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The world is watching with horrified fascination as repeated signs of President Joe Biden’s mental deterioration doom his chances of remaining US leader.
Yet this total fixation on how far his cognitive failure makes it impossible for him to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election in November diverts attention away from the damage already done by his impaired judgement.
Hatred and fear of Trump is so all-consuming for most of the US mainstream media, Democratic Party, and a large chunk of the American public that they ignore or misinterpret other dangers threatening the world.
European leaders gathered in Washington this week to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Nato showed that they too have become victims of the same tunnel vision inflicted on people obsessed by Trump as the root of all evil.
A worrying blindness
Attention has been focused this week solely on Biden’s periodic incoherence and “gaffes”, which included giving a warm welcome to “President Putin”, when he meant to say Volodymyr Zelensky, and speaking of “Vice President Trump”, instead of Kamala Harris.
For many anguished Democratic politicians and voters these repeated errors mean that Trump will inevitably reclaim the White House, if Biden does not stand down as Democratic candidate.
To the frustration of the President and his staff, media questions focused on his mental state and not on his more coherent and lengthy answers to questions about US foreign policy. This is a pity because what he said showed a worrying blindness to the dangers posed by escalating wars and confrontations on every side.
“We’re making the world safer and stronger,” he told a questioner at his press conference on Thursday night. But this confident assertion is demonstrably untrue with a war raging in Ukraine since 2022 and in Gaza since 2023, and with both conflicts showing no sign of coming to an end, but at risk rather of spreading to other countries.
Make China pay a price
Biden spoke enthusiastically of a more confrontational Western posture towards China “as a decisive enabler of Russia” and the need to make China pay a price for this. In other words, the US President believes that increased tension between the West and Russia, the world’s second biggest nuclear power, and China, the world’s second largest economy, will make us all a lot safer.
Nato currently “finds itself in something that it, and its American hegemon, were careful to avoid during the first Cold War: a proxy conflict with Russia not in Asia or Africa, but in Europe itself, and in circumstances that in the long run strongly favour Russia”, writes Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on Ukraine-Russia relations.
The US and Nato powers have a contradictory attitude towards Russia and China that carries grave risks. On the one hand they are demonised as powerful aggressive states which are menacing their neighbours. But they are somehow also weak countries that will buckle and give up under pressure.
To make the point in more concrete terms, the Russian army has so far failed to capture Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city 20 miles from the Russian frontier, suggesting that Russian forces are unlikely to be able to sweep into central and Eastern Europe. But at the same time, no serious military analyst believes that the Ukrainian army will be able to reconquer the Crimea and Donbas. On the contrary, the latest headlines from Ukraine are about the government recruiting thousands of criminals from prisons in order to raise another 400,000 soldiers to hold back the Russians. One of these two propositions about the Russian threat might be true, but not both.
Obstinate
As regards Biden’s inaction over Gaza, past US presidents from Eisenhower to Obama successfully sought to restrain Israel in wars in the Middle East, but Biden has feebly resisted and largely enabled the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians.
It is astonishing how the larger European members of Nato have allowed themselves to become more dependent on the US because of the Ukraine war under a US leader whose judgement is visibly impaired by senility. In the event, he is as obstinate in denying the awful realities of the Ukraine and Gaza wars as he is obstinate in denying his own reduced cognitive abilities.
A feature of Biden’s mental disintegration is that so many people refused to recognise it for so long. The Republicans and Fox News have been going on about it for years, something which for many Democrats was enough to dismiss the allegation as one more Trumpian smear.
The overwhelmingly anti-Trump media in the US denounced those suggesting that the President might not be entirely in his right mind. Such blindness did not extend to the US public, many of whom said that they thought Biden was too old for the job, long before the actor George Clooney and The New York Times began to say the same thing in recent weeks.
A crisis of leadership
Ignoring accusations of hypocrisy, pundits resolutely in Biden’s corner for years did a swift volte face and said the President had to go and soon. Their motive was not that the US has a leader who eschews effective diplomacy to end wars, but that he has become an electoral liability.
They might just get away with it, but they have probably left it too late to switch political horses at the last moment and still expect to win the race. Gone, whatever happens, will be the Democratic attack line that Trump in the White House means a risky return to unpredictable leadership.
One way of looking at the troubles of Joe Biden is to see them as but one example of a general crisis of leadership in the US and in the larger European powers. In nearly all of them, high levels of immigration and the inequities inherent in neoliberal economic systems have proved deeply destabilising.
Fragile and unsafe
In the UK general election, voters showed, above all else, a determination to kick out the ruling Tory party, and all incumbent candidates, to the advantage of Labour, Liberal Democrats, Reform, Greens and everybody else opposing the political status quo.
Overall, national leaders everywhere and not just President Biden appear increasingly detached from the realities around them. This means that, contrary to Biden’s claim at his press conference, we live in a world that is increasingly fragile and unsafe. Co-operation crucial to making progress on global issues, like climate change, has dropped to the bottom of the international agenda.
Lieven gives an apocalyptic warning about how this might end: “Assuming that we have any descendants, they are likely to view us as we do the European elites before 1914: trapped by their inherited culture and institutions, they pursued policies that seemed rational to them, but in retrospect look completely insane.”
Further Thoughts
Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Government promise that the big change in the UK will be a return to stability after eight years of Tory crisis. Here they have had a bit of luck: in Scotland the Scottish National Party has imploded and Labour has reoccupied its old electoral stronghold.
But it is Northern Ireland which is the most politically fractious part of the UK, causing endless problems for the Tories after Brexit that they had not been expecting. Today the situation there is as calm as it is ever likely to be.
The general election changed nothing much, with the nationalist and unionist parties each winning nine seats. Sinn Féin is now the largest Northern Ireland party at Westminster, in the assembly, and in local government, but the Catholic/nationalists community, who were the minority in the region for a century, should remember that the simple fact of being the majority does not mean that they will get their way in big things or small.
As we see the annual celebrations on 12 July of the Protestant victory in the battle of the Boyne in 1690, the unionist-nationalist rivalry is as hard fought as ever. There is not surprise in this, but I never imagined that a concern for endangered species was high up the agenda of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
Yet it turns out that I was wrong: a DUP member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Joanne Bunting, is objecting to plans for a new Irish language primary school building in east Belfast on the grounds that it might pose a threat for endangered bats which may live nearby, according to the Irish News.
On the ecological impact of the school, Bunting says in a letter objecting to the building of the language school that a “comprehensive bat survey” needed to be carried out in the area.
“There are indications that bats may inhabit the vacant building adjacent to the proposed school site. Given the protected status of bats and their habitats under wildlife conservation laws, a comprehensive bat survey should be conducted to assess the presence and potential impact of these protected species.”
What all this is about is unionist sensitivity to any further intrusion into mainly unionist east Belfast by any institution devoted to expressions of Irish culture.
Beneath the Radar
Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves say that the only way for the UK to escape from its social and economic mini-crises involving everything from the water companies and the NHS to the prisons and local government is through greater economic growth.
But for that to happen there needs to be more public and private investment. Nothing the new Government has in mind will do much to increase either. Just how far down the rankings the UK has fallen when it comes to investment was succinctly summarised by the Institute for Public Policy Research just before the election. This concluded that “the UK has the lowest rates of investment of any G7 economy… The latest comparable data for the year of 2022 shows business investment, by private companies, is lower in the UK than any other G7 country, for the third year in a row”.
Among OECD countries, the UK ranks 28 out of 31. As a percentage of the GDP, Slovenia, Latvia and Hungary do better and only Greece, Luxembourg, and Poland do worse. When it comes to total public/private investment, the UK has the lowest level in the G7 for 24 out of the last 30 years.
Cockburn’s Picks
The political crisis in the US over President Biden’s mental health has obscured the hideous tragedy ongoing in Gaza. There is every sign that this is now going to get worse.
Approaching 40,000 Palestinians have died and another 90,000 have been injured – and how did the US House of Representatives respond to this? Just before the 4 July recess it voted to ban the State Department from citing statistics on the number of dead and injured from the Gaza health ministry, the only official entity tracking the death toll in Gaza.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.