From Kennedy Jr. to Ramaswamy, White House hopefuls bash Biden over cluster bomb saga

The Biden administration’s decision to send cluster munitions to the war-stricken Ukraine has attracted criticism from not only people from abroad but also back home. Multiple prominent presidential candidates who are taking part in the race to the White House condemned the US President for taking the initiative. The list includes stalwarts like Robert F Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and Marianne Williamson, who believe sending these bombs will prolong the Russia-Ukraine war. 

On Saturday, the nephew of former President John F Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed the Biden administration for his plan to send lethal weapons to Ukraine. The presidential hopeful took to Twitter to condemn the move. “Last year, WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the use of cluster bombs a “war crime.” Now President Biden plans to send them to Ukraine,” Kennedy wrote on Twitter. “Stop the ceaseless escalation! It is time for peace,” he added. He then pointed out that the US President was against the cluster bomb in 1982. “Biden was opposed to cluster bombs In 1982 as well when he opposed their sale to Israel. What happened to his conscience?” he added in another post.

Kennedy Jr. is not the only critic

Kennedy is not the only White House hopeful who condemned the move taken by the Biden administration. The American candidate and Republican White House hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy lambasted the 80-year-old president and urged him to “man up”.  “@JoeBiden needs to man up to his bully-friend Zelensky & clearly state that we are dead-set opposed to Ukrainian admission to NATO. This should be a hard red line,” Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter on Saturday. He then went on to attack the Republican leaders who supported sending catastrophic bombs to Ukraine. “It’s shameful that even Republicans like @LindseyGrahamSC are now pushing for it. Stop marching us to the brink of nuclear war. For all the hand-wringing about the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (on which the U.S. has more than fulfilled its commitments), the neocon-Democrat establishment is shockingly silent on James Baker’s famous 1990 “Not-One-Inch” commitment to Gorbachev that NATO would never extend east of Germany. NATO was created to deter conflict with the USSR, yet NATO has expanded most rapidly *after* the fall of the USSR & is now *worsening* the risk of nuclear war with Russia itself,” he further wrote in the tweet. 

He called the whole ordeal “sheer lunacy” and said that if he becomes the president he won’t support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ramaswamy described Zelenskyy as an “anti-democratic comedian-turned-leader”. “This is sheer lunacy. As President, I’ll refuse to be bullied by an anti-democratic comedian-turned-leader & it’s truly mystifying to me that the rest of the West is eating out of this Pied Piper’s hand every day,” he concluded. On the same day, Democratic challenger Marianne Williamson also criticised the move “Sending cluster bombs to Ukraine is a terrible idea. An inhumane decision. Even in the midst of war, we must hold onto our humanity,” she wrote on Twitter.