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In the wake of Zelensky’s powerful speech to Congress, the Democratic president announced “unprecedented” military aid, yet failed to satisfy either Kyiv or the Republican opposition and some more warlike US media.
From its first denunciations of the threat that Russia posed to Ukraine to its flurry of sanctions announcements against Moscow, the management by the White House of this latent and then devastating crisis has continued to be written at the whim of a double temporality, in the form of a big gap between the speed of communication and the prudence of actions.
That is, always one step ahead for intelligence, which the Biden administration has effectively placed at the center of an unprecedented strategy of transparency and anticipation of Russian operations, in order to thwart ambushes and other disinformation enterprises. But with, systematically, as a setback of the grievances expressed by the Ukrainian State or, from Washington itself, by the mobilization of Congress, when it is a question for the executive of responding to the Russian invasion by means of concrete provisions – from the long-delayed embargo on Russian energy imports to the material support to be provided to the forces defending Ukraine at arm’s length.
For the three weeks that the war has lasted, the measures have been piling up, with a speed, a magnitude of their effects, and a coordination of the nations that join them, of which we can hardly discern a modern equivalent. And yet, most leave to those who claimed them the se…