“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” That is a sentiment much of America and the wider world would endorse; but what is the point of removing him if he is succeeded by Kamala Harris?
Joe Biden, America’s senile president and, more alarmingly, commander-in-chief, has become a serious threat to the world; in the most volatile situation since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the supposed leader of the “free” world – a term that increasingly demands qualification – is a drivelling gerontocrat with a tenuous grasp of reality. Who thought it was a good idea to allow this shambling invitation to World War III to visit Poland and, just one NATO frontier away from the war zone, deliver a succession of provocative remarks, like a verbal cluster bomb?
He began his trail of destruction in Brussels, at NATO headquarters, when he stated that, if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine: “It would trigger a response in kind.” Really? “In kind”? So, America would break international law by deploying chemical weaponry in retaliation against Russia? Granted, the United States made prodigal use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, not to mention atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, but it had generally been supposed that Washington had, in recent times, reined in its more destructive impulses and would abide by the rules of international law. But if the US commander-in-chief says otherwise, the world has to take that into its calculations.
Then, on to Poland and fresh disasters. The paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division must have been startled to hear – from their ultimate authority – that they were being deployed to Ukraine. “And you’re going to see, when you’re there… you’re going to see women, young people, standing in front of a dang tank, just saying: ‘I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground.’”
If news that the president of the United States had just announced he was sending American troops to Ukraine came as a shock to Vladimir Putin and the world at large, it was even more startling to White House and Pentagon staff, who immediately set about trying to undo the damage by, in the current PR jargon, “walking back” Biden’s incomprehensible, slack-jawed remarks.
Inevitably, Biden himself was challenged about it by the media, giving him an opportunity to aggravate the situation even further, while simultaneously initiating a breach of NATO security. When a television reporter taxed him with having given the impression that he would use chemical weapons in retaliation against Russia, that he intended sending US troops to Ukraine and that he wanted regime change in Russia, Biden tersely responded: “None of the three occurred.”
So, the President is in denial about his own well-publicised gaffes. If these three indiscretions had been uttered at private meetings in the White House and investigative journalists were scrambling to discover the truth, such a stark denial might conceivably have muddied the waters; but since all three were delivered live on television, with millions watching, and disseminated online to the entire world, such a denial sounds even more demented than the original comments. Such conduct is so childish as to call into question the President’s mental state.
The danger of Biden’s infantile recourse to alibis of the “a big boy did it and ran away” school is that they aggravate the original fault by compromising security. Challenged on his remarks apparently signifying deployment of US troops in Ukraine, he replied testily: “We’re talking about helping train the Ukrainian troops that are in Poland. I sat there with those guys for a couple of hours.”
If true, that public disclosure makes Polish territory (i.e. NATO Article 5 terrain) a potential target for Russian attack and, if America and Poland then denied there had been training for Ukrainian troops conducted on its soil, Putin would have the testimony of the American president to support his case. But worst of all was Biden’s climactic gaffe, apparently demanding regime change in Russia.
Whatever their varying interpretations of the overall situation, all informed, mature statesmen and commentators are united on one point: any notion of regime change in Russia is out of the question. It is the one issue guaranteed to drive a losing Vladimir Putin, who has studied the fall of Muammar Gaddafi and other dictators, to extreme, even nuclear, measures. Now, after diplomats and heads of government have striven over the past month to remove that option from the real-world agenda, Joe Biden has fuelled Putin’s paranoia with one unscripted outburst.
Biden, in his own way, is as big a threat to world peace as Putin – arguably worse, because he does not know what he is doing. His cowardly flight from Afghanistan, when all he had to do was implement a phased withdrawal, leaving the Bagram air base to be evacuated last – instead of first – signalled to Vladimir Putin that he had nothing to fear from the Biden administration. Biden’s failure cost lives in Afghanistan, but may have destroyed many more in Ukraine if, as seems credible, it was the final factor that determined Putin to embark on his adventure, further encouraged by Biden’s extraordinary licensing of a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.
Contrast this administration – for it is an entire government and its supporting political party that is the problem, not just one senile buffoon – with Jack Kennedy’s response to the Cuban crisis. Kennedy had his failures, notably the Bay of Pigs, but his handling of the most serious nuclear confrontation to date was deft. Behind a front of firmness, Kennedy and his team were pragmatic, measured and ready to compromise within reason.
America sacrificed missile sites in Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev turning his ships around. The United States’ stance was firm and principled, but also tactically mobile. It never lost sight of the paramount need to prevent global nuclear annihilation. By calming and helping, in some degree, to save the face of the over-confident Soviet party chairman, mature diplomacy saved the day.
The maxim “speak softly and carry a big stick” has been replaced by Biden shooting off his mouth in every direction, verbally abusing Vladimir Putin instead of effectively interdicting his aggression. Yet Biden is not the unique problem, but a symptom of the wider malaise afflicting America, epitomised by the degradation of the Democratic Party into a neo-Marxist cult that places its demented objectives far above the security and geopolitical interests of America.
For the Democratic left to secure its stranglehold on the party and get its agenda rubber-stamped by a weak, complicit executive, Joe Biden was the ideal instrument: familiar and seemingly moderate in voters’ eyes, his cognitive impairment, evident from as early as the first debate in the Democratic primaries, was an added attraction to those who used him as a Trojan horse.
For these ideologues it is all about critical race theory, gender issues and identity politics. When it comes to foreign policy, they are lost. Just as the election hype touted Biden as a return to sanity and Trump as insane, so it trumpeted decades of foreign policy expertise for Joe Biden. “America is back.”
No, it is not. It is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin launched his first Ukraine aggression on Barack Obama’s watch and his second on Joe Biden’s, but offered no serious provocation when Donald Trump was president. Putin was very wary of Trump because of his unpredictability. Yes, Trump was hail-fellow-well-met towards Putin, but the Russian dictator comes from a KGB/Kremlin environment where such bonhomie can change to lethal hostility without warning.
Putin, both before and during the Ukraine invasion, has made no secret of his belief that woke liberalism has weakened America and Europe to the point where they lack the moral fibre to resist his imperialist ambitions. The Biden administration sees the Ukraine war as a distraction from its radical redistribution of wealth via massive “infrastructure” programmes, stoking inflation, and revolutionary social transformation. It shows little understanding of the crucial geopolitical significance of the Russian aggression, nor of how to respond. If Biden were somehow to demit office, the Democratic leftist manipulators have ensured his successor would be Kamala Harris – a very potent warning of the desperate incapacity of ultra-left regimes to respond to real-world crises.
Similarly, in Britain, where Boris Johnson has performed creditably so far in the Ukraine conflict, the BBC and Labour cannot wait to bring “Partygate” back to the top of the agenda, regardless of the destabilising effect if the Prime Minister were to depart.
It speaks volumes about the total lack of reality afflicting “progressives” that even the shattered ruins of Mariupol, and the death and misery reigning there, cannot endow them with a sense of proportion, to the extent that they are still focused on the issue of whether Boris Johnson, by stepping into the Downing Street garden for 20 minutes to encourage overworked staff, broke some regulation. The problem regarding Boris is that he does not have an obvious successor; the problem with Biden is that he does.