Allow me this dissent on the notion that President Biden committed some sort of “gaffe” when he said Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in office.”
Critics and even some Biden supporters keep bloviating about the president’s remarks in Warsaw the other day in which he said, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
They refer to them as “those nine unscripted words” that got Biden into trouble.
I disagree. I didn’t read into those words that Biden was calling specifically for regime change. He was offering his opinion on the thuggish behavior coming from the Kremlin. Joe Biden knows better than to contradict decades of U.S. foreign policy. He knows that the United States is not going to seek to remove the Russian despot from his perch.
He was speaking the truth. Indeed, Putin — the architect of the brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine — “cannot remain in power.” Whether he gets ousted depends on whether Russians are willing to make that move.
I am going to give President Biden a pass on what he said in Warsaw. His remarks only tightened the screws on Putin. What is wrong with that?