Biden’s defenders have praised the president’s candor, but this was not an articulation of U.S. policy. It was throat-clearing that could only further destabilize the situation in Eastern Europe, as evidenced by an administration-wide effort to clean up after the president’s intemperate remarks. While it’s sometimes welcome, it is not the president’s job to be a beacon of moral clarity. His role is to establish America’s national interests in as discrete a manner as possible and behave in ways that advance those objectives. Time and again throughout this crisis, Biden has let his mouth get in the way of that imperative.

In late January, as Russia amassed an invasion force along Ukraine’s borders, Joe Biden consistently retailed a message that conveyed little more than his own confusion. “My guess is he will move in,” Biden confessed when asked if Putin would invade Ukraine, only to reverse himself minutes later. “I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet,” the president later said of the invasion he’d just claimed was imminent. “If he invades, it hasn’t happened since World War II,” Biden added incorrectly. In 2014, Russia became the first European power to invade and annex territory in a neighboring state since 1945 when Moscow invaded Donbas and Crimea, outright subsuming the latter into the Russian Federation. Worst of all, the president appeared to blink when he said it would be “one thing if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do.” Biden unwittingly advertised the deep divisions within the alliance over how to respond to Russian aggression that falls short of total war.