The outgoing US president is risking direct war with Moscow knowing he can’t be held accountable by voters anymore.

The nameless and faceless American officials who’ve apparently been running the country, since US President Joe Biden has been busy perfecting his Weekend At Bernie’s routine during his final weeks in office, have told the Western press that Biden had authorized American long range missile (ATACMS) strikes into Russian territory. Go ahead, Joe, tell ‘em!

But apparently Joe didn’t want to “tell ‘em,” choosing instead to wander off into the Amazonian jungle when asked about it during a trip to Brazil. That also just happens to be where the good hallucinogenic plants are that would allow any remaining functional brain cells to forget about his pratfalling into a potential third world war.

How far inside Russia are we even talking here? Who knows. Joe’s still on safari, at least in the clinical, psychological sense. So enter “Jungle” Josep Borrell, EU diplomacy chief, who once infamously stood in front of a bunch of European diplomatic students and referred to Europe as a “garden” and the developing world as a “jungle.” It was Borrell who had to clarify for the entire world that what Joe really means is that he’s giving Ukraine the ability to strike 300km into Russia.

Guess we’re just supposed to take his word for it, then, since America doesn’t have a manager on shift?

Then the Western press further specified that it was only really supposed to apply to Kursk region. Source: Trust me, bro.

Then these same press sources relayed that it was only because Biden didn’t like North Koreans being in Ukraine on Russia’s side (there’s still no proof of that claim, but it’s already been pushed into the realm of assumed truth). Can’t have Russia internationalizing this conflict, critics say, even though the West has literally adopted the strategy of trying to drag the entire planet into it, either by trying to coax them onto their sanctions bandwagon or emitting clarion calls for foreign fighters on Ukraine’s side.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky did his best impression of an employee left to manage the shop while all the folks in charge were out for lunch. “Strikes are not carried out with words. Such things are not announced. Missiles will speak for themselves,” he said. If and when those missiles do “speak,” they’ll be saying, “Yo, Washington sent me.” Because no one’s letting the Ukrainians do any driving that doesn’t involve sitting on an adult’s lap.

Why? Well, because Ukraine wasted zero time in crashing one of the rare F-16 fighter jets gifted by the West. A German government coalition lawmaker told Der Spiegel earlier this year that the country’s Leopard 2 battle tanks have virtually all been blown up or are broken down and sitting in the repair shop, and the Ukrainian forces are reportedly even further aggravating the damage by attempting repairs.

So Russia knows that Western long-range missiles, which only Western military personnel can operate, aren’t being fired by Kiev. For Washington to even suggest otherwise would be like the driver of a car trying to pawn off responsibility for a crash on the toddler in the backseat with the toy “turn and learn” steering wheel. Slicing through the whole charade, Russian President Vladimir Putin amended Moscow’s nuclear doctrine to hold co-responsible a nuclear state that assists a non-nuclear state, like Ukraine, in targeting Russian territory.

The Western establishment has taken the amendment as a political move. Probably because they considered Washington’s ATACMS use policy escalation purely political, too, just tossing it out into the public domain through the establishment press about as casually as order suggestions for the next pizza night.

It’s not like Putin is going to actually use nukes or anything, they figure. Guess the idea is just to find out exactly how far they can go in hitting Russian soil with Western weapons until they’re proven wrong, then? Brilliant idea. It’s not like Putin didn’t make NATO’s militarization and Nazification of Ukraine very specific red lines and then reacted when they were crossed, much to NATO’s apparent shock and amazement.

Whatever happened to the West’s insistence on stopping Putin in Ukraine so he doesn’t rampage through Europe like King Kong? Or how about NATO saying a year ago that he wanted a full-blown war with the alliance? Now suddenly they’re staking planetary peace entirely on their apparently abundant confidence in Putin’s benevolence and aversion to war when it comes to nothing less than targeting and striking Russian territory directly with their own weapons while they pretend that Zelensky isn’t just relegated to making the French fries?

And all this without a single debate or vote in US Congress for the record? Guess they’re in a rush to get what they want before the new manager arrives – because incoming President-elect Donald Trump has already made it clear that he’d de-escalate.

At least the Washington back room perma-bros responsible for concocting policy should have the integrity to wait until someone can actually be held accountable by voters, history, and the rest of the planet, for potentially kicking off a direct war between the US and Russia. Because Biden could hardly even be held accountable for what he ordered for breakfast.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of DTNZ.