal Russian weaponry and troops across the border. One important hurdle: Mr. Biden’s remarks this week that one of the principles the United States cherishes is the right of nations to associate with others without restriction.

The “overwhelming international condemnation” that Mr. Biden said would be the consequence of a Russian invasion likely means nothing to Mr. Putin. But the pipeline and assurances that Ukraine will not become a dagger at Russia’s back may well have an effect. In the end, it may not only be Mr. Biden who is weaker than many of his Cold War presidential predecessors. Mr. Putin may be as well.

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