Even as the prime minister has whipped up a storm, of sorts, by implying that an American-led conspiracy is out to oust him, the US government has had to distance itself from the business of so-called regime change because of very different reasons. It turns out that US President Joe Biden overstepped the line after he met with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Poland, and not just called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “butcher,” which apparently didn’t disturb too many people, but also went on to say that he “cannot remain in power.”
Not surprisingly, Republicans had their knives out even before the government went into damage control mode to keep this slip of the tongue from “playing into the hands of Russian propagandists.” Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Biden’s remarks a “horrendous gaffe.” Other lawmakers, some even from the Democrats, also warned of the consequences of such a “public misstep in wartime”. Yet this criticism is unlikely to change much about the war on the ground because even though Washington is forced to diplomatically distance itself from such policies, removing the Russian head of state from power is precisely what it wants and it is also what it is trying to do. And even though it has refused to send soldiers to Ukraine or enforce a no-fly zone above it, it is still sending enough weapons there to keep the war going for a long time while also turning a blind eye to mercenaries from other countries that have started flooding into eastern Europe. It’s keeping the stock prices of their arms industry behemoths very bullish if nothing else.
Regardless of how wrong this war might be, and how right the US thinks it is in attacking the Russian president, the fact is that this conflict is bad news for just about everyone, especially developing countries depending on the international commodity market for a bulk of their imports. And since this war is definitely about proxies, if not directly about controlling or changing regimes, it does put a bigger than usual question mark on how the world’s more powerful countries are going about wrecking the international status quo as it has stood for decades. Therefore, even if the US president didn’t mean what he said in Warsaw, or has to withdraw his very public comment, the fact remains that this war was very deliberately provoked by Nato poking its nose where it has no business doing anything at all. And now the talk of the mighty sole superpower tearing up regimes as it likes is only a very small part of the much bigger problem. *