Regardless of what Joe Biden says about military options not being on the table in Ukraine, and that he doesn’t want to spark World War III, the reality is that the U.S. is already a co-belligerent in the Ukraine war, writes columnist James Carden, in an April 19 Asia Times article. There is no getting around that truth. The U.S. is providing several billion dollars worth of military assistance, is involved in intelligence sharing, and according to one unnamed Pentagon official, it is “likely we have a limited footprint on the ground in Ukraine, but under Title 50, not Title 10"—meaning U.S. intelligence operatives and paramilitaries.
Carden reports that constitutional law expert and former associate attorney general under the Reagan administration, Bruce Fein, told him that the U.S. and several NATO members “have become co-belligerents with Ukraine against Russia by systematic and massive assistance to its military forces to defeat Russia.” What this means, Fein explains, is that both the U.S. and its NATO allies are vulnerable to attack by “an enemy belligerent"—that is, Russia—because of their “systematic or substantial violations of a neutral’s duties of impartiality and non-participation in the conflict.”
Here’s the legal issue, Fein explains. “Neutrality is violated by permitting a belligerent to violate its territorial integrity (as Belarus and Russia have done to Ukraine), or by supplying warships, arms, ammunition, military provisions or other war materials, directly or indirectly, or supplying military advisers to a belligerent,” as the United States has done. The truth is that the United States has failed to fulfill its constitutional duties because under the Declare War Cause of the Constitution, co-belligerency, which means that the U.S. is no longer neutral, “requires a declaration of war,” as Fein explains it. Instead, Congress has been aggressively pushing the Biden administration to become even more deeply involved, in what is now clearly a U.S.-Russian proxy war.
The various other elements in this situation include passage on March 2 of the non-binding “Supporting the People of Ukraine” resolution, followed on March 10 by the House vote to send $14 billion in military funding to Ukraine as part of an omnibus spending package.. Then on April 7, the Senate passed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend Lease Act of 2022. The end result, Carden observes, is that the Biden administration and Congress “are wading into dangerous waters.” As an example of how dangerous, Fein points out that the U.S. has “employed the concept of co-belligerency to target for extermination any group or individual who provides material support to al-Qaeda or ISIS.” But, he adds, there is a real risk that Russia may take a page out of America’s playbook. (https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/us-a-co-belligerent-in-ukraine-war-legal-expert-says/)
