When President Biden arrives in the UK tomorrow, there will be many pompous events to welcome him.
No one will mention the fact that he didn't come to our first coronation since 1953. He snubbed Charles and Camilla, sending First Lady Jill Biden in their place. Was it a petty act of revenge for refusing to give him a place of honor at the late Queen's funeral?
As a guest at Windsor on Monday, we can be sure that the President will receive a warm welcome from the King and Queen, and the meeting is seen as an olive branch offer on Biden's behalf. Joe will turn on his folksy charm and joke, and Charles will chuckle politely.
Rishi Sunak will also be welcome, even though the king's octogenarian guest takes a hell of a long time to get his name right.
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So far, the Prime Minister's diplomacy has not made much of an impression in the Biden White House. Fortunately, we don't play cricket with the Americans.
In our media, the usual talk about the «Special Relationship». Across the Atlantic, the president's visit will be seen as a stopover on the way to the NATO summit in Vilnius, which is the true purpose of his trip.
The Elephant in the Room
Vilnius will take place amid the aftermath of the telegraph scoop. Biden reportedly chose Ursula von der Leyen, Chair of the EU Commission, over Ben Wallace, our brave Minister of Defense, to succeed Norway's Jens Stoltenberg as NATO Secretary General.
Mrs von der Leyen, the EU's most powerful official, turned out to be an unlikely candidate after NATO allies failed to agree on a successor.
The US president, who traditionally gives Europe the highest civilian role in the alliance, sees her as a candidate , which can be supported by 31 member countries. her native Germany and France, who underestimated Russia's invasion of Ukraine, on the advice of American spies.
Ursula von der Leyen's tough stance on sanctions against Russia has divided the EU. Photo: VIOLETA SANTOS MOURA/REUTERS fears that pro-Russian states such as Hungary and Bulgaria are leaking details to Moscow.
Vladimir Putin will crack open Crimean champagne over the idea of a legendary incompetent Eurocrat who runs the alliance on which he is based our safety depends.
A few years ago, Ms von der Leyen was kicked upstairs by her patroness Angela Merkel after it emerged that the Bundeswehr had been conducting exercises using brooms instead of rifles. But the sorceress's apprentice is hardly less accident-prone in Brussels.
The introduction of her vaccine, her first major role as EU boss, at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, sent members of the European Parliament calling to her head. a year of work.
And then her eagerness to impose sanctions on Russia led to her causing huge divisions among the 27 EU member states when Germany, Italy and Hungary saw that she had gone too far.
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But Joe. Biden likes her, and that means more than military experience.
Irish's «special relationship»
So what's behind the ritual and rhetoric? The truth is that the UK still matters to most American elites. US President? Not much.
When Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries marched on Moscow last month, Washington gave London advance warning of the mutiny. The Americans did not share this intelligence with any of the other allies: not even with the other three members of the Five Eyes alliance (Canada, Australia and New Zealand), and even more so with the French or the Germans.
The fact that we even know about it, it is implied that senior Biden administration officials want to send a signal of loyalty and trust to their counterparts in the UK.
Why? Because Joe Biden, on the other hand, has made it quite clear what he thinks of the British. His condescension, his distrust and his disgust are visceral.
His response to a British reporter in 2020 speaks for itself: “BBC? I'm Irish!”
Biden's Irish roots are at the core of his personal and political identity. The first Catholic president since Kennedy, he prides himself on being descended from Irish immigrants who came to America to escape the Great Famine (1845-1849).
When Biden sees the British politician, he sees the descendant of Lord John Russell, the Whig prime minister, and his Irish secretary Charles Trevelyan, whose inadequate response to the potato's decline has been blamed for the death of a million people from starvation, disease and malnutrition. . Another million emigrated. Among the famine refugees were Biden's maternal ancestors: 10 of his 16 great-great-grandparents were Irish.
Long before his ambitions extended to the White House, Biden built his career as one of the oldest senators in Congressional history about the formidable Irish American vote.
Joe Biden sees his role in protecting Ireland's interests from the British. about 10% of the US population) are descended from Ireland. Traditionally, they vote for the Democrats. They have voted for Biden since 1972. In 2020, they did it again — in the vast majority of cases.
After Brexit, the Irish-American lobby in Congress resumed. Then there are Democrats like Pete King, a former New York representative who once called the IRA «the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland.»
Joe Biden doesn't need to be lobbied: he's part of the Irish-American lobby. Three years ago, he said: “We cannot allow the Good Friday Agreement to become a victim of Brexit.”
Most recently, in the negotiations leading to the Windsor Agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol, the president made it clear that he sees his role in protecting the interests of the Republic from the treacherous British.
In May, he announced this. reception for the Democratic National Committee that he traveled to Belfast and Dublin in April to «make sure the British don't cheat and Northern Ireland doesn't back down.»
It was Biden, in fact during his visit showed indifference to what he vaguely called the «Irish Accords». For example, he broke diplomatic protocol by flying the Irish flag next to the Stars and Stripes on his car in Dublin after refusing to fly the Union flag in Belfast.
Even more revealing was one of his gaffes when he was in County Louth, when he referred to the New Zealand rugby team All-Blacks as the “black and yellows,” a British paramilitary force that rose to prominence during the Irish War of Independence a century ago.
British neglect.
As president, Biden never had time for the first British prime minister he had to deal with, Boris Johnson, whom he called «sort of a physical and emotional clone» of Donald Trump. When Johnson resigned last year, Biden couldn't even name him.
As for Liz Truss, he thwarted her attempts to negotiate a trade deal and quickly exploited the mini-budget fiasco for household purposes. «I wasn't the only one who thought it was a mistake,» he exclaimed, adding that he «didn't agree» with «tax cuts for the super-rich,» a «trickle-down» economy he caricatured as Reaganomics.
Of course, you can say that Biden doesn't like British Conservative prime ministers. Yet despite his championing of liberal principles such as abortion rights and gun control, the president is a centrist on the American political spectrum.
He may romanticize his Irish ancestors, but he holds a firm view of the present day. immigrants trying to cross the Mexican border. Like his former boss Barack Obama, Biden is actually to the right of Sunak on the issue of migration.
Even in terms of economics, there is nothing to choose between them. Both had astronomical levels of taxation, spending, and debt, although Biden's inflation and economic growth rates are slightly higher.
Thus, Biden's distance from Sunak is not so much ideology as ingrained prejudices. Yet, in a time of global peril, Biden rarely misses an opportunity to offend the British, even to the detriment of the Atlantic alliance.
Earlier this year, Ben Wallace cautiously proposed himself as the next Secretary General of NATO. He quickly enlisted the support of the European countries most at risk from Putin's Russia. Paris and Berlin were predictably hostile, but Washington's veto surprised British officials.
“We should be their closest ally. And that's what we get, ”commented one of the representatives of Whitehall. There is little doubt that the snub does not come from the State Department or the Pentagon, but from the White House.
Ben Wallace, a former Scottish Guardsman, served during the riots in Northern Ireland. Photo: Peter Dejong/AP
However, Biden himself has publicly described Wallace as «very well equipped» for the position, which has not been held by any Briton for a generation. Considering that the UK is the only major Western military power, outside of Poland and the US itself, that spends 2% of GDP on defense — supposedly NATO's minimum requirement — the case for Wallace seemed compelling.
Washington in NATO's 74 years was considered the main guarantor of Europe's security.
For many years, the US hoped that countries such as Germany, France and the UK would eventually close this gap. But underspending in Europe, largely due to Berlin, has been a constant thorn in the side of the White House.
Only Donald Trump dared to challenge the failure of NATO's 2 percent spending target, raising fears that the US could pull out of the alliance entirely, leaving Europe short of a trillion dollars spent on defense.
Last week it was reported that the President blocked Wallace and supported Ms von der Leyen for a specific reason: the decision to continue training Ukrainian pilots on American F-16 aircraft without his approval.
Wallace has spearheaded the creation of an international coalition to supply aircraft to Ukraine, which seems to be too far for Biden. The Minister of Defense has also stepped up the pace in previous NATO confrontations.
NATO Allies
Perhaps these fights made Biden feel bruised. Maybe he thinks the silky Mrs. von der Leyen will be more obedient than the gruff Captain Wallace. However, it's hard to shake off the impression that his main problem with Wallace was that the former Scots Guardsman had served during the riots in Northern Ireland.
In 1993, Wallace was mentioned in dispatches after his the patrol captured an IRA unit attempting to blow up the soldiers. Everything we know about Biden's immersion in Irish republican mythology suggests that for this reason alone, he would have found the British defense secretary antipathetic.
The «Great Old Man»
The president's blind spot on the UK does not disqualify Biden. from high office. Indeed, critics consistently underestimated him.
But it shows a flawed strategic judgment and a failure to fully respond to the challenges facing the United States and the West. The president likes to emphasize that he came to this position with more experience than any of his predecessors. But it has to do with an attitude that is simply anachronistic. Biden is a man of the first half of the 20th century, living in the third decade of the 21st century. It would be wonderful — many readers might say the same — if he was not also the most powerful man on earth.
The current Potus is by no means the worst thing that could be. He is not a narcissist, not a maniac and not a predator. He doesn't lie or be paranoid. His predecessor and likely opponent next year, Donald Trump, has all of these qualities and is charged with felonies to boot. Unlike Trump, Biden upholds the US Constitution and takes his duties seriously.
But at 80, he is already the oldest president in American history. By the time he leaves office in 2028, he will be 85 years old. To elect him for another four years is a real adventure.
Others, even older people, have previously held high positions with success. Konrad Adenauer rebuilt West Germany in the decades after the war and was 87 years old when he (reluctantly) retired in 1963. It is possible that Biden will hold the course. its depth. You don't have to believe Republican conspiracy theorists or Putin's propagandists to understand why this man was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The problem isn't senility, it's seniority and the concomitant arrogance of experience. This man of versatile but limited intellect is convinced that more than half a century in politics not only allows him to understand the world better than anyone else, but also gives him the right to «more excuses».
No, Joe. , this is wrong. There is a war going on — the bloodiest in Europe since 1945 — and the West has not been so bitter since he was a young man. Our position is too precarious, the stakes are too high for such complacency in the Oval Office.
NATO members' defense spending as a percentage of GDP
Those who know Biden find his Grand Old Man's garrulous pomp to be unbearable.
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During a visit to the UK when he was vice president about a decade ago, David Cameron invited Biden to attend a meeting of his newly formed National Security Council. Such meetings usually last from 11:00 to 13:00. The cabinet minister who was present told me what had happened.
Biden arrived on time with his motorcade, Cameron greeted him and invited him to say a few words. An hour later, at noon, he had not finished with Europe. At one o'clock he was still in the Middle East, with East Asia and the Pacific still ahead of him. By then, an elderly statesman had dozed off and had to be poked in the ribs. It wasn't until 2:00 pm that Biden sat down, after which the prime minister hurriedly thanked him. The Vice President beamed and left with his cortege, satisfied with the morning's work. Dazed, dehydrated and hungry, the council members fled.
If Biden's only vice was that he loves the sound of his own voice too much, it would be forgivable. But this one is not only talkative, but also incorrigible.
Biden ended his speech last month in Chicago with a story about Xi Jinping. He boasted that when they were both vice presidents, he spent 68 hours with his Chinese counterpart, most of the time in the mountains of Tibet. “By the way, I turned in all my notes,” he improvised, mocking Trump, who is now facing trials for possession of classified documents.
But the point of the story was to recall how Xi asked him to define America . Biden responded with one word: «Opportunities.» To applause, he added, «Betting against America has never been a good bet.»
Except, of course, those in the Viet Cong, the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, or, as Xi noted, the Chinese and Russians.
Biden learned how to run Congress from Lyndon Johnson, the greatest mediator of all, but he didn't learn the lessons of Vietnam that destroyed the LBJ presidency. He also did not learn from the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis that destroyed Jimmy Carter.
If Biden learned any lessons from Bill Clinton's belated intervention in the Balkans, he again forgot about them by the time of Barack Obama and allowed Putin to pass with impunity, first to Syria, and then to Crimea.
Giving up Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021 was as shameful a humiliation for the West as any of them.
Trump planned to do the same, but it happened in front of Biden.
How can Taiwan stand firm against mainland China when its main ally, the US, is in such precarious leadership? Xi learned more from his conversations with Biden than anecdotes. In fact, he may well have come to the conclusion that a Biden presidency is his only window to seizing the coveted offshore island.
Putin's miscalculation of the president
NATO's failure to contain Putin in the period leading up to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine should be recognized as the biggest foreign policy disaster modernity.
Biden has been warned many times, not least by Boris Johnson (who was convinced by Ben Wallace), that the threat is real and imminent. He ignored even his own intelligence experts until it was too late.
Biden was not the only culprit — Merkel, Macron, Scholz and others should share the blame — but as Potus, he bore the primary responsibility for stopping what he should have known would be a war for Ukraine's existence. If the Ukrainians were armed with some of the arsenal that the US and its allies have since provided, would Putin have attacked?
The fact that he not only offered to rescue Volodymyr Zelensky from Kiev, but was also surprised by the refusal of the Ukrainian president (“I need ammunition, not transportation”) shows how little Biden understood this man and his people.
< p> Since then, Biden's over-caution and ambiguity have persisted, prompting Putin to keep pushing. After the capture of Bucha, with the focus on the genocidal aspects of the war, the US should have urged the West to take immediate steps to allow the Ukrainians to defeat Russian forces and impose criminal sanctions to stifle Putin's economy.
As a result of Biden's weakness, Ukraine and Europe faced existential danger. Photo: Gavriil Grigorov/Pool Sputnik Kremlin
Instead, Biden only grudgingly acknowledges every increase in Ukraine's firepower, implying that Putin's nuclear blackmail has succeeded. When the ecocide followed the genocide, when the Russians sabotaged the dams on the Dnieper to slow Ukraine's advance, Washington did little to respond.
As a result of this weakness, not only Ukraine, but all of Europe, including the UK, now faces an existential danger: the destruction of six nuclear reactors in Zaporozhye by the Russians, who have already mined the area. This huge «dirty bomb» will be much worse than Chernobyl.
Does Biden understand that he must make containment work again? Is he embarrassed by a nightmarish predicament?
Americans may forgive him for lapses in memory or judgment, but not for a weak moral compass.
Joe Biden is a vain man, but not a bad one. The reason why, for all his undoubted accomplishments, his presidency will be severely condemned by historians is that at the critical moment he failed to offer the bold confidence, the uncompromising leadership that the times demanded. “For if the trumpet sounds uncertain, who will prepare for battle?”
One thing Biden understands is unity. He defended NATO, whose unity is its main asset, while Moscow hopes to divide the West.
The US President rejected Wallace not only because of his concerns about British military assistance, but also because such France and Germany would not want Brexit Britain rewarded on the main stage.
And Ursula von der Leyen? Well, she is a woman and a close friend of Jill, the First Lady, who reportedly insisted on her husband that NATO have its first female Secretary General. Incompetence does not seem to prevent one from holding the highest positions.
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