It’s impossible to deny that Biden has already made his mark on history. Its two stimulus packages, which are soon to be accompanied by a third, are billed as the most robust interventions in the US economy in decades. Its effects will be felt for generations and will reconcile society with the state.
Its economic policy has inspired government programs around the world, including Brazil. Not bad for the leader of the West, recently labeled “decadent” by former president Dilma Rousseff.
On paper, Biden delivered almost everything he promised in 2020, when he announced that “the United States is back”: a modern and competent administrative machine, a modernizing state, and an ubiquitous America in the global arena. But none of that was enough.
The vaccination campaign ran into a deep social fracture. Anti-vaccination movements competed, and in some states won, the “battle for the soul of America,” one of the main themes of the president’s campaign.
The immediate effects of your economic policy are being limited by contingencies, such as an inflationary surge, political deadlocks inside and outside your party, and unexpected changes in society.
The still poorly explained dismissal of more than 4 million Americans since August, or 3% of the employed population, is probably linked to new paradigms in post-pandemic labor relations. A difficult phenomenon to assimilate for a president who has always celebrated America in which companies and employees lived in branch and generational relationships.
But it is in foreign policy, his supposed area of ​​expertise, that Biden has shown all his vulnerability. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, a fair decision marred by a humanitarian catastrophe, has provided ample ammunition for geopolitical rivals. His coup against France in Australian submarine contracts reinforced the European Union’s conviction that the North Atlantic alliance is a thing of the past.
At the Glasgow COP, the United States exposed the chasm between the aspirations of technocrats and the social reality in climate policy. As for last week’s Democracy Summit, Biden flirted with ridicule.
Based on criteria defined with the clarity of a nightclub doorman, the American president summoned heads of state that he considers to be part of the democratic field to speak about platitudes. If Biden’s idea was to show that the international community supports the US policy of containment against China, the Democracy Summit was a demonstration of weakness rather than strength.
That was just the first year. Next year, Biden will face the most undemocratic opposition in midterm elections since southern slaveholders declared secession against Abraham Lincoln. Vladimir Putin is determined to make the conflict in Ukraine a real moment for American global ambitions.
Biden is an old political fox who knows the rhythm of the presidency like no one else. His team is seen as a combination of the brilliant minds of the Obama era and the best generation on the American left since the 1960s.
Its first year, however, ends with the harrowing feeling that the Biden government has already reached the limits of its capabilities.
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