Foreign policy is the name of the game on today’s edition of The Editors. After much back and forth with Germany, the U.S. has declared that it will deliver some tanks to Ukraine. Charlie believes that, overall, “Biden’s done a really good job on Ukraine. I think that Mitch McConnell’s done a good job on Ukraine, too, in his legislative role. But Biden’s the president, and I think he has largely got it right.”
Charlie does support sending the tanks, but he quibbles with the reasoning behind why this “particular decision [would] be the one that was treated as an unacceptable escalation.” While he’s sympathetic to those who are nervous about this move, he believes that, ultimately, Biden “has done a good job of balancing the moral imperative and strategic imperative and American imperative to help Ukraine with a broader understanding of the risks in a way that actually is admirable.”
Other countries have followed America’s lead, with Poland sending Leopard 2 tanks to the beleaguered nation. MBD and Jack see this move as “canny statesmanship” (Jack’s term) from Poland, and MBD says that “Poland is kind of the most anxious to kind of offload these Leopard 2 tanks into Ukraine. . . . Anti-tank missiles from Russia were able to destroy the Leopards. Meanwhile, Poland is planning on replacing these tanks with like Korean-made Black Panthers in the long run, and so in some ways . . . what you’re seeing too is Poland saying . . . ‘Okay, we can kind of give this away, and in the heat of the moment we can also lobby . . . the United States or other powers to kind of backfill some of our weaponry with the more advanced stuff that we want in the longer term.’”
Our four panelists, but particularly MBD, have varying perspectives on what type of aid the U.S. should be giving Ukraine, and they cover a lot of ground in this show. Listen below for the entire conversation.