HE MAY YET TURN OUT TO BE THE GAVRILO PRINCIP OF THE 21ST CENTURY: Hunter Biden Is a Geopolitical Disaster: His Ukraine dealings corrupted our government, impeached a president, and may have prefigured a war.
Mr. Biden was unlucky in his son, but he also allowed a family environment in which milking connection to Joe was de rigueur. Paralysis seizes our elite over what has ensued. Suppose a journalistic tick-tock were written today similar to 1969’s “On Borrowed Time,” Leonard Mosley’s microscopic account of events between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Today’s version would include: Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, President Trump’s impeachment for asking about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, the laptop episode in which Russia was framed as an imaginary culprit to change the subject from Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.
What did Vladimir Putin make of these events? How might they have figured in his bet that the U.S. would let Kyiv fall into his pocket? Maybe one day he’ll tell us.
Mr. Biden ultimately summoned the NATO muscle memory to stand up to Russia’s invasion, and this column congratulated him. But Republicans in an election year can rightly ask what else exactly was an American president supposed to do? They can also ask what Mr. Biden failed to do. His surrender on Nord Stream 2, after Mr. Trump quashed the pipeline, sent a message of appeasement. In the war’s opening days, his administration seemed unduly eager to cede Kyiv to the Russian advance and spirit President Zelensky to safety.
At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?
The story here is all the more remarkable for being untold. In short order, the Hunter mess has managed to taint our intelligence community, the FBI, IRS and now the Justice Department. If news sense is not completely dulled by neurotic compliance, some editors must also be starting to see the outlines of another approaching debacle, in which skeletons from the Biden closet elect Mr. Trump.
Neurotic compliance is all they have left.