Donald trump

Less than a year into the Biden presidency the world suddenly is a very chaotic place. The hasty and botched US exit from Afghanistan has created a terrorist-led state. Iran is ploughing forward with its nuclear plans. Russia has leverage over European energy supplies. Communist China is no longer hiding its totalitarian nature and global ambitions. And yet the US, UK, Germany and other major democracies seem more concerned about climate change and what may or may not happen 100 or more years from now than tackling the very serious threats to the free world’s national security today.

Do you remember the president who gave Vladimir Putin everything he wanted in Europe? The president who consistently ignored the advice of military experts, hoarded Covid vaccines, peddled nativist rhetoric about American manufacturing, turned Washington, DC into an 80s sci-fi dystopia during his inauguration, expressed his astonishment at the number of interracial couples on television, and planned a mass deportation of Haitian refugees fleeing an earthquake, a hurricane, and a coup? Readers of The Spectator are clever enough to know that I am talking not about Donald Trump but Joe Biden. For months now I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void: Biden is everything Trump wanted to be. The main difference between the two is their respective bases of support.

Joe Biden is facing what will likely be the defining event of his presidency. The gains made in Afghanistan are evaporating in record time under his watch. But Biden doesn't want to be a foreign policy president. He wants to be the man who ended wars, taking credit for America’s Covid recovery, funnelling trillions of dollars into infrastructure and education while the Federal Reserve’s printing presses are warmed up and there's still appetite to spend. But like his Democrat predecessor — and the man whom he served as vice president — he has been dealt a different hand. President Obama was loath to see the atrocities taking place in Syria distract from his domestic agenda (which he wanted to be defined by healthcare reform).

On a humid summer’s day in Singapore three years ago today, Donald Trump became the first incumbent US president to meet with his North Korean counterpart. For all of the summit’s theatre, Kim Jong-un’s pledge to ‘work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ seems unlikely to be realised. Three years on, and the country shows little intention of either abandoning its nuclear ambitions or reforming Pyongyang. Instead, the regime has tightened its control over society, not least ideologically, after the failure of the Supreme Leader’s five-year economic plan. In 2018, the leadership assured North Koreans that the country had achieved its primary geopolitical aim of becoming a ‘fully-fledged nuclear state’.

Now that Joe Biden has landed in the UK, many Brits may be realising what a stalwart friend they had in Trump. Within minutes of arriving on UK shores, Biden was denouncing Britannia, Boris, Brexit — you name it. Far from hailing the UK, America’s most cherished ally, BIden was showing Britain a bullying disdain that should be reserved only for China or Iran. It is difficult to conceive of two stranger bedfellows than the golden-tongued Old Etonian and the awkward, plain-spoken 'blue collar' Joe Biden. But rhetoric, style and acuity aside, the two heads of government face divergent motivations when it comes to policy — these are likely to challenge the British-American partnership.

In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than we will ever be, so something as accomplished at infection and spread could not possibly have been put together in a lab. Today, the mood has changed. Even Dr Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical advisor, now says he is ‘not convinced’ the virus emerged naturally.