It’s largely forgotten now, but Ronald Reagan made the gaffe heard round the world, when he unknowingly joked into a hot mic, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Although it wasn’t broadcast live, recordings were leaked by media sources within days. This was at a low point of the Cold War. A mistranslated account briefly sent part of the Soviet Far Eastern command onto high alert.
Later in the Reagan presidency, a massive NATO military exercise, coinciding with the deployment of new Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, had the Soviets believing that the US was in fact mobilising for a first-strike nuclear assault. Soviet forces in East Germany and Poland went on high alert and bombers began loading nuclear warheads. It is now believed that it was the closest the world came to nuclear war since 1962.
The point of all this is that what world leaders say and do, especially during times of crisis, carries tremendous weight.
A president making off-the-cuff jokes can send an enemy rushing to arm the bombers. What amount of damage can a president whose brain is apparently on a permanent rinse-cycle do?
It’s one thing to misidentify your vice president as the first lady, quite another to call for the ouster of an autocratic and bellicose leader of a nation with nuclear weapons. That is the kind of thing that can trigger wars that could result in the annihilation of much of humanity.
As we all remember, when the Bad Orange Man was in the White House, his slightest utterance was enough to send the media in a pearl-clutching meltdown. By contrast, the media have taken it on themselves to constantly explain what Sleepy Joe really means when he babbles about Corn Pop or calls his Vice President his “First Lady”.
But Brandon’s ever-further detachment from the world of the compos mentis is no joking matter when the slightest misstep could plunge the U.S. and Europe into war.
At North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, Mr. Biden was asked what the U.S. would do if Vladimir Putin used chemical weapons in Ukraine. He said the West would respond “in kind.” You might think, deploying commonly understood definitions, that he meant to convey the somewhat shocking threat that NATO would retaliate against use of a weapon of mass destruction with a like attack. But you’d be wrong. Later, Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said that while Russia would pay a heavy price if it used such weapons, the U.S. had “no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstances.”
If you were a Russian leader, who would you take seriously? The president, or one of his brown-nosing underlings?
The next day in Poland, the president casually remarked to American troops stationed there that some of them had already been in Ukraine and others would be going soon. Soon another administration Humpty was on the line to reporters, insisting that Mr. Biden’s words were in no way inconsistent with the fact that the U.S. had no forces in Ukraine and no plans to send any.
Given that we know U.S. agencies have been training Ukraine’s very own neo-Nazi forces, again, why should the Russians believe that?
On Saturday we had the most arresting breach between presidential words and improvised official definitions. At the end of an impassioned speech that denounced Vladimir Putin’s aggression and framed the struggle as a battle between democracy and tyranny, Mr. Biden threw down a gauntlet: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
This apparent call for regime change in Moscow, was, we were instantly told, nothing of the sort. “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” according to an unnamed White House official. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”
And anyway, when we want regime change, it’s all fine and dandy.
We can’t go on like this. Credibility is essential to the effective and safe conduct of national security. No amount of hasty cleanup will erase the words that come from the lips of a commander in chief. And no, it is not a defense of the president to note – accurately – that his immediate predecessor was as notorious for his verbal indiscipline as Mr. Biden is.
The Australian
For now, all we can hope and pray is that the Russians understand just as well as we do that America is led by a mentally incontinent dodderer.
Almost certainly, they do: Putin certainly never dared invade any countries when the Bad Orange Man was shooting his mouth off.
