Joe Biden’s catastrophic presidency represents the final surrender of the West

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak greets U.S. President Joe Biden on his arrival at RAF Aldergrove airbase in County Antrim, Northern Ireland

The death of Alexei Navalny in Siberia should be a reminder to the democracies of the world. Not all countries play nice. Some – like Putin’s Russia – play very nasty indeed. And while we in democracies should of course keep to our own standards we should not be capable of being outflanked or outsmarted by the world’s despotisms and tyrannies.

Yet that is precisely what is happening at the moment.

It is not just that Putin is entrenching his power inside Russia and attempting to push his forces ever-forward in Ukraine. It is that wherever you look around the world the unfree states seem to be advancing and the free ones are in peril.

In the Middle East, the “revolutionary” Islamist government in Iran is managing to successfully wage a war on multiple fronts. Through its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen it is threatening Israel’s security.

Its Houthi proxies, the latest object of adoration for Britain’s “pro-Palestine” movement, are targeting British and American vessels in the Red Sea. Other proxies have even dared to carry out a deadly attack on American troops inside Jordan. All of this has been responded to with a small degree of surgical precision but absolutely no significant deterrence – apart from in Israel’s near-completed war against Hamas.

Look to the rest of the region. You have the government in Qatar acting as a “broker” when it is in fact a part of the problem. Aside from accusations of funding terror, Qatar has also hosted such luminaries as the Taliban and the heads of Hamas.

The Gulf state likes to pretend it is an honest arbiter between sides. In fact it acts like a mob boss who, when they knock on your door, pretends that they don’t mean you harm but the big armed thug behind them is barely being held back. “Nice society you’ve got there: shame if anything happened to it.” Qatar believes it can get away with this gangster trick because it has invested billions of pounds into the UK. It seemingly does so in the belief that the British – even more than most other Western societies – can be easily and cheaply bought, and that our desperate government and institutions will slaver over the money on offer.

To date nobody high up in the British government has made it clear that if we can requisition the yachts of Putin’s oligarchs we can also requisition the assets – even the department stores – of the foul rulers in Gulf states. Anyone interested in slavery or colonialism would do well to look to Qatar, that fragile little statelet.

China must also believe that Britain and America are up for sale. So tightly have our governments tied us into China’s financial web that there too we have a serious domestic vulnerability. Were the third totalitarian boot to drop in the coming months or years and the CCP invaded Taiwan, we could say goodbye to the phones in our pockets, Taiwan being the world’s foremost provider of the chips on which all our communications – and therefore much of our lives – depend.

Yet on each of these fronts the West, led by Joe Biden, is displaying not dominance or even deterrence, but appalling weakness.

This week Lord Cameron was in Washington cack-handedly trying to persuade Republicans to continue funding Ukraine, after suggesting the West reward Palestinian terror by giving the Palestinians more recognition. His attempt to strong-arm Republicans into further funding to Ukraine included a reference to appeasement of Adolf Hitler. This did not go down well at all.

One ally of Donald Trump’s (the admittedly rather “out there” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene) said angrily after the meeting that Cameron “needs to worry about his own country, and frankly, he can kiss my a**”. Not very diplomatic language, perhaps, but a reminder that British foreign secretaries trying to lecture a leading party within the world’s superpower should do so with extreme caution.

But of course the main missing component in all this is the superpower itself. Under President Biden America has been seen continuously as being in retreat from the rest of the world.

Some Republicans as well as Democrats agree with this stance, albeit for rather different reasons. Democrats worry that their party’s reputation for foreign policy ability has collapsed – not least since the catastrophically inept withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the same time a growing number of Republicans believe that America should address its own southern border crisis before it sends billions more in aid to deal with the far more violent border crises in other continents.

At the heart of the growing unease, however, is a simple fact: that it is not clear that the superpower is able to effectively wield its military predominance.

The government in Washington – like Westminster – is now undermining its Israeli ally by suggesting that its actions in Gaza are somehow too much and that “too many” civilians have been killed in Gaza. In fact, as the historian Lord Roberts of Belgravia noted in a recent debate in the House of Lords, nothing could be further from the truth.

Even if we accept Hamas’s own casualty figures – which we should not – the terrorist to civilian casualty ratio in Gaza is relatively low. Some people may think that any casualty is too many, but this is war. A war that Hamas brought on the people of Gaza by attacking Israel.

The true problem of walking away from allowing Israel to win in Gaza is that the war is not about Hamas in itself. It is about destroying one of the proxies of Iran in the region. Both the British and American governments continue to believe the delusion that Iran can be “brought in from the cold” with enough diplomatic love and funding. Indeed British and American governments have together handed over billions in cash to Tehran in recent years.

If people wonder why the Houthis in Yemen are so well-armed, like the terrorists in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, look no further. Because a catastrophic strategic mistake was made by Democrats and Conservatives, and as a result the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran is more emboldened than ever.

We shall see if either country has the capacity to reverse this mistake in the months ahead. But one thing is for sure: whether in Ukraine, Taiwan or the Middle East, nothing can fall out for the good if the world’s leading democracies are seen to be in disarray, to be weak, or to be pursuing demonstrably failed policies.

At the head of this problem lies the absence of leadership from the White House. While Russia has put its economy onto a full war footing, China continues to push its military exercises and Iranian proxies fire missiles across its region, the British and American armies have serious recruitment problems, perhaps caused by our delusion that “diversity”, “representation” and other such woke mantras should be the priority of our armed forces.

We have been too sated by peace in the West to realise the stupidity of these policies. They are policies you can only pursue in a period of luxurious, unnatural peace. The autocracies and Islamist authoritarian governments of the world have seen through this mistake and taken advantage of it. Surely it is time we saw through them too.

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