CIVIS AMERICANUS SUM
U.S. Warns Americans Abroad Not to Count on a Rescue
By Michael Crowley - February 16, 2022
WASHINGTON
— As U.S. officials grew convinced this month that Russia might invade
Ukraine, they implored American citizens to leave the country
immediately — and added a grim addendum.
No rescuers would be coming for those who stayed behind, they said.
It
was a point President Biden drove home last week by insisting he would
not use the military to extract anyone trapped by a Russian attack.
“All
Americans should leave Ukraine,” he told NBC News, adding that he could
not risk a clash with Russian troops that might trigger World War III.
The
fallout from last summer’s chaotic evacuation of Americans from
Afghanistan appears to have shaped Mr. Biden’s approach to the Ukraine
crisis in multiple ways, from more explicit coordination with European
allies, who in some cases felt sidelined from Afghanistan planning, to
greater transparency about the most dire intelligence assessments.
But
in Ukraine and beyond, U.S. officials have also focused on a more
specific worry: that Americans living in foreign danger zones would
wrongly assume that an Air Force C-17 cargo plane — like those that
transported thousands out of Afghanistan during the final days of the
U.S. withdrawal — would be their escape option of last resort.
In
warnings to Americans abroad over the past few months, first in a
teetering Ethiopia and now in Ukraine, Biden officials have made clear
that the Afghanistan rescue operation was a one-off.
“The United
States does not typically do mass evacuations,” Jen Psaki, the White
House press secretary, told reporters last week. Lest anyone recall last
summer’s events in Kabul, she pointed out that “the situation in
Afghanistan was unique for many reasons.”
Ms. Psaki was referring
to the 16-day military evacuation of American diplomats, contractors,
aid workers and others from the Kabul airport just before and after the
Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. More than 100,000 Afghans who assisted
the United States during its 20-year war in the country, along with
their family members, were also flown out.
The Biden
administration proclaimed that operation a success, even as it endured
withering criticism for failing to anticipate the swift collapse of
Afghanistan’s government and not beginning evacuations earlier. Some
U.S. officials noted with frustration that their repeated public calls
for Americans to leave the country in the months before the Taliban’s
takeover had been largely ignored.
Since then, the president has
appeared determined to avoid anything resembling a repeat of that
operation, which was tragically punctuated by a suicide bomb explosion
on Aug. 26 that killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. Marines
manning a gate outside the Kabul airport.
“An invasion remains
distinctly possible,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday in a national address.
“That’s why I’ve asked several times that all Americans in Ukraine leave
now before it’s too late to leave safely.” The president added that it
was why he also ordered the temporary relocation of the U.S. embassy
from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to Lviv in western Ukraine, near its
border with Poland.
Biden officials delivered a similar, if less
widely noticed, message a few months ago, as rebel forces advanced on
the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. With analysts warning of bloody
urban combat and a potential government collapse, the State Department
began issuing near-daily statements urging Americans to depart.
As
is the case now in Ukraine, State Department officials specifically
warned that the Kabul airlift should not be seen as a precedent.
“I
think there may be a misperception that what we saw in Afghanistan is
something that the U.S. government can undertake anywhere and everywhere
in the world,” Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said at a
news briefing on Nov. 15. He added that no one “should expect that we
may be in a position to undertake something similar to what we saw in
Afghanistan.”
In recent days, the United States has also warned
Americans against traveling to Belarus and Transnistria, a breakaway
region of Moldova, both of which border Ukraine.
The State
Department estimated in October that about 6,600 American citizens
resided in Ukraine, many of them dual nationals, along with an unknown
number of tourists and travelers.
Ronald E. Neumann, a former
U.S. ambassador to three nations, including Afghanistan, said it could
be difficult to convince Americans that they were on their own.
“They
don’t get out, and then they think the military’s going to come and get
them,” said Mr. Neumann, who is now the president of the American
Academy of Diplomacy.
But it is one thing to talk in the abstract
about leaving Americans behind, and another to do it, he acknowledged.
“Some congressman’s going to be screaming that you’ve got to find Mary
Jo,” he said. “And you’ve got to do it, because that’s what you’re
supposed to do.”
Without casting judgment on the decision to
relocate the Kyiv embassy, Mr. Neumann noted that U.S. diplomats had
incurred great risk in the past to help Americans escape danger. During
World War II, he said, embassy officials in France and Poland assisted
Americans even after German offensives had begun. “Diplomats were going
out in the middle of air raids to find Americans and bring them into
embassies,” he said.
The U.S.
Embassy in Moscow also kept a skeleton crew there after the Nazis
invaded Russia in 1941. (The diplomats stored water by freezing it in
garbage cansand, when they weren’t preparing for the siege, attended the
ballet “Swan Lake” approximately 50 times, according to an official
State Department history.)
U.S.
officials said that even American diplomats at the embassy in Kyiv, who
were protected by a Marine contingent, were in too much danger to
remain there. And former ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, a veteran of war
zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, said he did not fault the decision.
“I
think it was the right call. The last thing the administration wanted
was embassy casualties or hostages, and they came close in Afghanistan,”
he said. A U.S. Army investigative report obtained by The Washington
Post included complaints that the State Department was dangerously
reluctant to evacuate its embassy in Kabul.
Mr. Crocker noted
that he believed Moscow was implicated in the unsolved 1979 kidnapping
and death of the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph “Spike” Dubs,
just before the Soviet invasion.
Even so, some American diplomats
said that relocating U.S. embassy operations before the start of
potential hostilities was an overreaction rooted in memory of the Kabul
airlift and perhaps the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. compound in
Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.
Russian state
media has ridiculed the United States for running from what it called a
phantom threat, according to a translation of Russian broadcasts
distributed within the State Department this week.
“While the
American [diplomats] are fleeing Kyiv, U.S. TV crews are still there,
scouring the city in search of sensations. However, they have to report
from the streets where nothing is happening,” Moscow’s Rossiya 1 network
reported.
Many current and former U.S. officials believe that
American diplomats have grown too risk-averse in general, especially
since the disaster in Benghazi, which became a long-running political
flashpoint, with Republicans alleging unproven cover-ups and
conspiracies by the Obama administration.
“A world of zero risk
is not a world in which American diplomacy can deliver,” Secretary of
State Antony J. Blinken said in an October speech at the Foreign Service
Institute in Arlington, Va., where the U.S. diplomatic corps is
trained. “We have to accept risk and manage it smartly.”
But in the case of Ukraine, Mr. Blinken is erring on the side of safety.
In
an interview with a Ukrainian television station on Tuesday, he said
the decision had been made “out of an abundance of precaution.”
“It’s
the prudent thing to do,” Mr. Blinken added, “because, again, my
personal responsibility is to the safety and security of our people.”