Biden to America: ‘We’re going to be OK’

President Joe Biden unfurled a resolute defense of democracy in his first State of the Union address on Tuesday, declaring that the United States would act as a leader for the free world as it rallies with Ukraine against a brutal Russian invasion.

With a war raging an ocean away, Biden vowed that the United States would emerge from years of division and disease to protect and expand freedoms at home and abroad.

“While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake, now everyone sees it clearly,” the president said. “In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.”

Biden’s speech was delivered against the backdrop of a pandemic that ignored borders and touched every corner of the globe for the past two years. It was not the one the president and his team had planned to give. But with the situation in Ukraine, the topics that had once been on the front burner — Covid, inflation and economic recovery — took a backseat, another reflection of a presidency that has been forced to respond to events rather than shaping them.

Biden made the implicit case for the need for alliances, reflecting his belief that the lockstep approach of NATO and European allies — who have sent weapons and supplies to Ukraine and unleashed punishing rounds of sanctions against Russia — has made the Ukrainian resistance possible. He condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression and reasserted the United States’ role as a moral leader.