With this weekend’s apparently ad-libbed call for regime change in Russia and the immediate walk-back of said call, it certainly seems like the more Joe Biden says, the less we should actually believe it.
The White House was forced to quickly clean up his gaffe about Putin saying that he cannot stay in power. The Putin line was obviously the most dangerous one Biden made all weekend, and it’s worth noting how swiftly the White House had to scramble on that one. The In MinutesThey were trying to clarify the situation for their media allies.
This is the line however that’s most likely to be the most deadly.
The case you can’t make is that U.S. policy should be both of these policies at once. There’s a place for strategic ambiguity, but this isn’t one of them. Alas, this weekend, President Biden exclaimed, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” and then his staff rushed to clarify that the president “was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change,” which is the opposite of what the president actually said.
As Andrew Stuttaford aptly summarized, “The ‘clarification’ was the right thing to do (there was no choice, really), but the net effect is that Biden can be portrayed by Moscow as bellicose, while simultaneously coming across as weak to nervous allies in the East, and hopelessly muddled to allies elsewhere and, of course, to adversaries and the undecided across the globe.”
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To govern is to choose, and what’s become abundantly clear is that Joe Biden doesn’t like making tough decisions. Joe Biden is averse to both sides. Oftentimes when a leader tries to take the middle path because he’s trying to achieve contradictory goals, he achieves neither.
In the matter of Putin’s treatment and how they see him, the U.S. can not fudge the issue. The Russian dictator has altered his country’s constitution so that he can remain in power until at least 2036 — when Putin will be 84, which is old even by Joe Biden’s standards. Putin will be in power until his death, unless something unexpected happens.
The rhetoric appears to be almost an over-correction back to the Biden of 2020 — the Biden that said he could go toe-to-toe with Putin — after horribly mismanaging the Ukrainian crisis from the start. However, it was an over-correction he made and not a mistake strategic from the White House.
Putin is almost certain to seek out the destruction of everything and everyone he views in order for his purposes. Sure, the White House is now saying Biden didn’t mean what he said, but the damage was done. Putin can’t walk away now, and that means the Ukraine situation goes from bad to worse. Biden, who has said it but never followed through on it, will make Biden look weaker.
This isn’t some new problem for the White House, though. They had to walk back his statement that the U.S. government wouldn’t pay money to immigrant families separated at the border. They were required to retract a claim that Biden took a COVID daily test. Jen Psaki needed to clarify his statement that Biden would protect Taiwan.
One has to wonder at this point if Biden is really going to be taking the White House at its word. It would seem as though we shouldn’t take him literally when he goes off-script. That doesn’t bode well for the press, who relies on access to Biden in press events so they can dig further into his thoughts and policies. All will now be filter through White House statements and Psaki, while Biden is pushed further back in the basement.
How dangerous is it for America that its leader can’t be trusted to speak off-script without causing an international incident? Are you thinking that America is weak after Afghanistan was over? Just imagine how weak we look when our own President tells reporters “I’m supposed to stop and walk out of the room,” because he can’t be trusted to speak his mind.
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