Syndicated columnist Marc Munroe Dion: Good luck to the dancers
There are only two really "American" responses to war anywhere in the world.
1. Let 'em kill each other. We can't be the world's police.
2. Let's get in on this!
Generally, American foreign policy begins with the first and ends with the second. Sometimes, we take Berlin. Sometimes, we take off out of Vietnam like a scalded hound.
In a nation that likes either the averted gaze or the bare knuckle, President Joe Biden is a dancer.
He has to be. Vladimir Putin has only to flip the switch and the sun falls.
I've lived all my life in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. My father, a sergeant in the Army Air Corps, was on Tinian when the Enola Gay flew off to incinerate Hiroshima.
"We didn't even know what it was," he told me. "'Atomic bomb' didn't mean anything. We didn't even know what it was after they told us what it was."
My father grew up in a house heated by a coal stove. Horse-drawn wagons delivered that coal to his house. He flew over the blasted ruins of Hiroshima not long after they dropped the bomb.
Biden dances in that shadow, pumping howitzers and missiles into Ukraine yet trying to soft-shoe his way past the moment when everything is a bright flash of light.
It's a good job for him. A lifetime in the inverted, seesaw bargaining world of American governance gives a man a good sense of balance, a notion of going as far as you can go without going another inch. Until you can.
The buck and wing. The tap dance. The old soft shoe.
No. Not the no-fly zone. Too big. Too much like war. No troops. For God's sake, not troops.
But missiles across the Polish border? Yes. Sanctions? Yes. Only the bankers will really pay attention.
Helicopters? Maybe. Wait. Wait for the right time.
A little bit of this and a little bit of that. Dancing forward, then fading back. A man dancing in the spotlight of possible nuclear war, moving all the time, in and out of that spotlight.
Keep some diplomatic channels open, back there where nobody sees. Cry "war crimes," but keep the diplomats whispering across the line. There may be a time after this time, after the moment when Putin's hand lingers over the switch. If there is a time after this time, we'll have to talk to Putin or whoever comes after. Go as gentle as you can, but keep the missiles going into Ukraine.
If Donald Trump were still in office, his inability to dance would have left us either flat-footed and giving Russia Ukraine or charging in blindly or, worse yet, talking tough until it was too late.
And maybe we wouldn't notice. Maybe Trump would have bought us peace with dishonor and, what the heck, it's Ukraine. Do they EVEN have casinos there?
The dancers don't get enough credit. The boxers who can hit you hard get the cheers. The boxers you can't hit get silence, or we say they're "running away."
Not that much older than Trump, Biden still has his legs, the grace you learn from a lifetime of bargaining, ear-whispering, leveraging, sliding one way and then the other, grace in the most pedestrian of causes.
People who write newspaper columns like to write sentences starting with, "History will remember ... " But if Biden misses a step, dances too fast or too slow, there will be no history.
I wish the dancer luck. I wish all of us luck.
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