Joe Biden's bad deal
Brittany Griner for Victor Bout exemplifies some of what's wrong with the modern left
Joe Biden has reached a deal with Vladimir Putin that will free female basketball star Brittany Griner from Russian captivity. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that (1) the deal will set free arms dealer Victor Bout, the Merchant of Death and (2) Paul Whelan, the retired Marine, is not covered by the deal. He will remain in Russia, where he has been held for nearly four years.
The bad news outweighs the good.
In my view, this deal reflects the misguided priorities of Joe Biden and American liberals. Priority goes to a black sports celebrity rather than to a former American Marine.
Team Biden says it’s working to free Whelan. I don’t doubt it. But this was a question of priorities.
Bout’s services are a huge potential asset to Russia, which must be why Putin went to great lengths — sentencing Griner to prison for ten years — to secure his release. In exchange for it, Biden should have insisted on the release of Griner and Whelan.
If that deal truly couldn’t have been reached, Biden should have held out for Whelan, who has been in captivity for almost four years, rather than Griner whom the Russians have held for one.
Instead, if Biden is to secure Whelan’s release, he likely will have to give Putin another prisoner — presumably another asset to Russia.
The Griner deal will please two of Biden’s most core constituencies — African-American leaders and, above all, the entertainment-sports industrial complex. But deals like this one — especially such one-sided deals — endanger Americans. They encourage our adversaries to take hostages which, in effect Griner was.
And make no mistake, this deal is about as one-sided as it gets. As Ed Morrissey says, Bout helped stoke conflicts around the world, from Afghanistan to Colombia, where he supplied arms to FARC at a time when they targeted Americans (among others). He is also rumored to have supplied arms to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Bout is not an old man. He’s 55 years old. That’s young enough to be an asset to Russia. As noted above, Russia must see Bout as asset. Why else would Putin have been so intent on securing his release?
By contrast to Bout, Griner’s drug offense, assuming she was guilty as charged by the Russians, is trivial. Moreover, Griner’s release, while it mitigates an injustice, won’t advance any U.S. geo-political interest. If anything, it will harm our interests by adding to the danger Americans face when they find themselves in enemy countries.
A portion of Paul Whelan’s family tweeted a statement applauding Biden’s deal. I assume those who issued it want to stay on the good side of Team Biden in the hope that it will agree to another one-sided deal — one that will bring Paul Whelan home.
However, Whelan’s brother opted for candor. He tweeted:
How do you [Paul] continue to survive, day after day, when you know that your government has failed twice to free you from a foreign prison?
The Griner-for-Bout deal exemplifies major flaws in the Biden ethos and that of the modern Democratic party: Lack of respect for military service (about which Sen. Tom Cotton has written an excellent new book); over-eagerness to please the celebrity culture (especially its African-American wing); failure to appreciate (or worry about) the long-term consequences of short-term, feel-good arrangements; and (most alarmingly) unwillingness to drive hard bargains with enemy leaders.
“The Griner-for-Bout deal exemplifies major flaws in the Biden ethos and that of the modern Democratic party: Lack of respect for military service (about which Sen. Tom Cotton has written an excellent new book); over-eagerness to please the celebrity culture (especially its African-American wing); failure to appreciate (or worry about) the long-term consequences of short-term, feel-good arrangements; and (most alarmingly) unwillingness to drive hard bargains with enemy leaders.”
That is a succinct summary of the rot within the modern Democrat Party.
However wicked various politicians and political movements have proven themselves to be, rushing to insinuate corrupt motives without evidence takes us one more step down a road that is tearing America apart. Naturally the thought occurred to me that Biden might have made Griner a priority because of celebrity culture and her race, but stating this so quickly and confidently is as misguided as attributing a black woman's success to preferences without evidence.
Then I read Allahpundit's take at The Dispatch:
"But I wonder if Moscow didn’t insist on excluding Whelan from a deal involving Griner simply to inflame cultural tensions in the U.S. ...On the other hand, if the president did what he eventually ended up doing, bringing Griner home while leaving Whelan behind temporarily, he’d end up taking cultural flak from the right. Offering Griner while holding back Whelan was probably the Russians’ way of teeing up American conservatives to complain that our woke Democratic administration values the life of a famous gay black woman more than it does the life of a white man who served this country in the Marines."