No, Biden did not start the war.
He had to make the determination if Amereicans were willing to engage in what appeared to become WWIII. Were the stakes high enough?
Biden looked back at his predecessors, at the invasion of Crimea, and the shrug from Europe, and Obama's realpolitik decision.
Ukraine was not a vital interest to the U.S. The Russian threat, although not internal as Putin claimed, nonetheless wasn't worth WWIII and wasn't within the obligations of NATO, the framework through which the U.S. defines its European defense policy.
Sanctions were thrown at the windshield but to no effect.
America suffered internally and externally since the Korean and Vietnam fiascos. Principled wars grow sour when the nation would rather have her sons alive than her principles defended. And, Ukraine at the time was in the general category of "who?" to most Americans, as all other Soviet satellite states were, except for the elite and boys who had played Risk.
Obama, an infamously junior politician who had been elected literally as a token gesture, had not the experience or the support to declare a war, all the more when domestically, the GOP was already waging a war against him.
On the positive side, our nation had learned its lesson from Kennedy's disastrous administration. We did not want to turn the planet to a cinder for Cuba. On thte negative, it meant that Bill Clinton's policy, along that very same intent, was wrong, and the real precipitating act that enabled the Crimean invasion.
It's easy to judge in hindsight, to declare that Clinton should have demanded Ukraine's admittance to NATO then and there as surety, but he didn't. It is likely that the State Department's assessment was that it could actually trigger a Russian invasion then, and call a bluff before NATO could act.
Ultimately, the blame game that the GOP is playing is a lie. The GOP has been the house for war hawks for more than five decades. All the skillet banging made since the Ukraine and Gaza invasions were nothing more than distraction to keep attention off Trump's lunacy and inept statements while smearing Biden to win the election. Just last week, Representative Crenshaw, from Texas, made the statement in an interview that "wars broke out all over the place" or some similar hyperbole, again claiming they would not have under Trump.
No. They didn't. The Israeli conflict has never NOT been a war. It just boiled over, and could just as easily be traced to Trump sucking up and moving the embassy to Jerusalem to further stick it to the Palestinians. He's a specialist is spreading spite. It's what he does.
And the Ukrainian War did not just break out in 2022. It expanded. And why not? Putin had seen that Trump played games with Ukraine to try to get a 2nd term, and that Biden was a weak seatwarmer, so he rolled the dice and went in.
America is NOT responsible for the slaughter on Ukraine's soil. It's still Russia, even after America takes the hit for making hollow promises during Clinton's gambit. The many thousands are because Ukrainians are not done yet. They can't defeat the Russians alone, and Europe literally doesn't have the will or the armies tto do it without leaving the homelands vulnerable. And because the MAJORITY of Ukrainians would rather die than fold, we have supported.
Frankly, Europeans are much more acquainted with slaughter from her wars than Americans are. We are more intimidated. Yet, we would fight on if our shores were to see tanks roll in. And our economy right now is being buoyed by the aid we gave Ukraine. Were those federal contracts not let, our economy would look worse than Europe's.
Trump is an international embarrassment. He has in less than a month, made Europe more vulnerable to Russia. And domestically, because the GOP is cowed, the Senate has passed no resolution condeming Trump's lies. Without that, Europe, including Ukraine, is staring at the propect of a dissolved NATO.
Everything points to the coming collapse of our country. We have gone over the falls with Trump. This is merely the air time when we wait to hit the rocks below.