As Russian troops invaded Ukraine Monday, some of Joe Biden’s 2020 tough talk about how he would supposedly tame the Russian Bear if elected president has resurfaced online.
SO WHAT
Biden’s foreign policy judgement is questionable.
WHAT HAPPENED
Twitter commentators have highlighted two Biden campaign tweets about Russian President Vladimir Putin that have not aged well.
THEN: Exactly two years ago Monday, Biden claimed “Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President” because they had gone “toe-to-toe” before.
Earlier in the campaign, in an October 2019 Twitter video, Biden suggested Putin was meddling in the election because he “knows if I am the president of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”
“He’s a bully, just like the president,” Biden added, suggesting he would do a better job at checking Putin than then-President Donald Trump had done.
- “When I’m president things are going to change.”
NOW: Putin said in a speech Monday that Russia would “immediately” recognize the independence and sovereignty of the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “republics” in eastern Ukraine.
- The Kremlin then ordered Russian “peacekeeping” forces into the Ukrainian-controlled territories.
- On Tuesday, Biden announced new sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for what he called “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
ANOTHER FLASHBACK
When Biden was running for reelection in 2012 as Barack Obama’s vice president, he repeatedly mocked Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s hawkishness on Russia as a relic of the Cold War.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served with Biden under Obama, famously wrote in his 2014 book that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”