Does Biden Have the Right To Remove Putin?

At the conclusion of his speech in the Polish capital of Warsaw last Saturday, President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin and said, “This man cannot remain in power.”

Biden’s remark was unscripted and extemporaneous, and has placed a heavy burden on American foreign policy. The president’s staff tried to mitigate the impact ... but will history repeat itself?

In the early 1980s, Republican President Ronald Reagan said in passing that America had annihilated the Republic of Evil, a reference to the Soviet Union. At the time, it was only a verbal flourish from a president who began his career on the Hollywood screen.

Biden’s remark pointed political analysts around the world in two directions. First, whether Biden’s slips of the tongue and his health are affecting him with more than 2 1/2 years remaining in his first term. People have raised doubts about the chances the Democrats face in the November midterm elections in November as well as the presidential election in 2024.

The second impact of Biden’s remark concerns America’s true intentions with respect to the Russian president, as the prominent Sen. Lindsey Graham called for a “Brutus in Russia” or someone more successful than failed Adolf Hitler assassin Col. Claus von Stauffenberg to assassinate Putin.

What is quite interesting — and might lead Russians to believe that Biden’s remarks were not inadvertent, is the memory of what Graham said at the Doha Forum in Qatar. He stated that if the war in Ukraine ends and Putin is still standing and is stronger, the world will have failed and the global order will have been obliterated.

Does Biden get to decide whether or not Putin stays in the first place?

In Warsaw, the American president talked about Russia, which has stifled democracy, and how the future will be brighter and rooted in democracy in spite of that. However, Biden failed to acknowledge that the basics of democracy consist of respecting people’s right to choose their rulers. Putin is the elected president of the Russian people; no one but his own people can throw him out of the Kremlin.

Sometimes people forget, especially in America, the Fourteen Points proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson on Jan. 8, 1918, meant to bring world peace and end World War I. The heart of these principles is the right of nations and peoples to decide their fate, which is the principle that Washington seems to have denied others in recent decades. Biden’s recent remark falls into this undemocratic category, both in form and in substance.

The Kremlin can argue that the statement was intentional and not a slip of the tongue by referring to Biden’s campaign statements about what the American president should and should not say. For example, he spoke of the heavy weight the words of a president carry, and how “the words of a president matter … they can move markets … they can send our brave men and women to war … they can bring peace.”

Here, there is only one alternative that allows us to deny the true implications of Biden’s statement, which is that the man in the White House failed to differentiate between what is in the interest of America and what exists to its detriment. This is a major problem at such a critical and sensitive time when the world’s security and peace are at the edge of the abyss.

Although Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to soften Biden’s remark, his statement also gave Russians a peek into what America is thinking behind the scenes, even though Blinken confirmed that any decision to remove Putin from power belongs to the Russian people and not to America.

However, some of those with a conspiratorial interpretation of history consider that Washington’s push for Ukraine to be more steadfast in its military confrontation with Moscow, especially by providing it with high-quality weapons and prolonging the war, is an indirect attempt to get rid of Putin. The Ukrainian trap, similar to the Afghan quagmire, is based on sympathy. However, this bears a new and dangerous characteristic related to the economic sanctions, which the Americans assume will accelerate an upsurge and eventual revolution by Russians at home after they hold Putin accountable for the negative impact the sanctions are having on their lives.

Richard Haass, a veteran American diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, described Biden as the leader in the White House who “made a difficult situation more difficult, and a dangerous situation more dangerous.” If only Biden knew, these remarks would be disastrous for him.

In any case, Biden's invitation to unseat Putin will reinforce everything that Putin and his elite believe and will move the conflict into the realm of dignity, national identity and Russian nationalism, which could have major consequences if the man in the White House understands it.