Remember Pope Francis? In an excerpt from an upcoming book ahead of the pontiff’s jubilee year he decries that “for almost three years Europe has been the epicenter of a piecemeal Third World War.” The key word is not “third” but “piecemeal” — and it dovetails with President Biden’s decision to authorize the use of American long-range missiles by Ukraine to strike inside Russia. 

It is a move welcomed by President Zelensky and assailed by President Putin, but whether it will move the needle much on Kyiv’s progress in the war is an open question. More certain is that, yet again, the decision reflects a White House that for more than three years has taken a reactive approach to matters of foreign policy — most glaringly in Ukraine. 

Authorization for the use of the supersonic tactical ballistic missiles, better known as ATACMS, will initially be limited to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine’s army now occupies nearly 500 square miles. They could eventually have wider use. Why the Biden move now? North Korea’s decision to send thousands of troops to Russia, principally to Kursk, is an obvious reason.

It also follows one of the largest attacks on Ukrainian cities since the war began, with Russia’s launch of 120 missiles and 90 drones, which caused at least seven deaths. To that grim toll add 11 people killed and 63 more injured by a Russian missile strike Sunday night on a residential neighborhood of Sumy — just south of the border with the Kursk.

The Biden administration wants to help Kyiv keep its hold on territories in the Kursk as negotiating leverage with Russia, before President-elect Trump takes a seat in the Oval Office. However, according to the Washington Post, persons close to the Russian strongman say he has no intention of starting negotiations to end the war as long as the Ukrainians are on Russian territory. 

With its troop build-up there, Russia clearly wants to take Kursk off the table as a potential bargaining chip for the Ukrainians in any future peace talks. This state of affairs makes for something of a thorny parting gift from President Biden to President Trump. The personal histories of both men have sometimes run through Ukraine, often inelegantly. 

Ukraine, for its part, has already — for more than a year now — been firing ATACMS at Russian targets inside territory that Russia currently holds in Ukraine. However, a Western diplomat in the country told the BBC that the supply of missiles will likely “not be decisive” and described it as “an overdue symbolic decision to raise the stakes and demonstrate military support to Ukraine.”

While the exact inventory of the missiles is difficult to ascertain, according to multiple European press reports the stocks are not vast. Furthermore the Russians have already moved many of the likely targets beyond the missiles’ 190-mile range. In September, President Putin said that using the long-range missiles inside Russian territory would be a red line.

Meaning, it “would change the very essence of the conflict” (for the Kremlin, the invasion of Ukraine is never to be called a “war”) and generate an unspecified response. Will it, though? The situation is still evolving. It is telling that the Biden administration moved on the approval only after President-elect Trump’s recent win. The calendar of American politics is not lost on the Kremlin. 

So on one hand the Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin, sometimes seen as Putin’s Rasputin, has called the White House’s decision “the last American attempt to unleash a nuclear war before Biden leaves forever” but on the other, that little word from Pope Francis again comes to mind: “piecemeal.”

In the final analysis President Biden’s biggest fumble has been taking an incremental approach to countering the Russian warmongering. The pattern over the past three years has been one of Ukraine asking for more weapons and Washington first stalling, then acceding to the requests. 

If time is money, in an active war zone time is also territory. Russia has suffered more losses in manpower than Ukraine, but it could be argued that Mr. Biden’s procrastinations coupled with Secretary Blinken’s resounding lack of diplomatic initiatives have served to embolden Moscow.

The ATACMS decision will inevitably be seen by the Kremlin as a belated Western concession to Ukraine — consider how Chancellor Scholz’s November 15 phone call to President Putin was perceived inside Russia. Writing on his Telegram channel, the  head of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, said that Herr Scholz’s call and the White House’s decision on missiles “represent the acknowledgement of the failure of the goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield.”

President Biden has invested billions in Ukraine’s defense but only members of his own administration — in which a majority of Americans clearly have no confidence — would at this point call his overall effort successful.  The pressure will soon enough be on President Trump and Marco Rubio to change the equation.