US President Joe Biden’s impolitic remark about his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, agreeing that the latter is a “killer,” may appear baffling. A closer scrutiny, however, will show that there may be a pattern in Biden’s sabre-rattling: it may be a red herring, for the benefit of China.
The US President has also imposed export restrictions on Russia. When an ABC News anchor asked him about a domestic intelligence report that Putin “authorized” operations to harm his candidacy in the November 2020 election, Biden said, “He [Putin] will pay a price. You’ll see shortly.”
Not very diplomatic, but still kosher, but he also said something offensive. The interviewer asked him what Biden thought about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and other Russian opposition leaders. Does he think that Putin is a “killer”? Biden said: “I do.”
Now Putin is not a nice guy, certainly not a champion of democracy and liberty, but then not many rulers are such. Chinese President Xi Jinping for one surpasses every politician in the world as far as killings go. In collusion with World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Xi exported the coronavirus all over the world, which resulted in the death of millions of people, collapse of the global economy, and untold misery for everybody, especially the poorest.
This is the reason that former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro suggested last year that China should pay “compensatory damages” for the corona pandemic it occasioned. Doing this will not be easy, for Xi’s China has blatantly denied its culpability (again the WHO has helped it), but the process should begin.
But Biden will not do that; he would focus on Putin instead. Fox News host Tucker Carlson correctly said that Putin “is not an existential threat to the United States but he [Biden] keeps talking about it because he doesn’t want to talk about China. His family has made millions apparently from China.”
The mainstream media in the US unscrupulously airbrushed the US President’s son Hunter Biden’s murky deals out of political debate. It seems that Joe Biden wants this to remain that way. The best solution, from his perspective, is to find a bogeyman; he has found one in Putin.
Biden’s gauche remarks may help him politically, but they will also help China, as people would spend more time on the real and fictitious misdeeds of Russia. People in America, and elsewhere, may be distracted. The real evil, China, will thrive. This will be tragic as Xi is guilty of crime against humanity.