WaPo: Opinion: The secret planning that kept the White House ahead of Russia

Key point: The Russian leader made a catastrophic mistake by overestimating his own strength and underestimating the determination of Biden and his team.

WaPo: Opinion: The secret planning that kept the White House ahead of Russia

• The first instruction Secretary of State Antony Blinken received from President Biden was to “reset” American alliances and partnerships overseas so that the United States could meet the challenges ahead. This strategy will prove decisive in the fight against Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
  
• The Biden administration‘s covert planning began in April 2021 when Russia massed around 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. The buildup turned out to be a feint, but Blinken and other officials discussed US intelligence on Russia’s actions with British, French and German leaders at a NATO meeting in Brussels this month. -the. Their message was, “We have to prepare,” said a senior State Department official.
  
• By avoiding a crisis with Germany early on, Blinken said, “the net result was that the foundation was in place when the Russians launched the aggression.”
  
• This American diplomacy is highly appreciated by Emily Haber, the German ambassador in Washington. “The wording of the joint statement [about Nord Stream] was vague, but the administration trusted the former – and later the new – chancellor to act on it. That’s what happened,” she told me. “A sublime form, I thought, of partnership management.”
  
• During the build-up to war, Biden sometimes appeared to speak poorly. But he had a clear vision of the changing strategic terrain. Early on, for example, Biden concluded that the best way to derail Putin’s hope of splitting up NATO would be for two strong new members, Finland and Sweden, to join.
  
• The Biden administration’s organizing of this coalition to support Ukraine may seem simple in retrospect. But it was a complicated coordination of diplomatic, military and intelligence resources that brought together dozens of nations at what could prove to be a pivotal point in modern history. Putin thought he could ride through Biden and the West to an easy victory in Kyiv. The Russian leader made a catastrophic mistake by overestimating his own strength and underestimating the determination of Biden and his team.

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