Nine months into his first term in 2021 an elated Joe Biden told the UN: “as I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years the United States is not at war. We’ve turned the page.” Biden had just pulled out of Afghanistan. All seemed good. Although the big news was still Covid which precipitated a global chip crisis, an energy crunch and a worldwide supply crisis the pandemic was expected to fall before the new vaccines. The expectation was that the world economy would soon recover. There were murmurs about migrants flooding across the US-Mexico border but the media played it down. So in this sunny interlude Joe's priority was pledging $11B toward fixing the Climate Emergency, the existential challenge of the progressive age.
February, 2022 shattered this perfect world when Russia invaded the Ukraine. There was the usual background of conflict in remote countries -- but Ukraine was different. It was war in Europe and involved nuclear armed Moscow. What paradoxically made things worse was that Russia was not winning. Its vaunted armies were being fought to a draw. Somehow the world was not as it used to be.
More storm petrels began to appear. In August 2022 as a U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's leader since the death of Osama bin Laden. It was the first U.S. military action in Afghanistan following the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan and a disturbing warning that the page had not been turned after all. From across the Pacific more warning bells rang. China was angered by a US Congressional delegation visiting Taiwan. The Western Pacific was acting up.
The end of the pandemic did not signal a return to the old ways but rather a drift into disturbing new patterns. The world was deglobalizing. "Following nearly a century of globalization, successive global shocks and the movement to confront climate change appear to be turning the tide." The immediate reasons for the shift were the sudden realization of how vulnerable supply chains were due to pandemic lockdowns and war and energy insecurity arising from the obsession with renewable energy.
As winter set in Joe Biden was faced with another problem, domestic this time. Widespread price inflation was eroding his popularity. On December 6, 2022 the state of New York convicted the Trump organization of all 17 criminal charges brought against it, to some solving that other problem: the Trump challenge to "our democracy." This brought home another point. Not only was the world deglobalizing but America was polarizing with consequences that could not yet be foreseen.
As the summer of 2023 opened the fears of a monkeypox and H5N1 pandemic did not materialize. While Ukraine and Russia were still deadlocked, the Great Resignation, a mainly American phenomenon in which employees resigned from their jobs en masse due to wage stagnation amid rising cost of living betokening deep underlying economic changes, began to plateau. With the promise that things were returning to the old normal, Joe Biden and his handlers began to feel upbeat again. Maybe the page was turned after all.
But his relief was short lived as the 2023 United States debt-ceiling crisis took center stage. The debt ceiling had already been increased multiple times and had become a politically controversial issue. It was one of those problems that never get solved, just kicked down the road. Then disasters came quick and fast. First Iranian-supported Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel on Oct 7, 2023. Next another Iranian proxy, the Houthis, disrupted global shipping. The NYT writes "The turmoil has been sweeping … detours, and the Houthi attacks, have persisted despite airstrikes by the United States and its allies against the Houthis." Finally Iranian militias attacked US bases in Iraq directly in January of 2024. "The strike against the base was claimed by a group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. According to the US-based Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the group emerged in late 2023 and is comprised of several Iran-affiliated armed groups operating in Iraq."
Suddenly the globe was afire, afloat on the hope that with war raging in Europe, expanding in the Middle East and threatening in the Western Pacific, Joe Biden's streak of bad luck would somehow change. But the collapse of Biden's dream world is essentially the product of cumulative problems he has failed to solve, each comparatively little by itself, adding up to a huge sum. Unresolved economic and security problems, political controversies etc, have accumulated like barnacles on the hull of his ship and enmeshed it. Nothing is ever "solved." Not the debt crisis, nor the border, not the Ukraine war, Gaza, ISIS in Syria or the Red Sea crisis. The list just creeps up in length. Houthis, Iraq… It's like a Biden's Ark of problems. And this leads to "bad luck."
Suddenly the administration is facing cascading conflicts. It seems unlikely that recent events in Gaza, the Red Sea, Syria and Iraq are strategically disconnected. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” They are pieces in a bigger picture whose full extent is not yet evident. What are its goals? The Biden administration is not telegraphing its situational appreciation. It's possible Biden has not formed a theory of impending events and is reacting on a Whack-a-Mole basis. In retrospect the Lloyd Austin fiasco suggests the administration is not in a high state of internal readiness at the senior level. More disturbingly, Biden is not turning to Congress, let alone the public to explain:
- who he estimates the possible adversary is;
- what that adversary's goal is.
I think he would like to say there is no "adversary"; that it will all blow over and we can all get back to DEI and climate change. Or perhaps he has no grand strategic understanding to sell. Maybe he's not sure whether Iran itself is a proxy for someone further back in the shadows. How far down does the Legion of Doom go? The most terrible thing for Joe to contemplate is that he was wrong all along about everything. The one sure thing is the world is not as Biden thought it was on that day in 2021 when he assured the UN that he had turned the page.
