When Joe Biden was elected president in November 2020, few believed that he’d be some kind of a transformative figure. Instead, it seemed clear, he could be a sort of caretaker chief executive officer, someone who could put our nation back on the straight and narrow after the four years of tumult and nonsense that marked nearly every moment of Donald Trump’s presidency.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the normalcy: The coronavirus pandemic refused to go away even as inflation took off like a rocket. And our exit from Afghanistan turned into a debacle — even if one believes, as we do, that getting out was the right thing to do.
All the while, our divided nation, which Biden had hoped to stitch back together, seemed as riven as ever.
Until Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine. Suddenly, at least on that one issue, our nation, and our allies in Europe and elsewhere, came together. With just a couple of notable exceptions — some of the loony yappers on Fox News, especially — the citizenry have been united like at few times in our recent history. Democrats, Republicans and independents have uniformly decried Putin’s outrageous war, and have stood with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Credit Biden both for knitting together the coalition and for working to ensure that it not only holds fast, but is also strengthened over time. Credit Biden, too, with being so transparent in divulging publicly what Putin was up to with his pre-invasion troop buildup on Ukraine’s border. There was exactly no element of surprise when Putin finally invaded, as Biden had been saying he would.
Now, Biden is in Europe — first to Brussels and then onto Warsaw — where he’ll meet with European leaders, with NATO, with members of the G7. This is exactly the sort of thing that Biden, as a candidate for president, had said he’d excel at. He had spent a lifetime in politics, making connections with people and inside institutions, and he’d be able to put that to work should he become our nation’s 46th president.
Well, he did, and he’s been doing just that. Those who’d wish to knock Biden have no shortage of things to critique. But his deft handling of Putin’s war is most decidedly not on that list. Biden rose to the occasion, and then some.
