Tucker Carlson: Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a humiliating defeat for Joe Biden

We tried to bring you as straightforward an analysis as we could of the invasion of Ukraine yesterday. It was then in progress. It still is. The war at that point was less than 24 hours old, and it seemed disrespectful and wrong to use the deaths of people on the ground as a partisan cudgel. War is horrifying, of course, but it's also a grave and profound thing. You have to stand back and offer a moment before you start drawing convenient conclusions from the suffering you see. Death is a mystery. Acknowledge that. That's how we feel. 

Joe Biden's allies in the media do not feel that way. They use the opportunity to attack their political opponents immediately, as they always do. They have no restraint and no shame. We're grateful not to be them. So that was last night. 

Tonight, it's fair to note the obvious: The invasion of Ukraine is a humiliating defeat for Joe Biden. He's our leader. He staked this country's reputation, billions of dollars and the full force of the U.S. government, on preventing Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine anyway, and America is diminished by that. 

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It's not the first time Joe Biden has done something like this. Less than six months ago, Biden oversaw an almost indescribably chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He left American citizens behind. He armed the Taliban with advanced weapons systems on the way out. It could not have been worse. 

So here you have two historic foreign policy debacles in under a year. Is there a precedent for that? What's the message of it? Well, weakness, obviously. Republicans often say that, but as usual, don't go far enough. Weakness? Well, North Korea is weak. They literally have famines. People starve to death in North Korea. That's weakness. But they're still a nation we have to contend with because they bite. 

A venomous spider is weak, you can crush it, but you're still afraid of it because it bites. We do not bite, and that's the problem. We're not simply weak. The United States government under Joe Biden is ridiculous. It's pompous. It's self-involved. It's long-winded and fatuous. It's not so different from the fading old man who leads it. 

There's no hiding this. The rest of the world sees it clearly. So do many Americans, if watching the invasion of Ukraine this week made you feel a little sick, this is probably why. Of course, you felt sorry for the Ukrainians being killed. But you also sense that this was a genuine disaster for us in America. And you're right, it is. 

Joe Biden is quickly draining the reservoir of America's credibility and power that has accumulated over centuries of wise decision-making. Like the U.S. Treasury, this is not Joe Biden's capital to spend. He is squandering something that others made. How much is left at this point? You hate even to think about it. Someday, we're going to find out. 

So the problem here isn't complicated. Joe Biden broke the oldest rule of all: Don't make threats you can't back up. You'd think he would know that if he had actually squared off against Cornpop, but the public swimming pool in Wilmington 60 years ago. But he never did. So he doesn't know that if you say something serious, you had better mean it. Is reckless to tell obvious lies. 

If you do that before long, and it happens very quickly, in fact, people figure out that you can be ignored. You're not a superpower. You're a joke. And that's why you never, under any circumstances, say anything like this: 

KAMALA HARRIS: The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence. But let's also recognize the unique nature of the sanctions that we have outlined. These are some of the greatest sanctions, if not the strongest that we've ever issued. 

JOHN KIRBY: The president believes that sanctions are intended to deter.

ANTONY BLINKEN: As to the sanctions. The most important thing we can do is to use them as a deterrent, as a means of dissuading Russia from engaging in further aggression. 

Those were statements made just recently, in some cases just days before Vladimir Putin showed precisely how meaningless our sanctions actually were. The greatest sanctions ever, said Kamala Harris, wearing her stupid little mask on Monday. She's a buffoon. You knew that. 

Now it's obvious that her buffoonery is a real peril for the rest of us. No one in the White House seems to understand this. It's life's most obvious lesson. So here is Joe Biden from today telling you that actually, these sanctions the greatest, most deterrent sanctions ever, were never intended really to deter anything. Sorry, if it took us seriously the first time, we didn't really mean it. 

JOE BIDEN: No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening. It has to show, this could take time and we have to show resolve. So he knows what's coming. And so the people of Russia know what he's brought on them. That's what this is all about. 

Who gives him these scripts? Do they not think we have access to YouTube? Or maybe they're just hoping Google will scrub it by the time he holds another press conference. You just told us on Monday that the purpose of these sanctions was to deter the invasion of Ukraine. So, at the very least, acknowledge they didn't work as intended. 

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They can never acknowledge that. Oh, the vaccine prevents transmission and infection. Just tell the truth. People will understand. But they lie every time. Now they're telling us, Putin knows what's coming. We'll get him next time. Right. 

No one believes you anymore, Joe Biden. No one should believe you. It is very hard to take unserious people seriously. A serious president who cared would have reassessed everything America's foreign policy and how it was administered after the Afghanistan withdrawal last August. That was a disaster. 

So a responsible person would have asked himself: How do we prevent this from happening again? That's how responsible people think. It's our leaders who care about their country's think. Of course, it's the baseline requirement for leadership. This was a disaster. How do we prevent it from happening again? That's not hard. 

But lifetime federal employee that he is, Joe Biden did the opposite of that. His first instinct was to protect the bureaucracy, not the country, the bureaucracy. So not a single person from the Pentagon or the State Department was fired or even reprimanded. In fact, famously, the only person who was punished in the end for that historic debacle was a marine colonel who complained about it. He went to jail for complaining. And you will see the same response this time after the disastrous invasion of Ukraine. The American officials who so publicly trashed this country's credibility will be promoted for it. They always are. 

Victoria Nuland is one of the geniuses behind the Iraq War that was almost 20 years ago. Does that hurt her career? It should have, should have ended her career, in place right then. Go do something useful. Learn how to lay tile. But it didn't end your career, in fact, your career accelerated. In fact, this same person, Victoria Nuland, went on to help lead the Ukraine debacle we're watching now. 

She's completely unqualified for the job she has. We knew that 20 years ago. And yet she's highly successful in Washington. Some day she'll probably be the secretary of state. Remember her name, Victoria Nuland. She'll be rewarded for failing. Meanwhile, people who criticize Victoria Nuland or who care enough about this country to critique Joe Biden's foreign policy disasters, find themselves denounced the media as, of all things, traitors to America, and then spied on by the NSA. 

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You see how that works? It's all self-protection, and because it is, only buffoonery is rewarded. And that's exactly why John Kerry is still around. John Kerry told the BBC in public on camera that the real victim of this war is something called "the climate." 

JOHN KERRY: Massive emissions consequences to the war, but equally importantly, you're going to lose people's focus, you're going to lose, certainly big country attention because they will be diverted. And I think it could have a damaging impact. … So I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate. 

And of course, he flew private to that interview, hoping nobody noticed, not caring if anyone noticed. What is the explanation behind that? How could you say something like that? That clip is real. We didn't make it up. It's hard to believe it, but it is real. It's all real. 

If you did a nationwide search for the people least capable of leading a large nation through complicated times, you would get our leadership class. You would get John Kerry. Oh, we found him. The search is over. And of course, at the very top of that list would be John Kerry's friend, Hillary Clinton. 

Hillary Clinton revealed the real story she's telling you that the actual enemy in this war is not in Russia, not eastern Ukraine. It's not Vladimir Putin. It's you. The real enemy of this country is anyone who dares to criticize the mismanagement of Hillary Clinton and her friends. 

HILLARY CLINTON: I think it's time for what's left of the Republican Party that has any common sense not just to say, OK, go help defend Ukraine against Putin, but to stand against those people in politics and government, in the media and elsewhere in our own country who are literally giving aid and comfort to an enemy of freedom and democracy. It can't. It can't continue because it plays right into the ambitions of not just Putin, but also President Xi of China to undermine democracy, to literally divide and conquer the West without ever invading us, but by setting us against each other. 

Your opinions are the real threat to democracy. Dare criticize us, and we will denounce you as a dangerous traitor because that's democracy. So if Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine? But guess whose fault it is? It's your fault. Notice the theme here? It's always your fault every single time. And they're going to punish you for it. 

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Hillary did say one interesting thing in that clip, probably inadvertently. She didn't say it, but the allusion was there. Russia and China are now aligned as a bloc against the United States. Now, how did that happen? It's pretty obvious you're looking around the world, you're thinking, who are the big powers with meaningful economies and nuclear weapons? Maybe they shouldn't be aligned against us. That's just the simplest kind of math. Maybe we shouldn't do anything that pushes our enemies into a bloc. Because that threatens us. 

But they don't know that that's happening, or maybe they're in favor of it. God knows what the Biden administration is thinking. 

According to the New York Times, "The United States met with China over three months to present intelligence, showing Russia's troop buildup near Ukraine and to urge Beijing to help avert war. Chinese officials rebuffed the United States and then shared that information with Moscow." 

Oh, yeah. So we went to China for help to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine at the very moment that Russia and China were forming a very public alliance against us. Did that really happen? Apparently, it really did happen. How long can this go on? And maybe that's why Biden didn't mention China during his press conference. He gave them our intelligence and they gave it to Putin. Perfect. But don't mention that or you're a traitor.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the February 25, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."