On Monday, President Biden said about his recent statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin should not be in power: “I wasn’t then, nor am I now, articulating a policy change. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it.”
Some analysts have noted that Biden has dropped his condemnations of Saudi Arabia as it has accelerated its bombing of Yemen in recent months.
NORMAN SOLOMON, solomonprogressive@gmail.com, @normansolomon
“By doubling down on his call for regime change, President Biden has undercut the words of top U.S. officials that appeared to ‘walk back’ his initial irresponsible statement in Warsaw,” Solomon said today. “Rather than trying to soothe the dangerous waters, Biden has made them even more dangerous. This should be condemned — rather than silently aided and abetted — by members of Congress.”
Solomon recently wrote the piece “Biden’s Dangerous Call for Regime Change in Russia,” which states: “Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to ‘walk back’ his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.
“They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’
“With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president’s top underlings could stuff it back in. ‘We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,’ Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change. …
“Mainstream journalists have avoided putting a fine point on the likelihood that World War III just got closer thanks to Biden’s words, whether or not they were ‘a slip’ or ‘a veiled threat.’ In fact, it might never be possible to know which it was. But that ambiguity underscores that his slip and/or threat was mind-blowingly irresponsible, endangering the survival of humanity on this planet.
“Outrage is the appropriate response. And a special onus is on Democrats in Congress, who should be willing to put humanity above party and condemn Biden’s extreme irresponsibility. But prospects for such condemnation look bleak. …
“Overall, in recent weeks, President Biden has jettisoned all but the flimsiest pretenses of seeking a diplomatic solution to end the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Instead, his administration keeps ratcheting up the self-righteous rhetoric while moving the world closer to ultimate catastrophe.”
Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions.
