President Joe Biden correctly reflected the world’s outrage last year when Russia amassed troops on the border with Ukraine then invaded with levels of brutality that included the targeting of schools, refugee encampments and hospitals. Russian President Vladimir Putin now faces arrest for war crimes. Undaunted by U.S. criticism, he has annexed two occupied Ukrainian regions on top of his 2014 annexation of Crimea.
On Feb. 23, 2022, Biden tried to rally the world against Putin, saying that “what literally is at stake is not just Ukraine, it’s freedom. The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country. … Since World War II, nothing like that has happened. Things have changed radically. And we have to — we have to make sure we change them back.”
This week, instead of echoing Biden’s outrage, Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow to celebrate his friendship with Putin. Other leaders have been more restrained but nonetheless reluctant to side with the United States. That at least partially can be attributed to the blatant hypocrisy behind Biden’s position. Twenty years ago this week, the United States amassed more than 100,000 troops on the border of Iraq and invaded that country, citing justifications that turned out to be baseless. It’s a historical fact that belies Biden’s assertion that nothing like the Ukraine invasion had happened since World War II.
The United States tortured prisoners. Government contractors regularly opened fire on civilians. Hospitals were attacked. Children were maimed by U.S.-deployed cluster bombs. America’s hands are hardly clean, which helps explain why Putin and Xi stated their rejection of U.S. lecturing on how other countries should behave.
Putin has been surprisingly quiet about another troublesome U.S. record — the one in support of Israel and its ongoing occupation, settlement and annexation of territory seized by force. In the decades since Israel seized the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Jordan-administered West Bank, Russia has joined other nations in sponsoring U.N. resolutions condemning Israel’s actions, only to have those resolutions repeatedly vetoed by Washington.
Until three weeks ago, Israel was among the countries reluctant to publicly condemn Putin. Persistent pleas by Ukraine for Israeli defensive military assistance went ignored. The historical perspective helps explain why. Israel has long insisted that it annexed the Golan Heights for security purposes, and it refuses to engage in any discussion about the West Bank’s future until the Palestinian leadership agrees to a list of one-sided preconditions. Meanwhile, Israel resumes its steady process of approving more and more Jewish settlements — de facto annexation.
Despite U.N. resolutions declaring the seizure of territory by force as inadmissible, Putin can point to an ample historical precedent to ask why he’s being held to a standard that doesn’t apply to others. On that score, sadly, he has a point.
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