Joe Biden, the gift that keeps on giving for the Obama administration, is presently under fire for his remarks concerning Russia. On the one hand, Mr. Biden’s comments were fairly accurate about Russia – as they were on his precautions of avoiding Swine Flu (assuming it were actually a pandemic), and his observations about Mr. Obama’s teleprompterism. On the other, of course, as with his previous statements, they were also terribly out of sync with the policy objectives of the administration.

Worse than simply saying too much or being a bit of a loose cannon, however, Mr. Biden’s slips at times have actually had the ring of substance, and while his timing has not appeared very thoughtful, his ideas on occasion seemed that they have been. This poses a significant problem for the administration, because Biden’s outbursts at the end of the day really appear to carry more meat than much of the policy rhetoric coming out of the White House and the State Department.

This is so much the case and occurring with such frequency that one really begins to wonder what Mr. Biden’s political end game might be, if there is one. Is this a case of mere egotism? One might wonder if the administration’s ad hoc policies leave Biden ironically in fear of also being seen as wrong-headed and short-sighted. Or is it that, despite his impulsive nature, Biden, an aged widower and father of three sees himself in the frustrating role of a mature counterbalance to an office filled with 20-to-40-somethings, whose surface knowledge of various matters strikes him as somewhat alarming.

This of course is unknowable for the moment, but what we do know is that the Vice President’s analysis of Russia and its current trends today is widely supported and recently very well summed up in an article by George Friedman for Stratfor, which in many respects agrees with Mr. Biden and certainly is not congruent with the Obama view of Russia. In fact, Friedman’s article agreed with a decent amount of Biden’s wider view of Russia, a country of historic contradictions between its economically poor population and powerful state security and military apparatus that also faces imminent decline for demographic reasons. Biden was correct to point out that it will most likely become more difficult for Russia to hold onto an increasing periphery of its territory without the population necessary to sustain it. Republics around Russia’s edges may already be breaking away today while Russia’s population is strong, but parts of Russia proper face both a withering local population and a dramatic increase in immigrant populations from neighboring states, which may become another increasingly significant factor in a future Russian balkanization, much to the dismay of many including Dr. Igor Panarin.

While Mr. Biden’s dismissal of Russia as a significant power was both inaccurate and would be foolish as a policy position, his observations regarding the sustainability of that power and the need for Russia to find a savior other than the one it has clung to for the past millennium – that of empire and repression – was immensely accurate. President Obama’s recent denial of the West’s role in the collapse of the Soviet Union is sadly exemplar of a level of denial about current Russian realities that almost rises to the level of President George W. Bush’s infamous statement about looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing his (good) soul, albeit with the promise of perhaps more naïve actions than rhetoric.

It is certainly not a fault of the administration to wish for better relations with Russia or to wish for good will and positive change on the part of the Kremlin; however, believing that wishes alone make things come to pass is better the domain of children’s bedtime stories than a policy direction undertaken by a head of state. It takes two to press that reset button and the first one to think it was doing so in this case can’t even correctly spell it.

As one Russian commentator put it about Obama’s recent visit to Russia,

It's very American, this 'Yes We Can!' thing, and I hope he doesn't use that kind of language because it's not going to resonate at all with a Russian audience. It has to be a less emotional, less PR-ish kind of style.

Russians probably correctly perceive the US administration as “PR-ish” and out of touch at the moment. In point of fact, Obama’s refusal to even acknowledge what everyone including Communist China and Vladimir Putin himself accept as historical fact suggests an alarming disengagement from past, if not present, geo-political realities. This, perhaps, is the reason that Mr. Biden’s halfway accurate depiction of everything from flu-avoidance to Russo-American relations seems so palatable: a half-truth is still better than no truth at all and the administration does not seem ready to deal with any.