There he goes again!
And yet, for several centuries now at least, it has been considered very bad diplomatic manners to mention a thing like that in public, particularly when the person you are so insulting is heavily armed, demonstrably inclined to use his weaponry, and likely to take offense at such an insult, as Putin in fact did.
Anyway, what seems to have elicited this breach of good manners on the part of our president was not any concern for those the Russian dictator was supposed to have killed—many fewer than he has killed since—but an attempt to get a little more mileage out of the Democrats’ “Russian collusion” narrative, which had lately fallen on hard times and been downgraded to mere “Russian meddling” in America’s elections.
As in so many other ways, what Biden thought was good for himself and the Democrats turned out to be very bad for America. And the Ukrainians. And, very possibly, the world.
His promise at the time to “punish” the Russian president for his meddling—the nature of the punishment was left unspecified—may not have led directly to the military alliance that was concluded between Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China a few months later, but it certainly did nothing to hinder it.
And it lent some credence to the two dictators’ claims of being threatened by the United States that were cited among the principal reasons for their alliance—which was concluded just in time to ensure Chinese support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine that followed it almost immediately.
You might have thought that, having had to resort to such a rhetorical big bang right off the bat like that, the American president would have been left with little scope for stepping up the verbal pressure on his adversary in response to the invasion.
But he has proved equal to the challenge.
Then, as if such burning of his bridges were not enough, Biden proceeded to blow them up by announcing that he considered Putin to have been guilty of “war crimes.”
The Russian strong-man was in effect being put on notice that his choices—again, so far as the United States was concerned—were reduced to only two. They were the same two that were faced long ago by ancient Roman generals: victory or suicide.
Nobody seems to have considered the advisability of offering such a choice to a war leader armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.
We in America are used to the penchant for rhetorical overkill of those, like Biden, who routinely warn us in apocalyptic terms that “democracy” itself is threatened when the other party wins elections, or that human life on earth is on the brink of extinction from global warming unless we bankrupt ourselves and return to a more primitive state of development by abolishing fossil fuels.
Other countries, however, may easily fall into the error of taking such people seriously—particularly when the American president himself appears to take them seriously.
It’s one more reason for thinking that Vladimir Putin and his generals may not be content to sink into the Ukrainian “quagmire” being prepared for them by Milley and friends, and that they must try something truly desperate to pull themselves out of it.
And then we may just find out that apocalypse is, for once, for real.