We made it through a civil war, two world wars and the Seventies but can we survive three more years of Biden?
I’d like to say that the question is hyperbole. Yes, the Biden administration is a disaster and Biden himself is clearly no longer in full possession of his faculties – but we survived the Harding administration so the answer should be yes, right?
Sadly, maybe not. Policy disasters are not new and we have weathered storms before. The rioting in major cities is pretty obviously condoned by the Democrats that run those cities – so when the folks who live there get tired of it, they know what to do. The fact that it has had next to no traction of its own and hasn’t either spread nationwide nor been widely accepted is a strong indication that the rioting is political theater and not a political threat. This is not where the danger lies.
The border crisis is alarming – kinda. Okay, optically, it looks horrible and it WILL cause major issues with Mexico down the line. It’s definitely a problem the administration needs to get under control but as it stands, tens of thousands of Haitians are not an existential threat to the United States. They are a major foreign policy concern – you can’t walk from Haiti to Mexico so there’s something going on when tens of thousands of some of the world’s poorest manage to get across the Caribbean and into Mexico. But this is also not where the danger lies.
Afghanistan is an existential threat to the Democrat Party, but not to the US. The Taliban is a joke and always has been. Sure, they are a nasty joke but honestly, they don’t have the political nor military might to be a threat outside their region – and not much of one inside it. The pullout has given them a lot of shiny new toys and that IS a massive concern. China will no doubt be buying everything they can to retro-engineer US tech. It will have foreign policy repercussions for decades. But the Taliban is not an actual threat to the US and this, too, not where the danger lies.
Inflation is much more concerning because it will damage not only the Democrat Party but the nation as a whole. (Granted, it stinks to be in power during an economic downturn of any sort – much more so when policies you rammed through over the last couple years are causing the trouble – stinks to be you, Democrats) This is not going to be pretty. It IS likely to cause a lot of harm to a lot of people. It is also likely to result in some major political upheaval that could destroy both parties. However, that’s just a party system change and it’s thirty years overdue anyway – this is not an existential threat to the US.
So what is? The whole bunch together? Honestly, probably not. The US is going to hurt from some of the stupidity it has engaged in in the last eighteen months (looking at you, lockdowns) but even all together, that’s not enough to destroy the US. No, the danger is something else.
The Biden administration has made extremely dangerous foreign policy mistakes. The latest debacle with Australia and the extreme sore point with Afghanistan have damaged the US’s standing worldwide in a REALLY bad way. This cobbled together mess of a global system relies heavily on the confidence the rest of the world has in the US’s trustworthiness.
Most of Western Europe, a good bit of Eastern Europe, Israel, all of South America, Japan and a good bit of Africa design their foreign policies based on their relationship with the US. Western Europe is highly subsidized by the US – virtually none of those nations need to keep more than a small military. The EU spent in 2020 only 1.6% of its GDP on defense. The US spent 3.7% of its GDP on defense. Bear in mind, the US has only negligible risk of a conventional war being brought to her shores and already has the largest nuclear arsenal by far – we aren’t paying just for our own defense. We pay for the stability of the planet and other nations worldwide count on us to be a nation that they can trust.
Afghanistan shook that trust to its core. Australia has rocked it even harder. The world is losing trust in the United States – and with good reason.
Before the isolationism kicks in, reality check. We ARE the world’s policeman and have been for more than eighty years. The overwhelming might of US forces has kept nuclear proliferation to a minimum and prevented most nations from bothering to build large militaries. That power has kept both the Soviets and the Chinese from risking large scale military confrontations.
The might of not only the US military but the US dollar has allowed trade on a genuinely global scale. It’s helped India and most of the Third World gain a foothold to pull themselves out of poverty. Sure, US aid helps – but not nearly as much as world stability. No one builds a business in a war zone. While there have been conflicts and wars, none have been on the vast scale of World War Two nor have any taken a fraction of the lives lost in the early Twentieth Century. That’s not because of our great foreign policy – we did some really stupid things in the last eighty years – it’s because we ARE the biggest kid on the block and no one is dumb enough to mess with us.
We haven’t achieved world peace but we made a dang big dent in stopping world wars. And we did that because the rest of the world grudgingly had to admit our intentions were good. Over time, we earned their trust with our (mostly) responsible use of our power and our willingness to back up our words with that power – and to keep our promises, even when new administrations came in.
Biden has changed that in a profound way that will have repercussions we can’t even foresee yet. Now every election will be terrifying to any nation dependent on us in any way whatsoever. Decades of trust are gone and will take decades to rebuild.
That damage is done – and we, the United States, cannot afford more of it. The WORLD cannot afford this. But just from a US viewpoint, the loss of global trade would destroy us. It would take decades for the rest of the world to build up sufficient navies to keep the seas safe for trade so if they can’t count on the US they WILL start looking to Russia and China to provide that stability. As we lose power, our enemies will take it up. And a huge part of the power of the US is the trust that other nations have in us.
It’s that trust that lets us influence other nations without having to launch more warships. It’s that trust that makes it possible to be the world’s policeman without the world turning on us. It’s that trust that keeps the rest of the planet from building up militaries big enough to bring the fight to our shores.
We are the biggest kid on the block. That’s a good thing for everyone else when that kid is benign – even better when he’s a good kid that likes helping people, even if he is a bit of a clutz. Other nations can feel safe around that kid, even trust him and forgive the occasional broken window. But when that kid is untrustworthy; when he breaks his word and lets other people get hurt then no one can trust what he will do next. That’s when other nations start building militaries to protect themselves, looking for bigger kids to protect them and seriously consider taking that kid down.
We are the mightiest nation in human history. We are NOT invincible. We cannot fight the whole planet and win. So even if we don’t want to be the nice kid anymore – and the truth is, most Americans WANT us to be that nice kid – we can’t afford to tick off the whole planet or even to just let things get to the point where no one trusts us.
THAT – losing the trust of all our friends and allies as well as some of our enemies – THAT will destroy us.
It’s time for Biden to go before he does more damage than we can handle.
