Be warned – the Biden fiasco’s only just begun
▶ “I TOLD you so” is perhaps the most enraging phrase in the English language. So let me get it out of the way early.
I told you so. I told you that Joe Biden was cognitively incapable of the most demanding job in the world. I told you that the media could only cover his debility for so long. I told you that it would end in tears.
Not just the tears of Afghans offering their infants over the barbed wire in the kind of scene that should shame us all – and especially Jews, who recognize this Sophie’s Choice scenario from our own recent history. But also the tears of Americans for the state of their democracy, and of the millions around the world who still look to the United States as Lincoln’s “last, best hope”.
What did you expect?
A two-party system obliges the voters to choose the lesser evil. It was obvious last November that a government of freeloading cynics under a patriotic, anti-political swinger was the lesser evil than a government of control-freak technocrats under a blatantly incapable career hack whose decades in DC are a paradigm of corruption and incompetence.
By all means, blame the system that produces such a choice. Blame the corrosion of ethics by money. Blame the collapse of most of the media into propaganda and banana republicanism. But don’t forget the relief you may have felt when that nasty orange man left the White House, and the “adults”, as the Biden team call themselves, regained control.
We cannot wish our problems away. The crack-up of the American system and the American-led world order are two massive problems for everyone. Unless, that is, you’re not on America’s side, in which case they are a splendid opportunity to trip the stumbling giant and put your foot on his throat.
The undoing of America is particularly challenging for the two countries that, perhaps more than any others, have identified their prosperity, security and global standing with that of the United States: Britain and Israel. The political class of both must now decide whether America really has lost its footing for good. Or rather, for bad.
If the American century is over – and the disgraceful scenes at Kabul airport and the White House this week suggest that it is – then second- and third-tier powers like Britain and Israel are going to have to accommodate a world in which liberal democracy is a distant memory. Boris Johnson’s pique and Tom Tugendhat’s outrage mean nothing in this emerging future. Neither will Naftali Bennett’s appeals for help against Iran, whatever happens on his visit to Washington this week.
People in the Old World console themselves that the Americans are powerful but dumb. The truth, as we can no longer deny, is that the Americans have the most powerful military in the world and they’ve been quite aware that something has been badly wrong for some time. They’ve been trying to fix it for over a decade.
Since the crash of 2008, they have elected two neophytes who campaigned against the Washington consensus: Barack Obama, a hollow triumph of style over content, and then Donald Trump, whose content never overcame his style. Yet the Blob and the Swamp, as the Obama and Trump teams called it, still rule, hence the disastrous ineptitude of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Obama and Trump asked questions of failing institutions. Sometimes they offered answers of a kind, too. Biden has neither questions nor answers. He is complacent, arrogant and incompetent. He cannot even deliver scripted replies to scripted questions. He has delivered the crisis of Western legitimacy that the pearl-clutchers of the press detected in Trump. He is the very figurehead of failure.
Biden’s incapacity is now so obvious that even the American media are now fact-checking him and expressing muted concern about his mental and physical stamina. But it’s too late. All this was obvious a year ago. But if you said, and I did say it, that Donald Trump, who led the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish administration in American history, was the lesser evil, you were attacked, as I was in these pages, as a racist and, laughably, an antisemite.
It has taken only eight months for his administration to expose America as a paper tiger. How, exactly, is the United States to restore its credibility? By bribing Iran a second time? By fighting China over Taiwan? These are recipes for global catastrophe.
I’ll make another prediction. This administration will be remembered as the worst in American history, for an arrogance worse than that of Herbert Hoover as the economy sank in the Twenties, worse than Lyndon Johnson as the US sank into the Vietnamese quagmire, and worse than Jimmy Carter’s as the helicopters sank into the sand in Iran.
The Afghan fiasco isn’t the end of it, either. The pullout from Baghdad is scheduled for later this year. The administration remains determined to give the Iranians the bomb. Chinese violations of Taiwan’s airspace are at an all-time high. Israel, it’s very clear, is on its own. As for the other half of the Jewish people, the Democrats have adopted a system of racial preferences that renders them unwilling or incapable of reining in the Jew-baiters in their ranks.
Anyone can see where all this is heading. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It’s very clear: under this presidency, Israel is now on its own