WEAK LEADERS EMBOLDEN BULLYING DICTATORS

It would be interesting to see what grades Joe Biden and Kamala Harris received in history when they were in high school and college. Based on their handling of the crisis in Ukraine, I would be inclined to believe they failed miserably. Unfortunately, there are many people who don’t have an appreciation of history, especially the period surrounding World War II.

When Poland was resurrected as a country in 1918 after World War I - just like Ukraine emerged as an independent country following the fall of the Soviet Union - Poland entered into alliances with Great Britain and France promising to defend Poland militarily from aggression either from Germany or Russia. Had Britain and France deployed troops and weaponry to Poland in keeping with their military agreements when German forces began amassing along the Polish border, the Soviet Union never would have signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, and Hitler never would have invaded Poland. Owing to the combined strength of Britain, France, and Poland at that time, a two front war would have surely ended in defeat for Germany. Unfortunately, Britain and France did not prepare for the invasion by deploying troops, planes, and weapons to reinforce the Polish military; Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 precipitating the beginning of World War II; and Poland in the end suffered the highest percentage loss of life of any country during the war. Just as France failed to defend Poland in keeping with the 1921 Franco-Polish Alliance, and Great Britain reneged on its 1939 Anglo-Polish military alliance, so too did the United States and Great Britain fail to enforce the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances they signed with Russian and Ukraine in 1994 during the Clinton presidency. According to that Memorandum, the U.S., Russia, and Great Britain promised to assure Ukraine:

1. respect for its sovereignty,
2. the inviolability of its international borders, and
3. an abstention from threat or use of force in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing as many as 3,000 nuclear weapons, which had made it the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world at that time.

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Joseph Biden has proven himself to be the Neville Chamberlain of our day

One can only wonder what Eastern European countries like Poland and Romania may be thinking today when they see that not only did Russia violate the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 by invading Ukraine, but so too did the U.S. and Great Britain by not doing more to defend it when Russian forces began amassing along Ukraine's border. As soon as a buildup of Russian troops was detected on the Ukrainian border, the U.S. and Great Britain should have immediately deployed forces within Ukraine to enforce the Budapest Memorandum that was signed by the four major powers five years before Vladimir Putin became the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation in 1999. Because U.S. and British forces were not deployed to support Ukrainian forces, just as the French and British failed to reinforce Polish forces, Putin, like Hitler, was emboldened to attack a weaker neighbor without fear of being defeated. . We can only hope a Winston Churchill will emerge before the world becomes engulfed in another world war owing to the incompetency of current leaders to deal with dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.