President Joe Biden’s public statement Tuesday morning announcing a U.S. cutoff of Russian oil was an excellent example of how words matter when they come out of presidential mouths — and how multiple audiences complicate the presidency.
The most important audience Biden had to address was Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden’s goal before and after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 has been to impress on Putin how seriously the U.S. and its allies take Putin’s aggression and how severe the consequences will be — without doing anything that counts as entering the war. Everything that Biden says about this, including the fact that he says it himself (rather than, say, issuing a press release), begins with making that position as clear as possible.
Biden’s next audience is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Biden’s policy requires Zelenskyy and the Ukranians to keep fighting. That’s delicate because Biden can’t give them the kind of unqualified assistance that they want and that a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would expect to receive.
