President Joe Biden closed his speech in Warsaw March 26 with a ringing denunciation of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” said Biden, setting off a firestorm of criticism from around the world. Yet his speech provided an essential step towards moral clarity.
Attempting to ameliorate the impact of the president’s words, White House staff immediately tried to walk them back, saying that Biden didn’t really mean that he wanted Putin removed from power, but only that Russia should not be allowed to exert power over its neighbors.
This didn’t wash. The tyrant’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, rejected Biden’s remark, claiming that “it is up to the Russian people to choose their president.”
French president Emmanuel Macron was also upset with Biden’s use of the word “butcher” to describe Putin. “I wouldn’t use this type of wording because I continue to hold discussions with President Putin,” said Macron in an interview with France 3 TV. “We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without escalation – that’s the objective.”
Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass seconded this view, tweeting “ending the war in Ukraine and avoiding escalation must be our priorities.” Senator Jim Risch (R-ID), the minority leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee also chimed in, terming Biden’s closing sentence a “horrendous gaffe.” Speaking on CNN March 27, he added: “This administration has done everything they can to stop escalating” and “there’s not a whole lot more you can do to escalate than to call for regime change.”
While I have been extremely critical of Biden’s handling of the Ukraine crisis both in the lead up
and since the invasion, in this case I must take the president’s side.
Biden spoke the truth and it needed to be heard.
We can readily dismiss the complaint offered by Putin’s mouthpiece that the Russian people should be allowed to choose their president, because the primary purpose of the Putin regime is to prevent such freedom. Since his seizure of power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has systematically silenced any free press in Russia, suppressed opposition political parties, and jailed or assassinated all critics.
Far from being inconsistent with the right of Russians to choose their own government, the removal of Vladimir Putin is a necessary precondition.
The criticism of the diplomatic crowd that calling for regime change in Russia is somehow rude and inappropriate is also off the wall. Putin has not merely called for regime change in Ukraine, he has launched a full-scale invasion with the clear intention of wiping the country off the map as an independent and sovereign nation.
Nor is he dealing with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in accord with international rules of diplomacy. On the contrary, he has repeatedly sent squads of assassins to try to murder Ukraine’s elected president, with the latest team being apprehended on the same day that Biden made his speech. According this assassin, the respect due to a statesman amounts to willful denial of reality.
Furthermore, the idea that applying harsh words to Putin is bad because they are disruptive to negotiations is absurd, because negotiations with Putin are nonsensical. There is no point seeking agreements from Putin because he doesn’t keep to any agreements.
In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees from the United States, the UK, and Russia to respect and defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. While there are questions as to whether the U.S. and UK are fully living up to their side of that bargain, Putin’s actions have been 180 degrees in opposition to it.
Nor can anything Putin says be trusted. He mocks the very idea of truth. In 2014, as his forces invaded Crimea, he denied any Russian involvement. Virtually right up to the day of the latest invasion, Putin’s spokesmen were assuring the world that Russia would not invade. Then it did.
Macron’s criticism of Biden is very poorly taken. While Biden has provided inadequate arms to Ukraine, since the invasion began France has disgraced itself by providing none, and major French companies continue to do business in Russia. Moreover, Macron has been conducting negotiations with Russia, while excluding Ukraine from the discussions. In these talks, Putin has offered various formulas all involving Ukraine making territorial concessions and disarming itself. This would, of course, leave Ukraine helpless to resist further demands.
If Ukraine wants to surrender, it could do so without Macron’s help. But Ukraine does not want to surrender. It cannot surrender, because it experienced Russian rule before, and that experience included not only mass murder of intellectuals and other potential opponents, but the events of the 1930s Holodomor where millions of Ukraine’s ordinary folk were systematically starved to death by Kremlin agents confiscating the country’s food.
Any who doubt that Putin is able and willing to repeat such crimes have only to look to his current massacre of Mariupol to settle the question.
For Ukraine, in this war there can be no substitute for victory.
Setting that small matter aside, Macron, Haass, as well as many defeatists within or around the Biden camp say that “containing” the war, rather than winning it, must be the priority for the rest of us.
But one only has to look at Putin’s track record to see that won’t work. Since 1999, he has been testing the West’s resolve by indulging in one aggression after another. First, he devastated Chechnya. Then in 2008 he invaded Georgia. This was followed by the massacre of over 500,000 people in Syria in 2012, and the intentional stampeding of millions of refugees into Europe to grow the fortunes of Putin-allied nativist parties.
Then, in 2014, he invaded Ukraine, a European country that was seeking EU membership. His gains from that attack being de-facto accepted by the West, he has now expanded his goals to aim for a territorial conquest that would provide him with a broad front for potentially attacking NATO members Poland, Slovakia, and Romania.
Putin is not acting on the basis of provocation. He is acting on the basis of opportunity. He has stated he wants to restore the Russian and Soviet empires, and the only limiting principle to his actions towards that end is what he thinks he can get away with. Thus, he cannot be appeased. Each successful aggression leads to yet a more offensive one.
If he succeeds in conquering Ukraine, he will go for more, both because his position will be stronger and the West – with Ukraine’s forces delisted from its order of battle – will be weaker, and because he will have seen, once again, that the West is unwilling to fight.
If we wish to prevent escalation, the only way to do it is to draw the line. The idea that we can protect ourselves by “containing the war” through appeasement is fallacious. It is Putin who needs to be contained. That requires defeating him. Furthermore, the defeat needs to be permanent, or he will simply try again.
So, Biden spoke the truth.
For the sake of world peace, Putin cannot be allowed to remain in power.
Biden’s statement may have been, as Senator Risch said, a gaffe. Gaffes are what happens when politicians inadvertently speak the truth. But it was not “a horrendous gaffe.” It was a necessary gaffe.
It was necessary because, more than anything else right now, moral clarity is needed. The West could readily empower Ukraine with the means to repel Putin’s invasion. But we are not doing so because our purposes are confused.
Some, within administration circles want Ukraine to win, and are calling for sending Ukraine all the weapons it wants. Others just want Ukraine to go away, and the fastest way to achieve that is to let Putin win. So, torn between these two outlooks, the administration sends drones, but only 100 of the small, short range kind suitable to taking out trucks but not the larger heavier versions capable of destroying tanks.
So, we are fine with Ukrainians destroying Russian tanks, but only if it is done by infantry willing to run the risk of coming close enough to use handheld anti-tank rockets. We are willing to provide Ukraine with short range antiaircraft missiles capable of shooting down low altitude Russian aircraft, but not missile systems for shooting down high-altitude bombers.
Certainly, we must not send fighter aircraft, which can not only knock down bombers and subsonic cruise missiles, but potentially do a job on Russia’s stalled convoys, its tanks roaming open country in the south, its artillery bombarding Mariupol, and its ships waiting offshore to strike Odessa. No, providing Ukraine with airpower would make Putin very unhappy, so we supposedly must not do it. Yet we cannot win, or even draw, without making Putin very unhappy.
If Biden is right, and he is, we need to act decisively.
We should send Ukraine all the weapons it has requested, but we should not stop there. There is no reason why Ukraine should carry the burden of combat alone.
On the contrary, there is every reason why NATO must engage. If it does not, not only will Ukraine be devastated by extended ground warfare, but Putin will be confirmed in his opinion that America’s real line in Europe is that it won’t fight Russia. That would virtually guarantee further invasions, with the Baltics being first on the list. Unlike Ukraine, they have no substantial ground forces, and could only be defended by a massive American commitment. If the US won’t fight, they are history.
But because Ukraine has taken such a fierce stand, Russia can be stopped now, at much lower cost. NATO does not need to send troops to Ukraine. It can do the job by providing air cover and close air support to the Ukrainian army to drive the invaders out. This is the fastest way to achieve victory.
The alternatives are either to let Putin win outright, which would lead to genocide in Ukraine and the fall of the Baltics, or give Ukraine just enough support to maintain extended resistance. This latter option, which seems by default to be the policy NATO is pursuing as a result of its indecision, will lead not only to the devastation of Ukraine, but Chinese domination of Eurasia, as Russia becomes totally dependent on Beijing to maintain its perpetual war.
The objections raised by the defeatists that intervention by NATO airpower based in Poland and Romania into Ukraine would lead to World War III, do not hold water. Provided NATO forces restrict their strikes to Russian air and ground forces inside of Ukraine, Putin would have every incentive he currently has not to strike back at NATO bases outside of Ukraine: the threat of retaliation.
If Putin struck NATO bases, Russian bases in Russia and Belarus would be subject to attack. This would completely disrupt the logistical structure of the invasion and turn the Black Sea Fleet into a flock of sitting ducks.
Another unsupportable objection is that NATO air forces cannot confine their activities to Ukraine because they would supposedly have to strike Russian anti-aircraft missile sites outside the country. While it is true that those facilities are an inconvenience, Ukraine’s existing air force has shown itself capable of flying despite them. NATO aircraft, equipped with superior technology for spoofing Russian targeting systems, could certainly do so as well.
So, just as in Korea, where US and Soviet pilots engaged each other without either striking at the other’s supporting bases, NATO can send its airpower into Ukraine, and what happens in Ukraine will stay in Ukraine. With NATO’s fighters, bombers, and ground attack aircraft backing up Ukraine’s army in force, the Russians will have no choice but to leave the country.
Outright defeat in Ukraine may well result in Putin’s fall from power. Or he may cling on for a while. In that case, the West should resume, in a big way, the Radio Liberty type activities it employed in the Cold War to help the nations of Eastern Europe rid themselves of communist tyrannies.
Biden was right. We can’t allow a mad war-mongering butcher to remain in control of a nation with an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. The policy does need to be regime change, with the first item on the agenda being repelling his aggression against Ukraine. If that is not done, Putin’s power will be strengthened, and more wars, and much bigger wars, will inevitably follow.
Clausewitz said that the key quality a military leader needs is resolution. The first line of Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War is “In War, Resolution.” Resolution requires moral clarity. For a brief shining moment on Saturday, Biden offered just that.
Now the West must act accordingly.
Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer. His latest book The Case for Space, was recently published by Prometheus books.
The opinions expressed in this Op Ed are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the Kyiv Post.
