With less one week left to go before the Biden administration gives way to Trump’s second term, the starkly contrasting visions and styles of the two presidencies could not be more striking.
President Biden is using his final week to mould and cement his legacy.
No one writes their own legacy but that doesn’t stop indulgent attempts to influence the narrative.
And so with some impressive topspin the outgoing president presented his retrospective.
In short – he claimed America is stronger now than four years ago and that its adversaries are all weaker.
I detected an underlying bitterness to his tone; a deep frustration that the American people don’t see what he sees. The majority who chose Trump in November see a world in chaos. They attach Biden to that, or at least see him as incapable of controlling it.
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Biden is right that Iran and its proxies are weaker now than just a few years ago. And he is right that Russia is bogged down in a stalemate war that didn’t go how Putin wanted it to.
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But it’s also true that the Middle East is embroiled in more turmoil than has been seen for many decades. America’s reputation in the Arab world has suffered hugely under Biden’s watch.
And Russia is now on a war footing, spending more than 40% of its total expenditure on defence (and probably offense too).
Gaza ceasefire deal is ‘on the brink’, Biden says in final foreign policy address
Meanwhile, the incoming president is doing his best to wholly undermine Biden repeating his conveniently unprovable claim that none of the foreign wars would have happened had he been in office.
He said in an evening phone-in interview with Newsmax TV that he would meet Putin “very quickly” to bring about an end to the Ukraine war.
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He said that the Gaza ceasefire deal was close, adding that it had better be or there “would be trouble like they have never seen before”.
It’s a new iteration of the Nixon-era ‘madman theory’; come across as unpredictable, irrational, volatile to scare the hell out of everyone and submit them into compliance.
If we see a Gaza ceasefire in the next few days, Donald Trump will seize the credit.
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The central tenets of American leadership over decades have been continuity, reliability, predictability.
As this week turns into next, all of that will go because Donald Trump is none of those things. He is the opposite of them all and proud to be. A disrupter for a disrupted world.
