Probably just semantics, but Biden didn’t call Putin a killer directly…
When Stephanopoulos followed up by asking Biden if he thinks Putin is “a killer,” the president replied, “I do.”*
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I’m neither American nor Russian so this reply is not a political or sided one, but just because this is the president you like maybe doesn’t make this a good response? There isn’t a single American president less killer than a Russian president or vice versa. Early in his reign Putin was doing all he can to align Russia to West, and was pushed back. Now that the American president is from the correct party is it suddenly ok to call a president of one of the major world powers a killer?
And isn’t the job of this press secretary be spinning this in a way that it’s not as crass as directly calling another president a killer? If I were a president and called somebody a killer, I’d fire my press secretary if she doubled down on that blunder.
Please look at this as president of nuclear power A from party X calling president of nuclear power B a killer and suddenly it doesn’t seem to be such a cool feat.
Just saying as a middle easterner.
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Putin wasn’t “pushed back” at the time (shortly after the Kursk submarine disaster). He made a cynical political calculation to turn the West into a boogeyman in order to appeal to Russia’s nationalist Know-Nothings and as a way of shifting the blame for his new regime’s rapidly mounting economic failures.
Please. The question was obviously a reference to Putin’s various and numerous attempts to have his domestic political opponents assassinated. I know you’re not from the U.S., but presidents here – even a former CIA head like Bush the Elder – don’t have their their critics and political rivals poisoned, irradiated, beaten, defenestrated, imprisoned in concentration camps, etc.
As I said above, I believe that Biden’s response was a gaffe from the viewpoint of traditional diplomatic norms and understand that sometimes that has serious consequences. That doesn’t mean I’ll stand by while anyone re-writes history or engages in false equivalencies.
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I knew nothing about her before she got the job, but I can only guess that her previous experience involved preventing toddlers from getting cookies because she is very skilled at smiling while telling them to politely kiss her butt.
I like her lots.
This strange trend of attempted gotcha questions has got to stop. The circus has left. Let’s move on folks.
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“Bless his heart.”
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I don’t think we’ve had a president who preferred to take the “hands on” approach since Teddy Roosevelt, have we?
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I get that the view from Turkey is a much different one, but is your argument that most, or even some, American presidents have engaged in targeted assassinations of rivals, and torture and jailing of political opponents? Or is this more of a “well, American presidents order drone strikes” attempt at equivalency?
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I get your point here, but I don’t really see a big difference between a drone strike and an assassination. When the killed person is of a different nationality than the president giving the order, it doesn’t make that person any less dead.
About the pushback, I’m no political scientist so this is only my memory but in early 2000s there were talks of a potential accession or at least cooperation of Russia and NATO, also Russia and EU. I might be mistaken so I don’t want to be seen as trying to push a narrative but that’s what I remember from those days.
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This is more of a drone strikes kind of thing. But also, it’s no secret America tried to assassinate Castro multiple times for example. Chile, Nicaragua, Libya, Iraq… I mean if it’s another country’s president it doesn’t suddenly become fair game. Is it really that much different when the assassinated/killed person is the leader of another country and not your fellow citizen?
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Actually, it is, yes. In the one hand (however distasteful or even illegal under international law) drone strikes and going after foreign leaders are an act of foreign policy. It’s an external thing. On the other hand, assassinating one’s domestic political opponents undermines one of the fundamental tenets of democracy, and is a direct strike on the rule of law.
The two are not at all equivalent. If they were we’d be taking about Ukraine and Georgia and the Crimea. But we’re not. We’re talking about Presidents order murders of their political opponents.
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I mean since neither of us are residents of Russia wouldn’t we be more concerned about the acts of foreign policy? I’m not saying Russia is a democracy, of course Putin’s assassinations and other methods of ruling are huge direct strikes on the rule of law. But the question isn’t if Russia has rule of law? It’s a killer of one sort calling a killer of another sort a killer and being applauded for that.
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But the American interviewer did see the difference, as a matter of course. American political reporters in the corporate press are very much wrapped in the assumptions of the military-industrial complex, so it’s taken as a given that drone strikes and such from Biden or Putin are part of the job and not worthy of remark.
No-one here will deny that all leaders of superpowers are, as parts of their jobs, ordering killings. But that’s not what was being discussed in that interview.
That was more a characteristic of Yeltsin’s administration. It held to a degree into the first year and a half or so of the Putin regime, but then things started going pear-shaped for him and he shifted Russia toward an anti-Western stance during late 2000/early 2001.
You may be remembering the brief period after 9/11 where there were some noises made about joining to fight the common enemy of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism, but that didn’t last long.
Since Putin frequently tries to kill his domestic opponents when they’re travelling abroad, his assassination orders can become a matter of foreign policy. You may recall that one such attempt shut down an entire neighbourhood in the UK and spurred a pandemic-like contact-tracing effort.
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Your point about drone strikes is valid. From the perspective of somebody in the Middle East, with no vested interest in either county over the other, I can see how drone strikes and novochik poisonings look the same. However, when you bring up Castro and Nicaragua and Iraq, you seem to be confusing the country with the current regime. Biden has been in power for two months now. He did not try to assassinate Castro or invade Iraq. Both countries have their share of faults and bad history, but there are degrees of bad leaders. There have been bad presidents on both sides (Putin and Bush and Trump), but the leaders are not interchangeable. Biden is not a continuation of Trump, but Putin has been in power for two decades now. Look at what Putin has done versus what Biden has done while in power. There is much to dislike about both, but they are not the same.
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following the near second reading of this extraordinary book… I am at a pinnacle of some understanding…
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Where I have a hard time with your equivalence between Putin and Biden is not just the difference between political murders to increase or retain power, but also that Biden really hasn’t really done the drone strike thing as president. I would have supported impeachment for Obama for his illegal use of drone strikes, both against US and international law, as much as I otherwise supported his policies. But Biden wasn’t the person making those calls, and as president he has begun dismantling those kinds of executive powers.
So if you are looking at Putin and Biden both being killers, you’re probably picking the wrong guy. He hasn’t been in charge long, but so far he’s been the only US president in the past 50 years to work to decrease presidential military powers.
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The part that confuses me though is why they keep doing murders that are so easy to trace…what with the messy poisons and bone saws and such things. I kind of think they want people to know, so the reputation will hang around like an 800-pound gorilla.
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Definitely. They enjoy and utilise the fear these acts engender in their other opponents. I’m sure that there’s a personal sadistic pleasure for these types as well.
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My memory is slightly different. The West’s friend, Boris Yeltsin, collapsed the country into poverty and handed over its wealth to the class of oligarchs we know and love. After that, and don’t forget Putin’s source of popularity is that he isn’t Yeltsin, the west stepped up its interference in former Soviet satellite states’ elections. Promoting “revolutions” and “democracy”, and you know fascism. Shit got very hairy in Europe over that and quite frankly it was sliding towards multiple wars.
Putin is, and was, anti west as that’s why he’s in power.
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He came to power in part riding the legitimate resentment Russians had for the Western neoCons who, in their typically bumbling and myopic way, had wrecked the country’s economy in the 1990s in combination with Yeltsin’s incompetent leadership and the greed of the oligarchs. However, for the first yearor so, the primary villains in Putin’s political narrative were Russians and not Westerners.
Putin’s anti-Western shift around 2000 co-incided with his desire to replace the Yeltsin-era Western-affiliated kleptocrats and oligarchs with his own tame ones, who would make sure to let him “wet his beak” in every one of their shady deals (or else…). He also saw an opportunity to tap back into re-emergent nationalist sentiment after a decade of humiliation, popularising Dugin’s prescriptions to re-assert “Russian greatness”.
The need to distract from his regime’s terrible mishandling of the Kursk disaster marks the real turning point in re: the West becoming the main bad guy.
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I’d call them neolibs (sorry to be endlessly nitpicking you on terminology) and I don’t think I would have even known the term neocon back in the 90s, not until around Bush whereas neoliberalism, the “Washington consensus” which was “the end of history” was very much a bete noire back then. Restoring respect to Russia after the humiliation and destitution of Yeltsin was always his schtick, that it got more and more aggressively nationalist and conservative is unsurprising.
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