What just happened
- Saudi officials announced a ceasefire in fighting between Saudi-led coalition forces and Houthi rebels in Yemen.
- Five people were killed by a gunman in Tel Aviv in the third fatal attack in Israel in a week.
- A report on maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust in the UK said better care might have saved 201 babies.
- Despite the war in Ukraine, a US astronaut prepared to return to earth from the International Space Station with two Russian cosmonauts.
Free speech is a dangerous thing. When Joe Biden used it last Saturday to veer off-script and say of Putin, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”, he handed the Russian leader apparent proof that the America that asserted the right to change regimes in Iraq asserted the same right in Russia.
Putin has pocketed the remark but hasn’t made much use of it yet (see below). In the meantime, Biden gave his critics more evidence that he’s a liability. But the data on Biden’s Ukraine scorecard has not all been in the same column, and in fact it’s easy to cherry-pick from the headlines to create two quite different presidents:
The unifier, who has…
- deployed high-quality US intelligence to warn the world early and publicly of Putin’s intentions in Ukraine and has thereby revived Nato as the unchallenged guarantor of European security;
- hired high-quality foreign policy and national security staff including especially Tony Blinken at the State Department and Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor, who have kept his administration on message and rescued him quickly from his own gaffes; and
- represented America abroad backed by the (by contemporary standards) rare spectacle of bipartisan accord in Congress on the overwhelming need for the world’s democracies to confront Putin as one.
The first of these deprived Putin of the advantage of surprise and of any scope for credible false flag operations to give him a pretext to invade. The second may have prevented World War Three by preserving clarity on a no No Fly Zone policy. The third has ensured rapid funding for and airlifting of urgently needed military materiel to Ukraine via Poland and Romania.
But Biden has at times seemed ready to undo all this good work as…
The blabbermouth, who, besides appearing to advocate regime change in his speech in Warsaw, has
- suggested in January that a limited Russian military deployment in eastern Ukraine might amount to no more than a “minor incursion”;
- implied despite clear official policy to the contrary that there might be US boots on the ground in Ukraine when telling some of his own troops they would see Ukrainian bravery “when you are there”;
- appeared to threaten Nato use of WMD by warning the US would respond “in-kind” to any Russian use of chemical weapons in Ukraine.
The White House walk-back on the Warsaw remarks was immediate – the president wasn’t advocating regime change, officials said unconvincingly; just noting Putin can’t be allowed to intimidate his neighbours – but the feedback has been largely damning. Macron said he wouldn’t have used such words. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Putin would see this “as confirmation of what he’s believed all along”. Gerard Baker in the WSJ said Biden had risked “the annihilation of much of humanity”.
The acid test is Russia’s reaction. Putin’s spokesman called Biden’s nine words astounding and alarming and noted that it’s not for Biden to decide who runs Russia. But Putin himself has so far been silent, and some of his troops are moving back from Kyiv and Chernihiv.
To consider: Biden’s words may not have been policy but they did have the merit of being true. As such they might resonate inside as well as outside Russia. No wonder they have not been rebroadcast there on a loop. If Biden was reaching for a “tear down this wall” moment, historians may yet conclude this was one.
