277 - The State of the World: The Need for Consummate Leadership

            These are desperate and troubling times. Not since the end of the Cold War has so much of the world been immured in perilous danger, with possible ameliorations becoming distant and hard to achieve. The resiliency of the globe’s 8 billion inhabitants is being sorely tested.  And – almost for the first time in seventy-five years – the kind of leadership that once steered the fragile ships of state to safe and strong harbors is greatly questioned, if not regarded as honored only in the breach.

            The celebration today of the North Atlantic Alliance Organization’s (NATO) seventy-five years of protecting Europe and the free world from Soviet and now Russian aggression acknowledges how little has changed in securing world peace and, indeed, how the vaunted expectations that the evil empire had been vanquished, or at least held at bay, have proven false. Putin has cloned himself as an upstart Stalin despite, or because of, the diminished economic and political status of what is left of the Russian empire.

            Nor would Putin and his invasion of Ukraine have any importance if an even more ambitious and anti-democratic China were not assisting Putin in driving a wedge against NATO and Western global assertions and ascendancy. President Xi Jinping, holding Putin’s hand and failing to restrain North Korea’s Kim Jung-un, seeks to diminish the United States and bolster the leadership attainments of what has become a personalistic rather than a structural or nationalistic claim to power.

            It in the deadly context of a titanic global struggle that was supposed to have been concluded with the end of the Cold War that extreme polarization in the West has become so worrying. That is why NATO’s anniversary is so important, as a marker in this struggle, and why the beating back of pro-Putin tendencies within Europe and within NATO is so critical. Containing Hungary and Slovakia’s fellow traveling is a necessary work in progress. So is holding off the rise of the resurgent right in Germany, France, Italy, and Sweden (and even in Britain) a key task for this year and next.

            But the linchpin of this endeavor is a resumed American leadership of the alliance against tyranny that stretches from Washington to Kyiv, to Tokyo, to Seoul, and beyond. That is why President Biden’s enunciation Tuesday of his and Washington’s commitment to NATO is so fundamental. But so is his own personal resiliency – his plausible ability to recover from the disastrous debate performance to resume his anointed role as a chief articulator of Western resolve.  The peoples of the free world and their leaders cannot continue the battle against dictatorship and falsity if the United States falls into the hands of a narcissistic pretend patriot and crypto autocrat who only seeks personal enrichment and flattery.

            The despair of the free world and the hopes of the tyrants revolve around evidence of Biden’s weakness and thus the seeming inevitably of a Trump electoral triumph that would vault unprincipled caprice, strange and irrational instincts, and sheer stupidity into prominence.

            A lively or at least seemingly well-focused Biden is essential not only to save the world from a Trumpian meltdown but also to cope strategically and tactically with the salient emergencies that should occupy us all, and that cry out for continued leadership of a high order. Biden has the accumulated knowledge and experience, even if he walks hesitantly and slurs some speech. Trump is a wrecking ball, to be feared.

            In the words yesterday of Thomas Friedman, “Now that the U.S.-dominated post-Cold War order has come unstuck….managing a hostile Russia — aligned with an increasingly hostile China, aligned with malign actors like Iran and North Korea, and super-empowered nonstate actors like Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah — will take not only incredibly wise U.S. leadership but also a U.S. leader able to forge multiple alliances. The post-post-Cold War world can’t be managed by a lonely American superpower telling all its allies to spend more on defense or…[be left to] the tender mercies of…Putin.”

            The defense of Ukraine is not going as well as it should. The West needs to enable or assist the Ukrainian armed forces in defending cities, hospitals, and electrical infrastructure against Russian missile attacks. That means more Patriot missile anti-aircraft batteries (some of which are promised), the speeding up of numerous new aircraft to take back the skies over Ukraine from the Russians, and a Western ok to attack Russian missile and drone launching sites within Russia. Ukraine needs to be kept safe. Biden’s approval is critical. Trump would cosy up to Putin and destroy freedom there and in Europe.

            Biden may not have done enough to restrain Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza.  He and his team may not have managed to insist that Israel exert a policing control over sections of the Gaza Strip that the Israeli Defense Force has pummeled and yet, as of today, has to go back and destroy over and over because of Netanyahu’s proclaimed reluctance to organize and stabilize those parts of the Strip previously assaulted.

            Most of all, Biden needs to find a way (Trump would not) to demand the end to settler aggrandizement and persecution of Palestinians within the West Bank. Fortunately, a senior Israeli general yesterday condemned the anti-Palestinian maneuvers of Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich, who is the pro-settler policy chief for the West Bank.  (See #276  “Creeping Apartheid,” July 7)

            According to outgoing Lt. Gen. Yehuda Fuks, a “strong and functioning” Palestinian Authority was in Israel’s security interest. He said that an extremist minority of violent settlers had been undermining Israel’s reputation internationally and sowing fear among Palestinians. “That, to me, is not Judaism,” Fuks added. “At least not what I was raised on in my father’s and mother’s home. That is not the way of the Torah.”

            Ukraine and Gaza are the inescapable major problems of our troubled world. Climate change is huge. But the Biden administration also must worry about the 25 million suffering Sudanese who are collateral damage in a senseless civil war caused entirely by greed and the avaricious ambitions of two once-allied generals. Those 25 million people, half of Sudan’s population, are calamitously short of food. In Darfur, where 300,000 Africans were killed in a genocide between 2003-2006 by the same generals who are now warring, a new genocide is unfolding, largely at the hands of an irregular militia run by one of the contending generals   (See #271  “Getting to Yes,” June 26)  And the United Arab Emirates and Putin’s Africa Corps are fueling the war and profiting from it.

            Next door, in the eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an equally desperate humanitarian emergency is underway, with three insurgent rebel groups fighting for control over resources like coltan, gold, copper, and cobalt dug up artisanally by local miners.  Approximately 23 million Congolese are food insecure, with starvation a constant danger.  (272 -“The Killing Fields of the Congo,” June 24)

            Washington must also concern itself with the Chinese desire to gobble up Taiwan, with Chinese attacks on the Philippines in the South China Sea, with the ongoing freedom struggle in Myanmar, and with Chinese ambitions in Oceania. 

This summary should not neglect the so-far unsuccessful US attempt to match or counter Russian and Chinese influence in Africa, to forestall Islamist incursions in the Sahel region (despite backsliding military coups in four countries), to help Somalia win its endless war against jihadists, to try to bolster democracy in Ethiopia, and – across the board – to maintain our accustomed support for and developmental aid to struggling governments. Haiti needs us, too. All of those problems should be on Biden’s agenda.

Friedman again articulates the devil’s choice: “One is a good man in obvious cognitive and physical decline, and the other is a bad man who lies as he breathes, whose main platform is revenge — and who is in his own cognitive tailspin.”

If Biden decides to heed the drumbeat of anxious colleagues and steps down, the free world will need a new leader who can re-exert American leadership and problem solving throughout what today is a fearful and enormously antagonistic world.  Trump can’t and won’t. The fact that he might dismiss or denigrate all of these difficult problems frightens the leaders of NATO and the rest of the free world. His accession could quickly compound every existential threat to humanity and our entire universe. That is among the key reasons why the US and the world need an engaged and articulate Biden. Will he be able to persuade voters, and the rest of the world, that he is as sharp as the best of octogenarians?