When asked on ABC Wednesday evening if he thought Russian President Putin was a "killer," POJO answered, “Mmm hmm, I do.”
Official Russia went nuts. In ominous response, as Aleksei Navalny languishes in gaol for the offense of (barely) surviving Putin's attempted assassination-by-poison, the Russian President wished POJO “good health”. They recalled their ambassador for consultations on "what needs to be done"; they intoned gravely that “the only language” that Americans understand “is, unfortunately, the language of force", which they threatened would ensue “if explanations and apologies do not follow from the American side;” Putin used a Russian schoolboy maxim to suggest that Biden was acting like a child calling names. When a child does that, the maxim goes, he’s really calling himself the name.
It was a lot of overkill lol and we can read some into the overkill. Putin has been itching for this fight. Obama humiliated and enraged him; HRC called his legitimacy into question; the Obamas supported the Ukrainian Euro Maidan movement toward Europe; Biden was part of the Obama administration and has been highly critical, rightly, of Putin; the U.S. withdrew from the treaty that prohibited a ballistic missile shield over Europe; W’s relationship with Putin went south after Putin’s invasion of Georgia. As a consequence of all of that Putin invaded Ukraine, accomplishing the dual purposes of taking back a country once in the Soviet orbit and preventing its drift into the enemy camp, and exposing NATO for the paper tiger it is; intervened—changing votes, too!—successfully (to Putin’s astonished delight) in the 2016 election to install 46-1; found 46-1 so pleasant and pliant that he tried to do it again in 2020; went about surreptitiously assassinating domestic critics in Western countries; and bombarded foreign installations with high grade sonic weapons that brain-damaged their occupants. And Putin got away with all of it!
Putin is emboldened, in other words.
We can learn from this exchange. We see in Putin’s use of the schoolboy maxim the familiar Soviet, now Russian, rhetorical tactic of “whataboutism”— “And you lynch Negroes." By calling me a killer, you’re just calling yourself a killer, like a child. We see in the response, “the only language Americans understand is force” the characteristic Russian bullying trait; we see the dangers in placating the bully as 46-1 did, and the wisdom in the Western schoolboy maxim of how to stop a bully,“Punch back.” We see Putin’s domestic weakness as the spur to distracting the Russian people with a--factual slight by the hated American enemy. We see that in recalling their ambassador they are begging Biden to engage with them in their preferred reciprocal tit-for-tat diplomacy.
Biden should let the ambassador recall go--It is the provocation often the penultimate step to a state of war--but as provocative as it is, it is clear overreaction and Biden should not reciprocate. I would help their ambassador pack—Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out—and take my time letting him return—So soon? I sort of got used to you not being here—but I would not recall our ambassador. Biden should not take any additional measures than current to ensure his own “health” (safety), but he should take seriously the threat of “force” against the United States and to European countries, especially the Baltics, for Putin has revealed the laughably soft underbelly of American power: NATO. NATO is a joke. The "one-for-all, all-for-one” mutual defense clause in the charter is a joke. The idea that Washington would defend an attack on Vilnius as it would an attack on Washington is a joke.
Biden should respond by following the maxim, “To achieve peace, prepare for war.” The United States has no use for Russia—they manufacture nothing that we want; they have been dysfunctional their entire history; they are not a "partner,” much less an ally (eternal curses on FDR); they have some absolutely brilliant scientists and experts but, in general, the Russian people, including the political leadership, have never been all broke out with genius. Without nukes, Russia would hold all the interest of Antarctica.
We can run circles around the Russians, as we did during the Cold War by sneaking a sub into Murmansk harbor and sneaking it back out before Rooski even knew we had been there lol; as we did in simultaneously pinging the location of all of our submarines worldwide, knowing that the Soviets were having difficulty tracking all of them; as we did even this century when a Russian general had to borrow an American’s cell phone to issue orders during the Georgian war. Biden has at least the cyber capability as Putin does. Biden must punch back to stop the bully. He should use U.S. cyber capabilities to further delegitimize Putin and destabilize Russia. The U.S. and Israel fucking attacked Iran and fucked up their uranium enrichment facility. We can fuck with Russia's computers.
When you punch a bully back you have to make sure you can win the fight if one ensues. Putin is not going to launch a surprise thermonuclear attack on the U.S. But where Putin has Biden is on NATO. Putin may, he very plausibly could, surreptitiously invade one of the Baltic states as he did Ukraine, triggering NATO’s absurd mutual defense clause. What does Biden do then? After his predecessor, Biden is not going further undermine the efficacy of NATO. But the truth is Joe Biden, nor any American president is going to go to war with Russia over Vilnius.
The undersigned has inveighed against NATO for the better part of twenty years. All of that will not be recapitulated now, and President Biden will be relieved to know that I have no unsolicited advice for him on NATO lol. It’s all yours, bruh. Scenarios in which Putin challenges NATO by invading a member state are too easy to envision and no doubt have been game-planned in the Pentagon ad nauseum...(I can't envision how those games work out well for the good guys, however.) How a Russian invasion comes about is also easy to see. Georgia, Ukraine, any of the Baltics, hold no strategic importance for Putin. He didn’t invade the first two for strategic value and he wouldn’t invade Lithuania for strategic value. DUH! Putin has shown a willingness to invade former Soviet states now independent if those formers become independent on the side of the U.S (NATO, "The West"). Biden, any American president, has an interest, therefore, in not sharpening the dispute du jour with Russia in order not to tempt Putin into seeing Europe in any more us-them terms than he already does (The alternative, I cannot resist restating, is to disband NATO), because if the us-them vision is made sharper in Putin's eyes then the Soviet adventures into Hungary and Czechoslovakia are going to be called to his mind. So President Biden does have a great interest in not letting this contretemps get out of hand--unless he's willing to disband NATO! He should absolutely “make Russia pay” for interfering in the 2020 election, more sanctions; he should absolutely engage in cyber warfare against Russia including cyber attacks on their nuclear infrastructure; even assassinations, including of Putin! Yeltsin told President Clinton, "We Russians may not understand puts and calls but we understand throw weight." The Russian schoolboy maxim is joined with the "language of force" threat: Force is the only language that Russians understand. If Biden does even some of the above, the bully will be bloodied. If he still wants a fight he will be obliterated and the world’s average IQ will increase lol.
