Dominic Green

Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build on Trump’s legacy, or will vanity and partisanship send the American Atlas tumbling to his knees? Trump won the 2016 election by forcing the difficult questions on to the national agenda. In office, he developed an alternative to the spent consensus of the 1990s. Call it vulgar realism, the lowest common denominator of American interest.

‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone. Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, once one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is going to be Biden’s national security adviser. John Kerry, the disastrous diplomat who gave us the Iran nuclear deal, is Biden’s climate emissary. And it was all going so well.

There is, as our presumptive and somewhat presumptuous president Malaprop told us on Sunday, a time to plant and a time for the other thing. There is a time for healing, and a time for massing your advisers in a garden centre and taking your enemies to court for stealing the election. A time for introducing your granddaughter as your dead son, and a time for calling upon the endorsement of ‘General Stanley McGeneral’. As it is written in the Book of Roger McGuinn, ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ Turn, turn, turn: Now it is time for the Democrats to turn on each other before their triumph is certain. Within hours of Biden claiming victory, the Democratic left was trading Twitter snark with the centrists.

It’s not over till the senile guy talks gibberish. It might not be over for days. The election may shift to the courts, to be contested like history’s most important parking ticket. Regardless of who wins — and the true professionals of prediction, the bookmakers, now have Donald Trump odds-on — Donald Trump has already done the impossible. He has won the moral high ground. Since 2016, the Democrats and most of the media have told us that Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was an electoral and moral aberration. That Trump was not Hugh Hefner, but ‘Drumpf’ the white supremacist. That the voters, chastened by four years under the orange flag of fascism, would recognise their error as a sin and repent.

There is nothing to see. In 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma on a reported salary of $50,000 (£40,000) a month. Hunter knows nothing about the energy business, and he doesn’t seem to speak Ukrainian. ‘I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,’ Joe Biden said in 2019, though he had been photographed playing golf in the Hamptons with Hunter and another Burisma board member, Devon Archer, in 2014. But there is nothing to see. On Wednesday, the New York Post published an email from Vadim Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Burisma board, from April 2015. Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for ‘inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together’.

Is Donald Trump taking the Democrats’ line on Brexit and the Irish border? We might think so from the Financial Times. On Friday, the FT quoted Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, saying that the Trump administration, the State Department and the US Congress ‘would all be aligned in the desire to see the Good Friday Agreement preserved to see the lack of a border maintained’, and that no one wants ‘a border by accident’. Does this mean that the Trump administration agrees with Joe Biden? No, it doesn’t. Biden, along with House of Representatives leader Nancy Pelosi and a gaggle of Democratic committee leaders, is siding with the EU.

Washington DC Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that if Joe Biden wins the November elections, an incoming Democratic administration would revive the Iran Deal ‘on day one’ and ‘return what would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars to a theocratic, corrupt regime’. In an exclusive interview at the State Department, Pompeo also discussed the Trump administration’s progress in negotiations on withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan and Iraq, and described his anticipation of witnessing leaders from Israel, the UAE and Bahrain signing the Abraham Accords at the White House: ‘It’ll be really a joyous day when the Bahrainis and the Emiratis are here.

A leaked letter to the UN Security Council shows that the British government has rejected the US position on Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs, is siding with France and Germany at the UN, and is risking a diplomatic confrontation with its closest ally.