By Kyle Smith
Tuesday,
February 22, 2022
Last June, ahead of a Russia–U.S.
meeting, Time magazine conjured up a piece of embarrassing
cover-art propaganda featuring Joe Biden’s aviator glasses reflecting Vladimir
Putin. At last, a U.S. president had Putin in his sights! Finally we’d get back
to putting Russia in its place.
“How Biden Plans to Get Tough on Putin
During Their Geneva Summit,” promised a breathless story by Brian Bennett. A
senior administration official suggested Biden, despite the “chaos” that
President Trump had supposedly unleashed in the world, would use a combination
of unity talk — everyone in Europe was on the same page about Russia,
supposedly — and thinly veiled threats about retaliatory cyberattacks to show
Putin who’s boss. “The whole goal is to have [Putin] come away saying, ‘The
Americans are onto us and have us encircled,’” the official told Bennett. The
writer editorialized that, “Biden is qualified to lead the approach. He’s spent
decades in debates on U.S.-Russian relations as a member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee.” Whew, then.
So how’d everything work out? Well,
according to Bennett himself, in a follow-up piece that sounded a bit less like
a fangirl transcribing a press release and more like someone who had actually
observed Biden up close, noted that Putin seemed somehow to have been the one
who came out on top. “The stagecraft,” Bennett noted glumly, “played to Putin’s
personal vanity and his long-standing desire for Russia to be taken seriously
as a major rival to the U.S. . . . Putin seemed to relish the platform in
Geneva” because it placed the two countries on an equal footing. Oh, and the
“White House said it did not expect any deliverables to come out of the
meeting,” despite Biden doing a very Joe Biden version of laying down the law:
He handed Putin a list of 16 kinds of cyberattacks that he considered to be off
limits. Did that mean all other kinds were okay? Putin may have been forgiven
if he went back to his dacha and spent the following 24 hours giggling.
“What ever [sic] happens in Ukraine
we shouldn’t underestimate the fact the United States has retaken the adult
chair in the world,” claimed former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart
on Twitter yesterday. “Biden has restored American leadership so damaged by
Trump. The world needs us and we have a President who can and does lead.” The
grownups are back in charge? Granted that Trump behaved, and behaves, like a
toddler. But is a woke undergraduate a grownup?
Biden and whoever is giving him orders about what he’s allowed to do are
running the administration like a woke blog. After gathering half a century of
experience, supposedly mastering the intricacies of Washington, D.C., and using
that expertise to be wrong on more or less every big foreign-policy question over
that period, Biden’s focus is primarily on issuing dumb young-adult taunts to
his detractors by, for instance, appointing Merrick Garland attorney general
(then watching Garland treat angry parents at school-board meetings like
al-Qaeda), nominating for comptroller of the currency a woman who expressly
argued for driving fossil-fuel companies out of business, and nominating to the
Fed another woman who said much the same thing. Biden tried to use executive
action to hamstring fossil fuels by imposing a “social cost” calculation on their actions, then, when a court
struck this down, froze (again) new drilling on federal lands.
Imagine what all of this self-sabotaging
looks like to Vladimir Putin. Here we have a man whose continued relevance,
hence his worldview, is dependent on understanding that fossil fuel is king.
The idea of Putin weakening his own hand on the geopolitical stage is absurd.
But then again, Putin, unlike the average Swarthmore climate-justice obsessive
or senior White House official, lives in a world in which hard power determines
outcomes. Putin has gas and oil, and these become more valuable every day Biden
schemes to handicap U.S. gas and oil. Putin is like the playground bully
manhandling a little kid who keeps asking, “Why do you keep hitting yourself?”
Except Biden’s America keeps hitting itself even when Putin is far away.
Putin has an image of Biden’s capabilities
that goes back a long way. In 2011, Biden was the leader of Barack Obama’s
Great Reset, polishing Putin’s boots with his tongue in order to troll
Republicans in a summit during which the then–vice president “got punk’d,” says
a White House stenographer, when Putin turned the sound and lights off when Biden was in the
middle of a sentence.
Time’s Bennett painted this pathetic picture after the Geneva summit last
June, noting that when Biden spoke, “holding a notecard in his hands,” he
described Russia and the United States as “two great powers.” Weak, inept,
confused, tired, clutching a note card like an unprepared student: That’s how
Biden is, and that’s certainly how Putin sees him. Long before our president
invited a Ukrainian invasion by suggesting a “minor incursion” would be fine,
Vladimir Putin had his number. If anything stops him, it won’t be fear of the
wrath of Joe Biden.
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