Biden’s press conference was genuinely frightening. If there’s one thing you’d think an old political hand would know how to do, it’s say the appropriate things about a budding foreign-policy crisis and otherwise shut up. Biden was simply incapable of doing it. This wasn’t Biden losing his chain of thought or getting someone’s name wrong, mistakes that we all make and make more often as we get older. This was a president of the United States who flatly couldn’t be trusted to address a potential war in Europe. He seemed to say that Russia could get away with an incursion short of a major invasion, then, given the opportunity to clean it up, rambled on about internal differences in NATO. He also predicted that Putin would go in. It’s easy seeing Putin considering this a greenlight for the sort of hybrid attack he’s used before, and it seemed Biden had no idea that what he was saying was problematic and perhaps profoundly harmful. Of course, afterward, the White House came out with a statement saying that any invasion whatsoever will be met with a united NATO response. But there’s no clarifying or walking back what everyone witnessed at that press conference.
This article was originally published by Nationalreview.com. Read the original article here.