Commentary
There he goes again!
Almost as soon as he took office last year, President Joe Biden heralded the new era in American diplomacy by calling Vladimir Putin, president of the country’s chief rival as a nuclear super-power, a “killer” without a human soul.
Now everybody knows—at least everybody who has been paying attention knows—that Putin actually is a killer. Whether he has a soul or not is a matter of some dispute, since former President George W. Bush claimed to have looked into it.
And yet, for several centuries now at least, it has been considered very bad diplomatic manners to mention a thing like that in public, particularly when the person you are so insulting is heavily armed, demonstrably inclined to use his weaponry, and likely to take offense at such an insult, as Putin in fact did.
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