Thank God for Joe Biden
Even though Donald Trump is out of power and gone from relevance to the point that even Fox News hosts are now being forced tamp down his increasingly bizarre attention-seeking lies to his face, we may just now be seeing the full fallout from his catastrophic “Presidency.” We’re now facing the sobering and tragic possibility that entire countries may cease to exist as a result of the damage Trump has done. Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that the United States isn’t one of them.
As so often ends up being the case, Trump isn’t a relevant player in the fallout from the mess he’s made. That burden instead falls to President Joe Biden, the elder statesman who rose up and knocked Trump out of power, knowing he’d be stepping into a minefield. It’s not just that Biden has had to piece the United States government and democracy back together. It’s that Biden is left trying to piece back together the United States’ standing and influence on the world stage, at a time when the guy who put Trump in power in the first place is now trying to take advantage of the fallout.
Yes, that brings us to Vladimir Putin, a guy who spent decades carrying out precisely as much evil as he knew he could get away with, always careful not to take the kinds of risks that could weaken him or get him ousted. Putin has somehow lost even his own plot, shifting from steady evil to self destructive evil, and it’s still not clear why. But whatever prompted Putin to bet his current standing (and maybe even his life) on this latest gambit, there’s perhaps no changing his mind. After all, a broken mind can’t be reasoned with.
And yet President Biden is doing precisely what one would hope in this situation. He took U.S. military intel and kept publicly announcing it in a way that’s been flustering Putin and his plans at every step. It hasn’t stopped Putin, but it’s certainly allowed everyone involved to be a step ahead of Putin’s advances. That’s a far cry from Trump, who liked to publicly release U.S. military intel for the benefit of America’s enemies.
Biden also appears to understand that the one and only way to force Russia to retreat is to pummel its oligarchs financially, in the hope that they eventually decide the cost of keeping Putin around is simply too great. Biden’s sanctions are targeted directly at the oligarchs, as a way of getting their attention. And while some in Europe may not be quite ready to remove Russia from the SWIFT banking system, Biden will surely end up convincing them to go through with it. This will cripple Russia’s ability to financially exist anywhere outside its own borders.
None of this had to happen, of course. If Trump hadn’t taken power, Putin wouldn’t have simply gone away, but he wouldn’t have had the four year head start he currently has. That said, there’s no going back now. The situation we now find ourselves dealing with is all the more reason why Trump must be criminally punished, of course. But if anything, what’s playing out on the world stage serves as a reminder of just how small and irrelevant Trump himself has become. He’s simply not a part of this, no matter how desperately he’s trying to be.
In the meantime, there’s no one you’d rather have in the Oval Office right now than Joe Biden. He has the experience, the relationships, and the savvy to not only deal with Putin head-on, but to organize and lead the world’s response to Russia. One of Putin’s favorite tricks is to pit allies against each other as a way of weakening them. Thus far there’s no sign of Putin being able to drive a wedge between America and its allies on this matter. President Biden is holding things firm and steady, exactly like you’d hope. There’s no magic wand for quickly pulling the plug on Putin. But there’s no one else you’d want that chair right now other than Biden.
