President Biden’s speech in Warsaw this week was oddly triumphant, sbg1 writes. “The one-year anniversary of what will undoubtedly go down as the worst fighting in Europe since the end of the Second World War should be an occasion for some humility.”
It was also—and this was clearly the point—about as dramatic a contrast as one could imagine with, who spoke the next day in Moscow, far from the front lines of a war that he has so far failed to win. Putin’s speech, bristling with thinly veiled nuclear threats, false accusations, and culture-war lamentations about the decadent West, was such a long and predictable rant that some Kremlin functionaries in the audience nodded off.
It has been Biden’s curse—and opportunity—to become President after a lifetime of aspiring to the job at just the moment when democracy has come under attack, at home and abroad. At his best, Biden has summoned an admirable clarity in describing the threat, whether from Constitution-defying Trumpists in the United States or Putin and his fellow-authoritarians overseas.
The President’s use of the past tense for a present crisis just didn’t sound quite right. This awful year of war has caused more than three hundred thousand casualties on both sides, according to various Western estimates, and sent millions of Ukrainians fleeing from their homes.
Before Biden spoke in Warsaw, Polish President Andrzej Duda alluded to this unfortunate recent history. “There is no place for business as usual with Russia anymore,” he said. For years, Poland and other Eastern European states that, in the past, were targets of Russia’s imperial aggression have prodded bigger European powers, such as France and Germany, to stand more firmly against Putin, generally to no avail.
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