So Joe Biden's all concerned about borders now — in Ukraine.

According to the New York Times:

President Biden, in a high-stakes virtual meeting on Tuesday morning, warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of economic consequences if he continued to escalate a military presence around Ukraine, according to a White House statement.

The diplomatic effort came as tens of thousands of Russian troops mass along the Ukrainian border, raising fears of an invasion.

Jake Sullivan, the president's national security adviser, described the president's comments to reporters.

"He told President Putin directly that if Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures," Mr. Sullivan said.

That must have sent shivers through Putin's spine — about how stupid a hypocrite he might be dealing with.

Biden, after all, is the American president who cast wide America's borders to all comers.  Nearly two million people from more than a hundred countries, some bearing banners of their home countries as battle flags, have marched into America in 2021, knowing that Biden won't send them back.  Now he's concerned about Ukraine's borders?  It sounds like a joke, and Putin would know it.

But that's hardly the biggest thing that must be running through the wily old Russian autocrat's mind right now as Doddering Joe, the Konstantin Chernenko of the U.S., and someone Putin would remember well, comes calling.

The economic sanctions Biden is threatening are laughable.

As with the border case, Biden is a hypocrite.  He shut down a U.S. energy pipeline with Canada, the Keystone XL, and gave the go-ahead to Germany and Russia to get their pipeline running despite the fact that they know that Russia uses oil and gas deliveries as a weapon — which Putin is doing in Moldova right now, actually.  That puts huge Germany on Putin's string.  Biden's team now claim  they are encouraging Germany to shake off its totally unnecessary dependence on Russia for fuel, a problem he himself created, by turning to green energy.

Beyond the hypocrisy is the fact that Putin is likely to be unperturbed.  He really wants Ukraine, for starters, and the corrupt oligarchies of the two countries are pretty much the same machine.  He'd give up a lot to get it. 

But more to the point, Putin knows that Biden's shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline has put the U.S. in the same puppet-string position as Germany.  Turns out the U.S. has become a big buyer of foreign oil in the wake of Biden's Keystone shutdown and Russia is our second-biggest seller.  EIA government data on the rankings are here, and a graph showing the sharp rise in Russian oil purchases by the U.S. (which hit a record high in May) is here.  Putin likes soccer and knows what an own-goal is.  Biden?  A guy who can't stop shooting himself in the foot.

There's also this: Putin, like anyone else, watched in fascination as Biden strutted his stuff in Afghanistan last August.  The U.S. military and its commanders have turned to wokester political correctness.  The U.S. pullout was a complete disaster, with even the most minimal of planning not done.  Not only did the U.S. leave its allies and citizens in the dust, but it also imported tens of thousands of unvetted "refugees" instead, offering a migrant taxi service instead of an orderly military exit.  Some $85 billion's worth of military equipment was left behind.  Terrorists were let out of jails, and allies were killed.  From Putin's point of view, it made the Russian exit from Afghanistan in 1979 look pretty good.  With that kind of recent military performance from the U.S., with absolutely no consequences to the incompetent generals behind it, who should fear the U.S. military?

This hardly is all.  There's also the Hunter Biden laptop discovery, which signaled that presidential son Hunter, as well as old Joe, was neck-deep in corruption with both Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.  Tell us again what that $3-million payment from the Russian mayor's widow might have meant?  Putin would know.

Biden's hand here is so weak that he shouldn't have met with Putin at all.  With as many failures and dirty secrets as he has, now all in Putin's hands, Biden's best tack ought to have been to keep Putin guessing by saying nothing.  Instead, we likely have a newly emboldened Putin.  He must have been laughing up his sleeve at what a wreck old Joe was.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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