Two years after his accession to the White House and exactly halfway through his term as head of state, Joe Biden has delivered the two most important speeches by an American president since the beginning of the century. Better: despite his old age, 80 years old, he has definitively erased the memory of “Sleepy Joe” (“Sleepy Joe”, the nickname Donald Trump had given him). As well as the impression of indecisiveness and weakness left by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama – who weakened America’s deterrent capacity like no one else by renouncing strikes against the Syrian regime, following the attacks on the chemical weapon in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013.
“Joe Biden’s visit to kyiv shows that he is a real war president”, says Jacob Heilbrunn, the director of the international politics magazine The National Interest, based in Washington. “He silences the critics who have long caricatured him as an old man reclusive in the cellar of his villa [NDLR : d’où il a mené l’essentiel de sa campagne électorale]. His trip to Ukraine, one of the most remarkable in modern history for an American president in a country at war and in a city regularly bombed without a presence of the US Army, shows on the contrary that he has c… .”, insists Heilbrunn, a wise observer of the American presidency who has been repeating two things to L’Express for a long time: 1 / Biden will run for re-election in 2024; 2 / he wants to make history.
It seems that Joe Biden is asserting himself as a great American head of state. And we must also believe that, all things considered, being octogenarian does not only have disadvantages. A child of World War II (he was born in November 1942) and a product of the Cold War (he first became a senator under Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev), Biden has this understanding of long time that allows him to ignore the polls and to declare on Tuesday February 21 in Warsaw that “defending freedom is not the work of a day or a year.” Almost as Churchillian as “the blood, tears and sweat” of the British Prime Minister’s prescient speech before the London Blitz in 1940.
Like Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 – a reference he is bound to think of – Biden also knows that the military industry must step up the pace to win the war in the long run. The subject was also raised by Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Munich Security Conference on February 17. “If there is something important to remember from this conference, said the head of Canadian diplomacy Mélanie Joly, who took part in it, it is that the allies are more united and mobilized than ever to support Ukraine until ‘at the end.” Passing through Paris, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs explained to L’Express on Monday: “We must arm Ukraine to achieve peace. We are now in a race where the military industry must ramp up. ” A statement to be compared with Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to the Raduga missile manufacturing plant in early February north of Moscow, whose director explained that his workers had recently switched to “three-eight” production mode.
“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no,” Biden hammered vigorously in Warsaw. And also: “President Putin chose this war. Every day, if the war continues, it is by his choice.” A way of responding clearly to Vladimir Putin who maintains the fable according to which Russia, threatened with invasion by its neighbors, was forced into aggression. After the visit to kyiv, aviator Ray-Ban on the nose, the timing of the Warsaw speech was particularly well thought out. These two “moments” – Kiev then Warsaw – “caught in a vice” and took the oxygen away from the annual speech, a bit lunar, addressed to the Russian nation by Vladimir Putin in Moscow and interspersed with standing ovation “spontaneous” on the part of the regime’s cadres lined up in an onion row.
Old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and experienced to have accompanied all the ensuing US-Soviet tensions, Biden knows full well that only two things are likely to impress Vladimir Putin ever so slightly: American determination and military power. The firmness shown in Warsaw also aims to reassure the “B9” – the Bucharest Nine, an appellation which brings together the countries of Central Europe – bothered by the ambiguities of Olaf Scholz or Emmanuel Macron, who said in Munich that he wanted “the defeat” of Russia, but “without crushing it”. Finally, Biden addresses his opposition, in the United States, where only 48% of Americans today support the delivery of arms to Ukraine, against 60% last May, according to an Associated Press poll. At the same time, 56% trust him to handle the situation.
Certainly, the war in Ukraine has become a subject of national interest and will weigh on the 2024 presidential election. Divided on the issue, the Republican Party finds itself weakened. Behind a Donald Trump opposed to the war – which he claims “to be able to settle in an hour”! – line up all the ultras like the elected Marjorie Taylor Greene or the presenter of Fox News Tucker Carlson who accuse Biden of neglecting the problems of migrants on the Mexican border and propose “a negotiated solution” for the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
At the same time, others, like the Republican leader of the Senate Mitch McConnell or the presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, attack the tenant of the White House on his supposed softness. Only one certainty: with Biden on the front line, the war in Ukraine is defining his presidency in the same way that the global conflict is associated with the Roosevelt era. Joe Biden wanted to go down in history and it was Vladimir Putin who brought him there.
