News/Commentary

Max Boot puts teeth in Biden’s regime change gaffe, likens it to Reagan’s iconic stance against Russia

March 28, 2022 | | Print Article

According to Washington Post columnist Max Boot, when President Joe Biden called for a regime change in Russia during an off-script moment the White House couldn’t wait to walk back, it wasn’t a “gaffe,” it was a provocative message, akin to those made in the past by Ronald Reagan.

“I understand the argument that Biden blundered because raising the prospect of regime change in Russia runs the risk that [Russia President Vladimir] Putin might now fight all the harder,” Boot wrote in a WaPo opinion piece entitled, “Biden’s support for Ukraine and opposition to Putin were no ‘gaffe.'”

Don’t tell White House officials that.

President Biden’s “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” remark marked the third time in three days Biden administration officials had to control the damage caused by the president’s comments, American Wire News reported Sunday.

Boot conceded the disturbing conclusion to Biden’s Saturday Warsaw speech sure looked and sounded like a gaffe in what Boot called a “pitch-perfect call for Western unity in the face of Russian aggression,” but he wondered if perhaps the president would be vindicated.

“Certainly the fact that Biden’s aides rushed to walk back his remarks with lame explanations (‘The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” one said) suggests that this was indeed a gaffe — one of many that Biden has committed over his long political career,” Boot wrote.

“Yet I wonder if perhaps history will vindicate this Biden ‘gaffe’ in much the way that many historians have praised comments by President Ronald Reagan that were once seen as dangerously provocative,” Boot mused. “Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ and predicted it would wind up on the ‘ash-heap of history.’ Those tough but true words contributed to raising superpower tensions in the early 1980s, but they also inspired many behind the Iron Curtain to fight for freedom.”

“After the Berlin Wall came down, many saw Reagan as a visionary, not as a warmonger.”

Perhaps… but Biden wasn’t calling out the evils of a faulty, oppressive political ideology.

He literally said the elected president of a nuclear nation “cannot remain in power.”

His attack was not on socialism or even on the historically aggressive nature of the Russian Federation.

It was clearly aimed at one person —  Vladimir Putin — whom the President of the United States of America said needed to be removed from power, for God’s sake.

Still, Boot believes there’s a chance future historians will be kind to Joe Biden.

“Future historians might similarly vindicate Biden’s hope that Putin — whom he has accurately branded a ‘war criminal’ — will fall from power even though the United States apparently has no plan to remove Putin, just as in the 1980s the United States did not have any plan to topple the Berlin Wall.”

They might…

Or they might see Biden the way Nigel Farage sees him — as “the most dangerous man in the world.”

Melissa Fine
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