Biden's Crusade For Global Democracy Is So Last Century

It was Joe Biden’s week.

- Simon Tisdall

His energised performance in Kyiv and Warsaw recalled the campaigning style of a much younger man. Russian media sniped that the US president was warming up for his 2024 re-election campaign. They missed the point. He almost certainly intends to run again. Yet last week’s adrenaline rush had a different cause. Biden has cast himself as a latter-day Lionheart, leading a global crusade against the bad guys . He’s on a high. He believes he, and the cause of democracy, are winning hands down. Sadly, he’s wrong.

By “bad guys”, Biden means, principally, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, whose delusional speech in Moscow confirmed him as undisputed heir to Ronald Reagan’s evil empire. But Biden is also rhetorically targeting authoritarians and tyrants everywhere – anyone who challenges the western democratic model. This includes governments ruling at least half of humanity, such as China, India and many African states.

Biden’s division of the world into “for us or against us” camps carries uncomfortable echoes of George W Bush, circa 2001, and of Putin himself. That it is America’s manifest destiny (updated version) to defend and promote freedom and democracy everywhere is a message that normally plays well with US voters.

At least, it did once, during the cold war with the Soviet Union, when Biden’s worldview was formed. No more. Despite Putin’s aggressive imperial irredentism, that era has passed. Today’s fractured, fragmented world is multipolar and geopolitically complex .