Biden Spoke Truth to Power
Diplomacy has its role, to a point
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Diplomacy is about walking a tightrope, balancing being respectful with making demands in carefully curated language. But, when faced with absolute evil, diplomacy can become a joke, as one side plays with the other while going ahead and doing exactly what it wishes.
In this case it is Vladimir Putin, a soulless dictator demonstrating the meaning of a psychopath, a person with total disregard for human life. This week, when Joe Biden said forcefully that he must be removed from power, he was speaking the only language the Russian maniac understands, an existential threat.
The war crimes taking place daily in Ukraine can all be traced directly to this man, though there are many lackeys willing to carry out his orders. All must and will be brought to justice, but Putin must go and never be heard from again. His legacy must be erased and the Russian people must learn the truth, in all its terrible reality, about what their government has done.
Diplomacy is about grey areas, those places where subtle suggestions can gradually create change. It has its place, but this is not that place. We have entered a black and white reality where it is simply good and decency against utter evil. We’ve been there before, only eighty years ago with Hitler, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a believer in the reasonableness of men and the diplomacy those reasonable men use to talk about great things, failed completely. He did not realize he was dealing with a man who saw him as a patsy who could be fooled because of his naïveté. 50 million died as a result.
This is no different. I won’t compare Biden to Churchill, not yet, but it took a Churchill to tell the world the truth about herr Hitler, that he was not a man as we think of them, but a monster with a mission.
Putin is no different. Inside he speaks one language, the language of terror and fear. And he understands only that language. If words have power, Biden’s were targeted directly at a man who understands power. We, the West, have power and must exercise it if the killing and destruction are to stop. A man who threatens the use of nuclear weapons must be removed from any ability to exercise that option. The future of the human race is at stake.
Overly dramatic? There are ten thousand of the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki out there. Diplomacy only goes so far when dealing with an insane dictator.
