“Two things I learned last couple of weeks,” Joe Biden said at a CNN town hall on Tuesday. “One, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin doesn’t want me to be president. And number two, that this guy Trump doesn’t want me to be the nominee.”
On the latter point, the former vice president is surely correct. The gradual decline of Biden’s once-promising campaign for president is widely interpreted as good news for the Trump White House. According to the New York Times, Trump leads other Democrats, but not Biden, in polls of critical swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan.
But Biden’s phony tough talk on Putin is too much to bear. Biden simply has no credibility. One need look back only as far as 2012 to remember why.
During a March 2012 photo opportunity in Seoul, sitting next to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, a puppet of Putin who was preparing to hand the presidency back to him in a matter of months, then-President Barack Obama essentially made the case for why Russia should want him to be reelected. And it was a strong case.
The Russians were invested in keeping America on the back foot, and at that time they did so in part by disingenuously opposing a proposed NATO missile defense system. In reality, that system posed no threat at all to Russia’s nuclear deterrent. But Russia was using it to gain leverage.
Obama, not realizing that the conversation would be overheard, told Medvedev that he needed time. He would be in a better position to take care of the Russians’ concerns, “particularly with missile defense,” after that November’s election.
“This is my last election,” Obama said. “After my election I have more flexibility.”
In short: Putin should want me to win.
“I understand you,” Medvedev replied. “I transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.”
Subsequently and throughout his run for reelection, Obama downplayed the threat of Russia, even going so far as to make light of Mitt Romney’s accurate warnings about Putin’s perfidy.
Indeed, under Obama, Russia reached the apex of its international power. Putin caught Obama completely by surprise when he illegally invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, something he had surely been planning all the way back in March 2012, when Obama had weakly asked for “flexibility.” And, of course, when the Russians launched their scheme to cause social media mayhem during the 2016 election, Obama was typically ill-prepared and ineffective in his response.
In the 2012 debates, when he disparaged Romney for wanting to return to 1980s foreign policy, Obama showed that he was not wise enough to be wary of Russia. And his vice president, a token old white guy chosen specifically because of his vast experience in foreign policy, was not very wise in this regard, either.
Biden says today that he would not have green lighted the Obama-era raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He’s probably not stretching the truth when he says that. But when he says that Putin would find his presidency difficult to bear, his record inspires some very serious doubts.
