It was Joe Biden\u2019s week. His energised performance in Kyiv\u2002and Warsaw recalled the campaigning style of a much younger man. Russian media sniped that the US president was warming up for his 2024 re-election campaign. They missed the point. He almost certainly intends to run again. Yet last week\u2019s adrenaline rush had a different cause.
\nBiden has cast himself as a latter-day Lionheart, leading a global crusade against the bad guys \u2013 what he calls \u201ca test for the ages\u201d. He\u2019s on a high. He believes he, and the cause of democracy, are winning hands down. Sadly, he\u2019s wrong.
\nBy \u201cbad guys\u201d, Biden means, principally, Russia\u2019s leader, Vladimir Putin, whose delusional speech in Moscow confirmed him as undisputed heir to Ronald Reagan\u2019s evil empire. But Biden is also rhetorically targeting authoritarians, autocrats and tyrants everywhere \u2013 anyone who challenges the western democratic model. This includes governments ruling at least half of humanity, such as China and India and many African states.
\nBiden\u2019s division of the world into \u201cfor us or against us\u201d camps carries uncomfortable echoes of George W Bush, circa 2001, and of Putin himself. That it is America\u2019s manifest destiny (updated version) to defend and promote freedom and democracy everywhere is a message that normally plays well with US voters.
\nAt least, it did once, during the cold war with the Soviet Union, when Biden\u2019s worldview was formed. No more. Despite Putin\u2019s aggressive imperial irredentism, that era has passed. Today\u2019s fractured, fragmented world is multipolar and geopolitically complex.
\nAfter Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans ask why the US continues to assume the burdens and responsibilities of global leadership, as unthinkingly advocated by politicians of Biden\u2019s generation. The next president, Democrat or Republican, may take a less expansive, inward-looking view. Biden is the last of his ilk.
\nIf that\u2019s true, then the bold pledges he made in Warsaw may last only as long as Biden himself. It\u2019s a worrying thought that Europe\u2019s security hinges on the views, however passionately held, of a frail, 80-year-old man who could soon be replaced by an unknown \u2013 or heaven forfend, Donald Trump.
\nIt\u2019s a powerful argument for greater self-sufficiency. Biden has become Europe\u2019s one-man buffer. But he\u2019s an old buffer. He may fail.
\n\u201cThe war in Ukraine is about power and the principle of territorial sovereignty, and whether the [US-led] western-designed global order … will survive new challenges from Moscow and Beijing. But it is increasingly a contest between two ageing cold warriors, one 70 years old [Putin] and another who just turned 80,\u201d the New York Times noted.
\nEven assuming Biden is fighting fit, plenty of voters still think he should throw in the towel. That\u2019s not because they dislike him (though many do) but because they think he is just too old. He would be 86 at the end of a second term.
\nFriends point out that Biden mostly fought the 2020 campaign sitting down, closeted in his Delaware basement because of pandemic restrictions. Next year\u2019s heavyweight contest will be infinitely more physically taxing.
\nColumnist Michelle Goldberg believes Biden should quit while he\u2019s ahead. \u201cBiden has been a great president. He\u2019s made good on an uncommon number of campaign promises. He should be celebrated … But he should not run again,\u201d she wrote. In one recent poll, 78% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents approved of Biden\u2019s performance, yet 58% wanted a new face next year.
\nAnalyst Ezra Klein said Biden had surprised everyone by limiting Republican gains and defeating pro-Trump Maga (\u201cMake America great again\u201d) extremists in November\u2019s midterms. Perhaps he could do it again in 2024. He had also succeeded in getting out from under the shadow of Barack Obama, to whom he played second fiddle for eight long years. Yet while Biden may have escaped his past at home, not so abroad. Like Obama, he is overly cautious. His excessive concern that supplying the best weaponry and air defences to Kyiv could provoke Putin has resulted in vast, avoidable destruction in Ukraine.
\nTaiwan still lacks the strategic clarity and weapons required to repel a Chinese invasion. Biden\u2019s nuclear diplomacy with Iran has failed. Israel-Palestine is a policy vacuum where bad things happen. His Afghanistan withdrawal was a shameful disaster. When it comes to what he regards as the most consequential fight of all \u2013 for global freedoms, laws and values \u2013 Biden is losing ground across the board. \u201cThe democracies of the world have grown stronger … The autocrats of the world have grown weaker,\u201d he declared in Warsaw.
\nTruly? Ukraine has survived, so far, but what of next-door Belarus, where the west watched as pro-democracy activists were crushed? What of Myanmar, where a Beijing-backed junta commits daily crimes against humanity?
\nThink, too, of Hong Kong, where free speech is a fond memory, and of the repressed peoples of Xinjiang, Kashmir, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Mali, Cambodia and other democratic black holes where the US (and its allies) have failed to act, looked the other way \u2013 or been actively complicit. This is the alternative, anti-freedom narrative of Biden\u2019s watch.
\nThis is also the complicated reality of a world split many ways, between not always united democracies, Russia and China (separately or in combination), and the rising 21st-century powers of the global south that do not adhere to 18th-century Euro-Atlantic values, Chinese-style collectivism or old-school Soviet totalitarianism.
\nThe whole idea of the west successfully waging a universal, modern-day democracy crusade \u2013 or second cold war \u2013 is deaf to history, blind to change, surreptitiously neo-imperialist. More to the point, it\u2019s a losing proposition.
\nBiden means well. But he\u2019s showing his age. His florid, outdated \u201cus and them\u201d rhetoric is a geopolitical dead end. The world has moved on. Like his Russian sparring partner, Biden hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Theguardian<\/p>\n
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