In first State of the Union address, Biden captures the moment telling Putin ‘freedom will always triumph over tyranny’

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The pall that hovered over the President could not go unmentioned, and it didn’t.

The annual State of the Union Address is an American set-piece, a sturdy tradition required by the Constitution, and beginning with the 20th century, 87 of these messages – the vast majority of them unmemorable – have been delivered in person from the rostrum of the House of Representatives. And since George Washington began the custom in 1790, most of them have concentrated on domestic affairs.

Not this one.

Not in a Capitol sealed off by a fence. Not in a capital warily watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine and shuddering as Vladimir Putin has his nuclear forces on alert. Not in a country that is experiencing near-helplessness watching the merciless pounding of Ukraine 8,000 kilometres away, unfolding, in the words of Matthew Arnold written a century and a half ago, “on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,” with the echoes of armies that clash by night.

“The world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security,” Joe Biden said, telling Ukrainians, represented in the hall by Oksana Markarova, Kyiv’s ambassador to Washington, “We stand with you.”

The initial drafts of the President’s first State of the Union Address, sculpted many weeks ago, emphasized the recovery from the coronavirus, the health of the economy, the prospects for his signature pieces of legislation. For months, faceless Washington officials and prominent Cabinet members angled to have their programs mentioned, if only in a dependent clause that could be used to win approbation in the bureaucracy and appropriations in Congress. But speeches are written on a word processing program and are easily overhauled, and this one was, substantially.

The original draft did not include the poignant phrase “an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny” nor a proposal for a ban on Russian aircraft from flying over American airspace, with the President in recent days adding those elements to remarks on a “make-it-in-America” initiative for federal projects ranging from defence to infrastructure spending, fighting supply-chain disruptions, cutting the price of prescription drugs, and drawing on Washington’s anti-trust tools to fight inflation.

Even so, the principal elements of the speech were addressed as much to Mr. Putin as to the audience in the chamber and at home across the country.

“The free world is holding him accountable,” Mr. Biden said, adding that the Russian president was “more isolated from the world than he has ever been.”

He said to Mr. Putin and to Russian business oligarchs: “No more.” And he vowed he would defend “every single inch” of NATO territory.

Mr. Biden knew he had to capture the moment – the heartbreak, the deliberate defiance of international norms, the assault on human decency – when the echoes of the Cold War rang with new force, and new peril.

“Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos,” Mr. Biden said. “They keep moving. And the costs and threats to America and the world keep rising.”

The 46th president – facing a developing international crisis, a pandemic, and inflation: a toxic stew of challenges – arrived at the Capitol to perform his Constitutional duty in unusual, but not unprecedented, circumstances.

In 1862, with the country split apart by the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln argued that “in giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free” and warned that the conflict, which would extend for three more years, would determine whether, “we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”

Eight decades later, in 1940 – with Europe aflame in war, Canadian troops supplementing the British Expeditionary Force but the United States on the sideline – Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned Americans, in words with poignance today, that they “must look ahead and see the effect on our own future if all the small nations of the world have their independence snatched from them or become mere appendages to relatively vast and powerful military systems.”

A year later, the country still uninvolved in the Second World War, he set out his vision of the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear – and spoke of “how quickly the tempo of modern warfare could bring into our very midst the physical attack which we must eventually expect if the dictator nations win this war.” That tempo became the leitmotif of American life eight months later with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This time the national-unity challenges are domestic – three out of four Americans said they believed the greatest threat to America was political instability rather than foreign challenges, according to a Quinnipiac University poll this winter – but in recent days there is a sense that the dangers are converging, much as they did in 1823 when James Monroe used his State of the Union Message to promulgate the Monroe Doctrine.

“Monroe acted at a real moment of perceived intense international threat and insecurity,” Jay Sexton, a University of Missouri historian, said in an interview. “Biden needed to tell us how our culture wars and internal divisions make us exceptionally vulnerable to outside threats.”

At a time when, according to the University of Chicago’s respected General Social Survey, the percentage of Americans who reported that they were “not too happy” in life grew from 18 percent in 2018 to 24 percent last year, the President did exactly that.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said, twice; pleading, “Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies”; and bidding Americans to pass “our test of resolve and conscience, of history itself.”

There have been occasions in American history when presidents have ignored awkward issues of the day and used their State of the Union messages to change the subject; Bill Clinton (1989) and Donald J. Trump (2020) did that as impeachment wars broiled in the very building in which they spoke.

Indeed, Mr. Clinton succeeded, if only briefly, in 1998, when his address was delivered a week after revelations that he had had a sexual affair with a White House intern. He did not mention the Monica Lewinsky episode even once. He was interrupted by applause more than 100 times.

Mr. Biden – every respected public-opinion survey puts his disapproval rate over 50 per cent – could not afford such a gambit, particularly since the new Hoover Institution State of the Union Poll, released by Stanford University this week, showed “a nation still divided” and a president who “has not brought about unity.”

“Putin’s war was premeditated and unprovoked,” Mr. Biden said. “He rejected efforts at diplomacy. He thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us here at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready.”

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