Spare a Thought for Joe Biden

 " Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum"

The American president is in big trouble, both domestically and internationally. After only one year in office, Joe Biden is considered one of the most unsuccessful presidents since George W.Bush. On the home front, the Democrats' fortunes are going south in all major polls, the party risks losing a significant number of Congressional and Senate seats in the fall. Former allies are deserting the party in droves and no wonder: the current administration has mishandled both the pandemic and the American economy, with inflation having risen to a 40-year high long before the Ukraine conflict started. The president's approval rating is one of the lowest ever, proving that Obama's advice - who told Joe Biden he did not have to run in 2020 - was both prescient and timely. 

The bad news on the home front is more than matched by disastrous news from abroad. As soon as he moved into the White House, Biden brought the ill-famed team of neocons Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland into the State Department and the national security apparatus, together with whom he had masterminded the so-called Maidan "revolution" in Ukraine back in 2014. This team did not waste any time in botching diplomatic negotiations with Russia throughout 2021 and provoking it to intervene militarily in Ukraine. They are currently undermining any bilateral talks which might lead to a peace treaty being signed, if Blinken's declarations are any guide. As Victoria Nuland recently told Congress, they envisage a long drawn-out conflict in Ukraine. This would suit the neocons' strategy to torpedo Russia's economy and leadership.

European political leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, were shocked when Joe Biden launched his savage personal attack on Vladimir Putin in Poland, advocating for regime change in Moscow. This, however, was consistent with the neoconservative agenda regarding Russia, despite Blinken's official denials. By calling Putin a "butcher", Biden is desperately trying to determine American feminists to vote Democrat in the midterm congressional elections. Sure enough, the importance of geopolitics in international affairs is hard even for seasoned politicians like Olaf Scholz to grasp, let alone for feminists. This is the reason why they have reduced the entire Ukraine situation to an issue they have been nursing for some time, that of Vladimir Putin's "toxic masculinity". According to leading American feminists, a kind of hormonal reaction of the Russian president explains Russia's intervention in Ukraine. 

Neoconservatives deserve another special mention, however. Affected as they are by the virus of global hegemonism that destroyed Napoleon's France in the 19th century and Hitler's Germany in the 20th century, they continue to push a "USA uber Alles" unipolar agenda in international affairs. Their hate towards Russia is not racial in nature, rather it is based on the realisation that the two other major hegemonic drives in the West's modern history were stopped only with the help of Russia. By refusing to accept NATO's expansion up to its doorstep, Russia - together with China - became the biggest obstacle to their global hegemonic plans.

Any sane American administration would have relegated the neocons to the dustbin of history long ago, not recycled them as they did. Instead, Joe Biden gave them center stage in framing American foreign and defense policies once again, and the results are nothing short of disastrous. Small wonder, therefore, that leading neocon figures are calling this period in US political history "the neocon moment". Walking back American foreign policy from its current predicament seems to be a tall order, which, unfortunately, will have to wait until the next US presidential elections. Let us hope that after so many decades of overseeing US foreign policy, Joe Biden will at least be able to avoid igniting World War III.