Biden, at the end of his speech in Warsaw: “For god’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
It was so transgressive. There are very good reasons to avoid calling for regime change in another country—reasons like respecting national sovereignty, like avoiding WWIII, like not stirring up recollections of how the U.S. habitually, over its entire history, has dictated to other peoples who should be running their affairs.
But Biden is a master of transgressive speech, and I admire when he uses it.
Remember when passing the Affordable Care Act was a Big Fuckin’ Deal? Biden’s whispered “gaffe” was “accidentally” picked up by the microphones. His F-bomb moved the headlines about the event to above the fold and put then-VP Biden at the center of the news. A very effective “gaffe” indeed.
Biden knows state protocol, and he knows history, and there is no way he didn’t get the import and significance of what he said yesterday in the very moment he was saying it.
So it was deliberate, and to what intended effect?
Well, what’s the point of being transgressive?
One, in attracts attention.
Two, it is a way of protesting business as usual. In this case, it is a way of saying that speechifying and diplomacy and supplying humanitarian aid and even supplying weapons are all together not enough, and we all know it.
Three, it’s doing a threatening dance, and I don’t mean that in a bad sense—this is high-stakes communication. It’s saying I’m a little crazy; I break rules; you don’t know what I might do next. It’s for sure scary to play that game between nuclear powers, but along with the first two points, that’s why it needs to be done. You have to break through the mundane, and more to the point, you have to break through the fear and the self-repression that comes from fear.
Of course his aides walked it back. They had to, and they needed to play that role. But for the figure in charge, at the center, for the man in the arena, the transgression is a key part of what he needed to do: Hold the world’s attention, convey that he knows what we’re doing isn’t enough, and break through the fear.
I doubt he gave his aides any warning.