Presidents Biden and Putin are trading barbs as of late, albeit through interpreters and intermediaries. At a California Democrat fundraiser, Biden called Putin a “crazy SOB,” while Putin sarcastically responded in so many words that Biden could have said, “Volodya, well done, thank you [for the endorsement], you’ve helped me a lot.” (The name Volodya is derived from Vladimir. In Russian, it conveys the idea of ruling with peace or being a renowned ruler.)
Biden’s “crazy SOB” remark came during a speech about climate change, where he reiterated his claim “the existential threat to humanity is climate.” When asked to comment on Biden’s “SOB” jab, Putin referred to the earlier endorsement he gave Biden over former President Donald Trump. From this exchange, Vladimir Putin’s comments are the ones deserving our attention.
Mr. Putin’s remarks broach the broader and more serious question: whom does Russia — along with other potential U.S. adversaries — want to see in the White House come November 2024? Whom would Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping prefer to face in a stare-down when the stakes are high and objective is Ukraine, Taiwan, or the South China Sea? Which candidate would Iran, North Korea, or the Latin cartels prefer to see in the White House?
We should take the Russian president at his word with his endorsement of Biden. Every international autocrat, dictator, and warlord would almost certainly want an increasingly frail President Biden with declining faculties over the nationalistic and assertive Donald Trump, who would openly adopt a more robust “America first” leadership approach to defense and foreign policy.
Plus, why would Vladimir Putin want a President Trump when actual events suggest he could achieve Russia’s objectives more easily and at less cost with President Biden remaining in office, whose actions, behavior, predilections, and temperament Russia has observed and benefited from? In Joe Biden, Russia — i.e., Putin — likely assesses a president (along with his present advisers and Cabinet members) as more interested in globalists’ designs from Davos, Dubai, and Turtle Bay than confronting tough issues like Middle East proxy wars, Russian revanchism, nuclear proliferation, and NATO solidarity.
Russia has watched President Biden, as we all have. The Russians observed him as Barack Obama’s vice president. Then the U.S. obliged the Kremlin by canceling missile defense systems for Central Europe. Mr. Putin noted U.S. facilitation of the transfer of large uranium assets to Russia. The Obama administration’s fuzzy line-in-the-sand indecisiveness over Syrian chemical weapons made way for Russia’s effective military intervention in Syria. President Putin must have approved of President Obama’s concessions to Iran for the nuclear deal, and it was Obama who notably told former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that Vladimir Putin should give him more “space” and that “after [his] election, [he] would have more flexibility.” On the Obama-Biden watch, Mr. Putin would conduct his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to seize Crimea.
Early in his own presidency, Mr. Biden lifted his predecessor’s sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (while canceling the domestic Keystone pipeline), giving Mr. Putin a big concession to set the tone. He further canceled Trump-era border policies, beginning a rush of migration now challenging U.S. sovereignty. In June 2021, he lifted Trump sanctions on Iran’s national oil company to revive the nuclear agreement as well as enabling that nation to engage in a strategic alliance with Russia. In Geneva, Mr. Biden met Mr. Putin, but instead of warning Russia not to hack any American sites, he gave him a list of 16 critical infrastructures he must not hack. Then, in August, Mr. Biden presided over a harried, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that likely was the green light for Russia to invade Ukraine. In December 2021, President Biden, watching the Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s border, warned Mr. Putin of dire consequences if Russia were to invade, but in February 2022, Russia did attack Ukraine. Finally in mid-2022, Biden traveled to meet the Saudi crown prince — the leader of a nation he once pledged to make a “pariah” — having to lobby for more oil production amid record-high U.S. gas prices.
In contrast, from the start, the Trump administration implemented a more uncompromising U.S. policy vis-à-vis Russia. Russia felt, in that administration’s first year alone, consequences of more assertive U.S. defense and foreign policy. In November 2017, the U.S. approved the $10.5-billion sale of Patriot anti-missile systems to NATO ally Poland in the face of perceived Russian aggression. In December of that same year, the U.S. authorized transfer of lethal anti-tank weapons to Ukraine to help that nation fight off Russian-backed separatists. U.S. troop presence in Eastern Europe increased over Obama-era levels to bolster European defenses against Russia, and the U.S. imposed monetary sanctions targeting bad individual Russian actors and companies instead of sanctioning that nation’s sovereign debt.
Further, the Trump administration pushed NATO allies to increase defense spending. In even more direct confrontations, Russian mercenaries and other pro-Syrian regime forces attacking U.S. troops in Syria were killed, while the U.S. under President Trump sanctioned Putin’s largest geo-economic project, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe (which President Biden reversed). In hindsight, President Trump’s tenure with its more forceful stance likely gave President Putin pause over four-plus years for his plans to invade Ukraine until the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
November 2024’s election has parallels with both 2020 and 2016, with the latter instructive in that Mr. Putin will probably again prefer the Democrat, regardless of any of the media’s latest infernal efforts to cast Donald Trump as a “colluding” Putin ally.
While speculative, Vladimir Putin was arguably just as surprised as CNN to wake up that November 2016 Wednesday morning and learn that the “impossible“ had happened. Two days before the election, pollsters and statisticians gave Hillary Clinton odds of between 75 and 99 percent of winning the election. Given such overwhelming pre-election global political and media consensus, a Clinton victory was probably baked into Kremlin intelligence briefings, causing Putin never to have given Donald Trump more consideration. His current endorsement of Biden for a second term — flattering him with praises like “he is a more experienced, predictable person” — is cover for knowing what a second Trump administration would mean for checking Russia and its adventurism.
If our nation’s recent “past is prologue,” global bad actors like Vladimir Putin will instinctively favor the Democrat candidate, particularly with the current Democrat agenda wreaking havoc on the fabric of American society and fomenting chaos with its open borders policies. In the specific case of President Biden, by easing sanctions, mollifying Iran, directing the Afghanistan withdrawal calamity, and weakening U.S. energy security, he transmitted the wrong signals to an autocrat who has exercised near absolute control over Russia for a quarter-century. It should come as no surprise that Mr. Putin would now endorse Joe Biden for president in a second term instead of Donald Trump. Let’s rightly understand why.
Colonel Chris J. Krisinger, USAF (ret.) served a tour as the military adviser to the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs at the Department of State. He is a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, is an honors graduate of the U.S. Naval War College, and also was a national defense fellow at Harvard University. If you would like to continue the conversation: cjkrisinger@gmail.com.
Image: World Economic Forum via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
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