Biden’s war: does he know what he’s doing?

Anyone could see that Joe Biden veered off-script during his big speech in Poland. ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,’ he said of Vladimir Putin, which sounded a lot like a cry for regime change. Luckily for him, though, and perhaps for world peace, Leon Panetta, a former secretary of defence under Barack Obama, was on hand to explain the comment away: ‘I happen to think that Joe Biden – you know, he’s Irish – really has a great deal of compassion when he sees that people are suffering.’

To be sure, to be sure. Still, even if Biden’s threat to Putin can be wholly attributed to a Gaelic jig playing in his head, the fallout has been the same. His staff promptly ‘walked back’ the remark, while Biden was said to have cast a shadow on an otherwise successful European trip.

The Putin comment was a kind of flash-encapsulation of the entire Biden approach to the Ukraine crisis. It was bracing yet confusing, earnest yet reckless, sharp on the surface while concealing a more complex and calculated reality underneath – from a President who can’t seem to stop betraying his authority with an endless stream of unhelpful ad-libs.

With much now riding on how well America handles the most perilous geopolitical situation for at least a generation, we see again an immutable principle of global politics at work, one that ranks right up there with ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia’. It is this: Biden will find a way to undermine himself. At least his apparent regime change demand had the virtue of making sense. His other gaffes on the same trip were more muddling, such as a vague threat to respond ‘in kind’ if Russia used a chemical weapon in Ukraine, implying that the United States might unleash sarin gas over eastern Europe.