Dubai: US Vice-President Joe Biden is leaving office on Friday, but has fired a few parting — and biting — shots at President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It’s like a Rubik’s cube trying to figure this guy out,” he said of Trump. “We have no freakin’ idea what he’s gonna do.”
In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Biden said his biggest worry is that Trump, for all his bluster, could be a global bystander, unwilling to engage a messy world with anything more than chest-thumping.
“The question I get everywhere is: ‘Is American leadership going to continue?’ “ he said. If Trump “just stays behind the lines — hands off — it could be very ugly. Very, very ugly.”
And on Wednesday, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Biden warned that Russia is the main threat to the “liberal” world order.
Though he also mentioned China and threats from the Middle East, his attack on Putin’s Russia was a direct warning to Trump, who is accused of cosying up to the Russian president.
“The greatest threat ... springs from the external actors who equate their success on fracturing the liberal international order,” Biden said. “I’m not going to mince words, this movement is principally led by Russia.”
The Vice-President, known for his everyman touch, is increasingly seen as a standard-bearer for opposition voices against the incoming president.
Putin is “testing the faultlines among Western nations” and working to return the world to a system “defined by spheres of influence”, he said.
“We even saw it in the cyber intrusions against political parties and individuals in the United States,” he said, after a US intelligence report that Russia worked to tip the election in Trump’s favour.
“Again, their purpose is clear, to collapse the liberal international order,” Biden said.
