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For months, senior Senators had traded proposals back and forth, mostly in private and with a quiet assumption that they could agree on a unified response should Russia invade Ukraine. After all, American solidarity with the West had pulled the world through the post-World War II era and kept a relative peace in the years since the former Soviet days. The ghosts of Ike, JFK and even Ronnie weren’t that far gone.
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But with war drums echoing in Kyiv, Moscow and Washington alike by mid-February—not to mention in NATO Headquarters in Brussels—the pressure had begun to seem insurmountable. With as many as 190,000 Russian forces poised to lay siege to Ukraine, NATO seemingly incapable of defending the non-member state against the exact aggression the alliance was built to counter, and senior Ukrainians themselves already fleeing the country, the tendency for inertia took over in D.C. The good-faith talks collapsed earlier this week as the Republicans and Democrats seemed to be sliding apart, especially when it came to the objective: were lawmakers trying to punish the Russians, or deter them from future actions? Getting to yes is difficult if you don’t see eye to eye on the original question. If comic books teach us anything, it’s that the origin story matters.
In the end? The Senate passed a toothless rebuke.
“We believe that it should say, ‘Nothing in this resolution is to be construed as an authorization for war,’ and ‘Nothing in this resolution is to be construed as authorizing [the] introduction of troops into Ukraine,’” Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said.
Facing the reality that sanctions require 60 votes to clear the Senate and both sides are divided over whether to impose sanctions now or to hold some back to make an invasion a more painful choice, the leadership in both parties came…
Source : time
