We have an editorial up on Biden’s Armageddon talk, urging the president to “give up his long-standing opposition to more robust U.S. missile defenses. Indeed, it is insane that a president of the United States is talking about nuclear Armageddon and we aren’t engaged in a crash program to fortify our defenses.”
Also, I hadn’t focused on the very last part of Biden’s remarks, which is a choice bit of completely unjustified partisan finger-pointing:
We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. We’ve got a guy I know fairly well. . . . He is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical and nuclear weapons, or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily lose a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon. . . . I didn’t realize how much serious damage the previous administration did to our foreign policy.
There are legitimate criticisms of Trump’s conduct of our foreign policy, but it’s ridiculous to argue that he somehow set the precedent for Putin launching a failed war of aggression in Ukraine and now potentially trying to nuke his way out of it.