Biden’s Ad-Libbing Becomes More Dangerous

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, March 28, 2022

 

You can make the case that Putin has proven himself too dangerous and reckless — to Ukraine, to NATO, to the Russian people themselves — to be left in power. After the mass suffering unleashed by the Russian invasion, few would dispute that Putin has an appetite for war, destruction, and conquest that will bring more and more chaos the longer he runs Russia.

 

You can also make the case that as much as the U.S. would prefer someone besides Putin run Russia — but based on that country’s history, we shouldn’t expect someone dramatically different — openly declaring our desire to see Putin gone simply verifies the dictator’s paranoia, offers more fodder for Russian state media about NATO’s alleged dreams of conquering Russia, wrecks any chance of a negotiated end to the invasion, and brings the U.S. closer to becoming a combatant in the conflict.

 

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.”

 

Biden made his ad-libbed remark because it’s what he really thinks — just as South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham genuinely believes that the world would be better off if someone assassinated Putin: “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country — and the world — a great service.”

 

But there’s a world of difference between the average American’s saying, “I wish someone would just kill Putin and end this whole thing,” and a U.S. lawmaker’s saying it. When a U.S. lawmaker says it out loud and on camera or social media, it persuades some people at home and abroad that this is our secret real policy, and that the U.S. policy of (generally) avoiding assassination as a tool of statecraft is just glossy public relations hiding a long and proud tradition of skullduggery in the name of defending the free world.

 

We wouldn’t mind seeing Putin dead or deposed, but we also want a stable Russia. We want Putin to meet an end like that of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s — a brutal comeuppance that left Putin “apoplectic” — but we also want him to take a deal that would end the conflict. We want to communicate our incandescent anger over Putin’s aggression and brutality, but we also want the Russian people to know that we mean no harm to them.

 

To govern is to choose, and what’s become abundantly clear is that Joe Biden doesn’t like making tough decisions. He wants it both ways. Oftentimes when a leader tries to take the middle path because he’s trying to achieve contradictory goals, he achieves neither.

 

The U.S. cannot kick the can down the road on the question of how to see and treat Putin. 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. Barring some unexpected turn of events, Putin will rule Russia until the day he dies.

 

Back in 2014,  Sergei Pugachev, a Russian businessman once so well connected in Moscow that he was called the “Kremlin’s banker,” predicted that Putin would never retire: “It has become clear Putin does not intend to go to some island, to lie down and spend his money somewhere. After all that has been done in the last 15 years, he cannot imagine life without Russia or power.”

 

National Review’s John Hillen, a former U.S. Army reconnaissance officer and paratrooper and former assistant secretary of state, wrote Saturday that, “There is no retirement home for old dictators, but beware an unhappy, unsuccessful, nuclear-armed Putin. . . . An embittered, embattled Putin in a declining nuclear state is a different actor from Putin the expansionist regional leader.”

 

As luck would have it, while John was writing his essay on the lessons of the invasion so far, I was writing about the longer-term outlook for Russia — and as the headline says, “Russia is screwed.” Take the war going badly, the Russian military losing its fearsome reputation, a devastated economy, a fertile environment for recruiting spies, and then throw already-bad demographic trends atop all that — a loss of a million people in 2021 — and then the mostly but not entirely negative impact of climate change on Russia, and you have a country that is thoroughly up a creek without a paddle in the coming decades.

 

(I see some readers were livid about my article’s discussion of the long-term effects of climate change on Russia. Nah, you’re right, fellas. Everybody in Russia’s northernmost climes are just hallucinating melting and thawing permafrost, and all of those accounts about the thawing permafrost, longer summers, and shoreline erosion are hoaxes. You don’t have to buy into every hectoring speech from Greta Thunberg to include climate change in your assessment of the long-term status of a country.)

 

In the long run, Putin’s Russia is likely only going to get poorer, less stable, angrier, and more internally divided, and it’s still going to have roughly 6,000 nuclear weapons.

 

Sure, theoretically, somebody could come up to Putin and off him and begin a new chapter in Russia’s history. But the U.S. would be foolish to rely on that resolution. Putin probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and Biden and his administration need to realize that they can’t have it both ways. If the administration wants to make the end of Putin’s reign a goal, it must act like it. If it does not, it must prepare to have some sort of stable relationship with a man Biden called “a butcher” and a “war criminal.” Those are ugly choices, but Biden wanted this job.

 

Then again, Biden also assured us during the 2020 campaign that, “Putin knows, if I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”