Former President Joe Biden rebuked Donald Trump’s handling of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s conflict with Ukraine as “modern-day appeasement” in his first interview since leaving the White House in January.
The Democrat sat for a wide-ranging interview with the BBC in Delaware this week, addressing the current state of global affairs and his thoughts on his successor.
Biden responded with blistering criticism when pressed for his opinion on Trump’s behavior since taking office, including the president’s threats against Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, talking about acquiring the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
“What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that?,” he told the Today program’s Nick Robinson. “That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity, not about confiscation.”
Speaking about Ukraine, the former president said that his administration supplied the nation with “everything they needed” to provide for their independence, adding that the U.S. was prepared to offer support if Putin further escalated the war. Trump had previously argued that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had played Biden “like a fiddle.”
Biden also condemned the Trump administration for suggesting that Ukraine would have to cede some territory to Russia in order to secure a peace deal and end the conflict.
“It is modern-day appeasement,” Biden said, referencing the policy of former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a diplomacy strategy that attempted to agree to Adolf Hitler’s short-term demands to avoid all-out war breaking out, which failed.
Biden said anybody who believes Putin is going to stop the conflict if Ukrainian territory is conceded “is just foolish.”
“I just don’t understand how people think that if we allow a dictator, a thug, to decide he’s going to take significant portions of land that aren’t his, that that’s going to satisfy him,” he said of the Russian president. “I don’t quite understand.”
Tensions between Washington and Kyiv exploded in late February when Zelensky was ambushed by Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office.
Talks that began more cordially devolved into a furious shouting match with Trump accusing the Ukrainian leader of “gambling with World War III,” and Zelensky initially leaving without a minerals deal needed to secure U.S. help in ending the war.
“I found it sort of beneath America in the way that took place,” Biden said.
Biden, the last living U.S. president to be born during World War II, shared his fears about NATO dying out and U.S. withdrawal under the Trump administration. Trump has repeatedly stated that the U.S. is being “ripped off” by its allies and Vance said that America continues to “bail out Europe.”
“I think it would change the modern history of the world if that occurs,” he said. “We’re the only nation in a position to have the capacity to bring people together, [to] lead the world. Otherwise, you’re going to have China and the former Soviet Union, Russia, stepping up.”
Biden argued that he didn’t “think it would have mattered” if he had decided to drop out of the race for the White House sooner amid concerns over his cognitive acuity in the summer of 2024.
Speaking about dropping out of the race and allowing his Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place to take on Trump in the November election, Biden remained bullish.
“We left at a time when we had a good candidate. Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away,” he said. “And it was a hard decision. I think it was the right decision. I think that… it was just a difficult decision.”
Reflecting on Trump’s return to office, which has seen the president issue a flurry of executive orders, dismantle federal departments and foment a global trade war, Biden attempted to draw comparisons from when he left office and now.
“Our economy was growing. We were moving in a direction where the stock market was way up,” he said. “We were in a situation where we were expanding our influence around the world in a positive way, increasing trade.”
Trump boasted of his “very special” first 100 days in office before he listed off his administration’s efforts in a so-called “achievement speech” during the largest rally of his second term in Michigan late last month.
When pressed on Trump 2.0, Biden said: “I don’t see anything that was triumphant.”
