President Joe Biden’s blundering ad-lib that Russian President
Vladimir Putin
“cannot remain in power” is not redeemed by the old saw that a gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
The fact that Putin will remain a menace until Russians defenestrate him from the Kremlin does not make it any less (characteristically) foolhardy of Biden to signal that the United States wants more than merely to end the tyrant’s murderous assault
on Ukraine
. Administration subordinates with their hair standing on end and scrambling to clean up after the president cannot erase the mess left by his rhetorical incontinence. But his braggadocio did not create a new challenge — it merely made an existing one more difficult. This challenge,
as I’ve noted
, is to calibrate pressure on Putin so he believes, perhaps rightly and perhaps only plausibly, that his self-interest lies in stopping the war rather than escalating it. If his back is against a wall and he has no “bridge” away from conflict, his only path will be to fight, perhaps using chemical or nuclear weapons, maybe by widening hostilities to more of Europe, and certainly by intensifying his ballistic terror campaign against defenseless civilians.
Telling Putin that his departure is an American goal — this is ultimately true but not an immediate or even medium-term aim — might have been calculated to persuade him that he can’t get out of here alive so he has nothing to lose in this life by taking as many innocents as possible with him to his doom. Making Putin’s continued aggression just dangerous enough to prompt him to cease hostilities and withdraw but not dangerous enough to goad him into greater recklessness is a difficult conjuring trick.
Is there a plausible Venn diagram in which peace on terms Ukraine can reasonably accept overlaps just enough with Putin’s need to save face? That question has lain beneath Biden’s dithering approach from the start. But to acknowledge that our president faces a nettlesome problem does not exculpate him for his repeated goofs and consistent weakness; coping competently with such volatile events is what we put chief executives in the Oval Office to do. Biden has all along resisted Volodymyr Zelensky’s urgent requests for a more generous supply of potent weapons — they’re “gathering dust” in Pentagon warehouses, as Ukraine’s president says — and he has inched toward meeting these demands only when he gets out of step with international and domestic political opinion.
Sometimes our policy hesitation has reached a pitch of near absurdity, as when Washington and Warsaw, each fearing Putin’s blame, couldn’t agree to deliver Soviet-era fighter jets to Kyiv. It was subsequently suggested that they be delivered as spare parts. Biden’s reluctance to give Ukrainians the tools to do the job has become yet more glaring as Russia, failing in its original goal of outright conquest, digs in to hold territorial gains and “focus on the primary objective” of securing the bogus “liberation” of annexed portions of eastern Ukraine.
Reasonable people now wonder whether Biden actually wants to keep Ukraine weak so it is forced to end the war quickly on unfavorable terms rather than fight on and inflict a serious setback on the aggressor. As Putin’s forces at least temporarily abandon their actual primary objective of imperial expansion, the prospect of Ukrainian and allied victory becomes clearer. But its attendant danger of a bigger war appears to have frozen Biden. He wants the outcome and would seize it if he could, but he has no idea how to get from here to there. So, he struts and hurls swaggering insults, calling Putin a “butcher.” But he is much less like an effective leader than like the hesitant cat in the adage identified by Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. He wants to catch the fish, but he won’t take action because it would mean getting his paws wet.
Thus, Biden and the nation he leads must “live a coward in [their] own esteem, letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would.'” The only properly desirable outcome of Europe’s war is Ukrainian victory. This means the restoration of its territorial integrity, its political and diplomatic self-determination, and a long-term settlement that allows peace rather than a temporary ceasefire during which Putin can lick his wounds and plan his next step in rebuilding Russia’s empire at the expense of liberal democracy.
