Joe biden

One of the West’s great foreign policy failures of 2021 was the Iran nuclear negotiations, which remained bitterly unresolved as the clock passed midnight. Having spoken to a number of diplomatic sources on different sides in recent weeks, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the process has been woefully inept. Not only has there been a dramatic failure to extract any concessions from Tehran – even a meaningful freeze on progress towards the bomb has remained elusive – but western negotiators have become enveloped themselves in an Asterix-style dust cloud of infighting, competing agendas and tension. All of this, of course, is a gift to the Iranians, who have entered 2022 in a commanding position. In truth, the project was all but doomed to begin with.

Donald Trump famously boasted that he could 'stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody’ and still not lose voters. That was back in 2016 and the following years proved his point. We are now in the winter of 2021, however, and the 45th president may at last have stumbled across a way to alienate his fan base — by endorsing vaccines. Covid is today the most hostile frontline in America’s all-consuming culture war. Resistance to the national vaccination drive has become the stickiest point. You are either pro-freedom or in bed with the Great Globo Pharma Conspiracy. Trump has adopted a more middle-ground position: encouraging people to take the vaccines while supporting the right of people to choose not to be jabbed.

Plummeting polls are sending a clear message to the Biden administration, but the President is deaf, dumb and blind to it. And it's not just the polls. Take congressional retirements. Democrats who chair congressional committees, reading the grim poll numbers, figure life will be a lot more comfortable as highly paid lobbyists than as powerless minority members. They are retiring in droves. Historically, retirements by well-informed insiders are strong predictors of the next House majority. Local elections are sending the same message. They tell Democrats they have moved too far left and that voters’ quality of life is suffering. Voters are especially troubled by inflation, Covid and crime.

With Biden sliding to 38 per cent approval in the polls, it’s finally time for everyone to stop calling him 'the new FDR'. That preposterous moniker was always misplaced. Biden’s ambition for 'transforming' the country has never extended beyond removing Donald Trump from the White House, inserting his patronage picks into important jobs and, most importantly, crushing the intra-party insurgency led by Senator Bernie Sanders. He has been spectacularly successful in all three of these goals given his meagre talents. But comparing him to Franklin D Roosevelt — America’s most transformative president since Abraham Lincoln, and a man of immense energy — has always been downright absurdity.

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.

For many Brits and Europeans with ties to America, human relationships have been put on hold for an insufferably long time during the Covid-19 crisis. Today, at last, that changed. White House advisor Jeffrey Zients announced that anyone fully vaccinated from anywhere in the world will be able to enter the U.S. with a negative test result from November. To say this was a comfort to millions who felt trapped in or outside of the US seems to trivialise the consequences. Look at the Twitter hashtag #LoveIsNotTourism to see the real-world effects of enforced separation.  Upon hearing the possibility of the ban’s lifting, I booked a UK trip for November, almost two years since my last visit.