Two weeks ago, I wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin made a serious misjudgment in his decision to go to war against Ukraine on Feb. 24. Three weeks earlier, Chinese leader Xi Jinping had miscalculated Putin’s odds of success in Ukraine by declaring that the China-Russia friendship “has no limits” and no “forbidden” areas of cooperation.
According to my yet unproven theory of “the era of intuition, coincidence and misjudgment,” I was afraid that U.S. President Joe Biden might eventually follow his Russian and Chinese counterparts.
And, unfortunately, the U.S. president joined the international club of miscalculations on March 26 in Poland when he went off script at the end of a well-prepared speech on Ukraine and democracy, speaking these nine words concerning the Russian leader: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”