Joe Biden's World

One would like to think, during this political campaign season, that the nation is engaged in serious discussions about consequential issues.

And yet, such a claim would be risible. Large segments of the population are in an irrational frenzy about the prospect of a return to Donald Trump. 

If the Enlightenment brought us the reign of rational thought, we have long since discarded it. We have returned to primitive pagan idolatry. Our politicians and our media talking heads are more concerned with manipulating emotion than with advancing rational thought.

Forget Bidenomics, for a moment, at least. Consider that serious thinkers are warning against a return to Trump. They will miss the wars, they will miss the massacres, they will miss the bodies piled up in Ukraine and Israel, and they will miss the open borders. They will especially miss the administration that has shown the nation to be a pitiful, helpless giant.

Emotional frenzy obscures more than it clarifies. To the point that no one can think straight any more. After all, a court in Colorado just removed Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot-- in the name of democracy. 

We are living in Joe Biden’s world. The only question is: can it get any worse?

Of course, it can always be worse, but it was certainly not worse during the time when Trump was president. 

For today I bring you two different analyses of the state of Joe Biden’s world. One is by Lee Smith; the other by David Goldman.

It is not a pretty picture. It is not merely that Biden is singularly weak. He has managed to fill his administration with manifest incompetents. The world’s bad actors have noticed and they are taking full advantage. From Hamas to the Houthis, word has gone out. Joe Biden is so pathetic that he will let America’s enemies get away with just about anything.

Truth be told, it is all a reprise of the Obama presidency. Either Biden is salivating at the prospect of reviving the Iran nuclear deal, or he is simply a tool promoting Iranian anti-Semitism. And, of course, the Biden open borders policy reflects the Obama nonsense about being citizens of the world.

The evidence begins with the advent of what Lee Smith calls the Palestinian Empire. Obviously, Hamas and its supporters are going to lose in Gaza. Their homes and businesses are going to be reduced to rubble. And yet, the feel-good Biden administration is trying to limit the damage, presumably to see Hamas rise again, like a phoenix from the ashes.

Worse yet, Muslims around the world are embracing Hamas atrocities as signs of strength, a victory of sorts over Western capitalism.

The Empire of Palestine has nothing to do with territory. But, it has come to colonize the minds of large numbers of Western youth.

Smith explains:

The ongoing marches around the world to “flood” Western cities, college campuses, and government office buildings, halt traffic on major arteries and thoroughfares in support of Hamas are evidence that the Palestinians have managed to create something much loftier than a mere political arrangement of institutions and offices that would make them no different from the 193 members of the United Nations. With Oct. 7 representing the high-water mark of their long campaign against the Jews, and Americans, the Palestinians have called forth from the nations those who are ready to awaken and celebrate the new spirit of the age.

With the intifada globalized, and millions from West to East—from the dispossessed of the Southern Hemisphere to privileged Scandinavians—stirred by similar furies, it’s like an end-of-times World Cup parade every day. Supporters cheer their champions, the world’s team, the Goliath that kidnapped, raped, executed, and beheaded children.

Hamas counts on Western sympathy, a basic effeminate weakness, to restore whatever Israel has destroyed:

The salient fact is that the crushing military defeat suffered by the Palestinians will hardly matter, as long as the world’s one superpower—alongside Europe and the Gulf Arab states—stand ready to rebuild whatever Israel destroys. By continually revitalizing the Palestinians, by giving them new life, the stewards of global affairs have engendered something that by definition cannot survive in nature on its own: a society that celebrates death as its highest value. The Palestinians claim that it is their perseverance and faith, their willingness to suffer great losses, that ensures their ultimate victory. But the source of their steadfastness—their ability to replenish their arsenal and refurnish their tunnels and other military infrastructure—is, in fact, a luxury repeatedly afforded them by the U.S. and its European partners. Had world powers simply allowed Israelis and Palestinians to make war, the party of permanent resistance would have had two choices—change radically or perish entirely.

It is not just Biden’s America. In the absence of consequential leadership in Washington, the weak-kneed mealy-mouthed Europeans will join the chorus. After all, they made the calamitous mistake of allowing Muslims to invade their countries, bringing criminal gangs and anti-Western habits. Now they have to try to appease and placate the invaders.

Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause because the most basic laws of nature have been revised to accommodate it. The Palestinian cause gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favor as well. And they have.

David Goldman is largely in agreement about the dangers to Israel. Yet, he considers the larger picture and explains that the problem lies in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy.

The Biden Administration previously imagined that it could force regime change in Russia through crippling sanctions. Instead, a large part of world trade and financial currents skirted American sanctions, leaving Russia with barely-diminished oil revenues and a steady supply of high-tech components from China, directly and through such intermediaries as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Armenia. Rather than collapsing by 50 percent as President Biden predicted, Russia’s economy grew by 3 percent in 2023 after contracting by just 2.1 percent in 2022. Putin had an 80 percent approval rating as of October 2023. The Biden team is responsible for the grossest blunder in the checkered history of American foreign policy.

Ukraine, Goldman says, is about to fall. The Biden effort to fight Russia through a proxy army, is about to fail. Some of us saw this coming quite some time ago. We promoted  preemptive negotiation. Now, the end is near:

America’s strategic position is about to suffer a blow on par with, and perhaps more devastating than, the 1975 collapse of Vietnam. With a resident population of less than 30 million against Russia’s population of 147 million, Ukraine cannot put enough men in the field to hold the line against a Russian army with comparable technology and much greater firepower. The West can’t produce enough artillery shells, so Ukraine is firing hundreds of howitzer shells daily while Russia fires thousands. Both sides have lost 70,000 to 100,000 and three or four times that number wounded, but Russia has several times more people. None of the West’s Wunderwaffen have made a difference, and the Russians have some nasty weapons of their own, as well as clear air superiority.

He continues:

The change in the world balance of power after the collapse of Ukraine will be so dramatic that all the players in this global game are cautious about their next step. But Russia and China are probing American weaknesses in ways that remain well below the threshold of a casus belli, testing American responses.

That’s what Joe Biden’s world looks like. One does not quite grasp how stupid you need to be to think that Donald Trump will make it all worse.

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