Help safeguard Ukraine
By David French, Opinion columnist
I was in Kyiv in 2023, and I was there when the Russian missiles were coming in. I saw the courage of the Ukrainian people. I saw the lines of ambulances of casualties coming in from the front. I saw the damage and the destruction all around Kyiv from Russian aggression.
There is a lot of concern that after Donald Trump is sworn in, he’s essentially going to cut off Ukraine, and that he’ll be cutting off Ukraine at a particularly dangerous time in the war. And so here’s where President Joe Biden has an opportunity to exert some real leadership.
From the beginning of the war, Western powers froze more than $200 billion in Russian assets. That is a sum of money that could really assist in propping up the Ukrainian economy, propping up Ukrainian arms purchases. It would be a tremendous assistance to the Ukrainian war effort, plus a real blow to Russia if it were permanently deprived of those assets.
And so, the proposal is that Biden spend at least some of his remaining time in office trying to persuade our Western allies to not just freeze the assets but seize the assets for the use of the Ukrainian war effort, thus dealing an immense financial blow to Russia and providing a financial windfall to Ukraine that Ukraine could use to continue its war.
If you’re going to be talking to historians 100 years from now, it is certain that they’re going to be talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine as one of the hinge moments in our history if an aggressor like Vladimir Putin is granted a victory in circumstances like this.
That is a direct threat to the security relationships that have kept the world safe from a great-power war for so long. What may well happen when Trump takes power is he just cuts off Ukraine. If we cut off Ukraine, not only will Ukraine be financially crippled, it could be militarily crippled in some very important ways. But the thing that is not as obvious is actually: The Russians are under pressure, too. A lot of people forget this. The Russian military is taking extraordinary losses right now, both in men and equipment. And so both Ukraine and Russia could be theoretically reaching near the limit of their ability to prosecute this war.
Right now, the danger has been that Ukraine would be reaching the critical point before Russia. If you could get Ukraine sufficient support in these last couple of months before the Trump administration takes power, it might be in a position of greater strength if and when ceasefire or armistice negotiations take place.
Appoint judges
By David Firestone, deputy editor of the editorial board
The big arena for stopping a lot of what Donald Trump wants to do is not going to be Congress, but it’s going to be the courts. The most important thing that President Joe Biden and the Senate can do from now till Jan. 3 is to appoint as many federal judges as possible — both to the district level and to the appellate level.
If they leave any vacancies open on the federal courts, those are going to be filled by Trump once he gets into office. He’s going to use every one of those openings to appoint one of his judges, and they’re probably going to be even more extreme than they were during his first term.
There are still some senators in the Democratic caucus who are raising objections to some potential nominees that are getting in the way of full confirmation, and it’s unfortunate because this is going to be the most important battleground going forward once Trump takes over. Virtually all of his plans are going to be immediately challenged by lawyers from around the country in the federal courts.
People understandably look at the Supreme Court because those are the most prominent judges in the country, but really, they should be taking a closer look at lower-court judges, both at the district and the circuit court level, because in many cases those are the judges who make decisions that affect people most closely.
Take a stand on Gaza and Sudan
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion columnist
For decades I’ve reported about humanitarian crises around the world, and in recent months I’ve reported both from the Middle East and from Sudan. In the final weeks of President Joe Biden’s term in office, I’m thinking about how he can best use his influence and his political capital to advance American interests around the globe.
Biden came into office with a reputation as a real foreign policy expert. To my surprise, I’ve actually been somewhat disappointed with where he has left foreign policy.
Overall, there’s a series of historic lapses, including the growing atrocities in Sudan and a looming famine there. And maybe above all the war in the Gaza Strip, perpetuated with American weaponry, so that conflict, I think, has become the albatross around Biden’s neck.
Sudan is probably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis right now, and Biden has been publicly silent about the role of our partner, the United Arab Emirates, in providing weapons to the most brutal of the militias there in ways that perpetuate mass murder, mass rape and the famine.
So Biden should publicly speak up about the United Arab Emirates, and I think that speaking up can raise the costs of this deplorable role on the part of the UAE and can lead it to play a more constructive role there.
And in the case of Gaza, it’s time for Biden to adhere to American law, which says that offensive weapons can’t be shipped to a country as long as it’s impeding the flow of humanitarian aid. Every aid worker I’ve spoken to has no doubt that is what Israel is doing.
I think the next four years are going to be a really difficult time for those of us who believe that our foreign policy has to reflect values as well as interests. But in truth, the last four years haven’t been so great, either. And this is Biden’s chance to begin, albeit too late, to remedy that.
Protect lands
By Binyamin Appelbaum, Editorial board member
A president in his final weeks in office has limited power to do new things, but there is one power that I would particularly like to see President Joe Biden use, which is the power of a president to designate new national monuments. What that means is that he has the power to take federal lands and to place them in a protected status that largely precludes their use for commercial purposes, like logging or mining, and reserves them for recreational purposes, and simply to be preserved land in a state of nature.
I would particularly like to see Biden designate three areas of land in California that are in different parts of the state. One is in the northern part of the state; it’s a region of volcanic land. The second is adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park. It’s called the Chukwalla Mountains. And the third is a stretch of desert down by the Mexican border. All told, that is about 1.2 million acres of land, stretching from north to south in California.
What’s special about those three pieces of land is not just that they are beautiful, and not just that they are fairly pristine, but that there is community support for preserving them. In many parts of the West, the designation of lands is extremely controversial. Big fights break out between local politicians and the federal government. But in this case, the California Legislature has voted unanimously in favor of designating those three tracts. The Native American tribes that have lived on those lands for a long time are the leading advocates for preserving those lands. There are always some people who are opposed, but in this case, there aren’t as many as you often find. These are easy ones. These are the slam dunks.
It is extremely difficult to remove protections once they’re imposed. The law says that once we’ve made this decision as a nation, through our elected leader, the decision sticks.
It may be the last chance for Biden to do this, but it also may be the last chance for any president. Congress passed a law more than 100 years ago that gives the president the power to protect public lands, and many of the places presidents have chosen to protect later become national parks, including the Grand Canyon. Some Republicans want to get rid of that law. They want to prevent future presidents from protecting land on their own authority.
There would still be a process for doing it, but it would be much harder. It would require a vote of Congress, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very much these days. So this power that Biden has may not exist the next time we have a president who is interested in preserving public land. So there’s an additional urgency here for Biden to exercise this authority while it still exists.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
