Biden is trying to walk a tightrope by ratcheting up the pressure against Putin on one hand, and by showing restraint in the U.S. response so as to avoid direct military engagement with Russia. So far, the U.S. has joined NATO countries in imposing sanctions and arming Ukraine, but has stopped short of imposing a no-fly zone or supplying airplanes. But the rhetoric should match that policy. And it becomes much harder to communicate the need for restraint when the president is saying Putin needs to be removed from power and put on trial as a war criminal.

The problem is, in making his statements, Biden is behaving much like a pundit. The “minor incursion” comment is something you’d expect from a policy analyst speculating as to what the NATO response might look like, depending on a range of possible Russian actions. Arguing that Putin needs to go is something one would see on an op-ed page. The call for a war-crimes trial would be perfectly routine in the context of a cable-news panel.

What’s important to remember about Biden is the huge bulk of his political experience — 36 years — was spent as a senator, a time of which he served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. As senator, he would routinely gaggle with reporters in the halls of Capitol Hill and be a regular guest on television news shows. And as a senator who does not directly make policy, there is a lot of leeway for engaging in speculation while tossing out various ideas. As an example, in 2006, he touted a plan to decentralize Iraq into three ethnic and religious regions. It was debated among the D.C. foreign-policy community but was not treated as representative of U.S. policy, because it was not.