Hold Biden responsible should Russia eventually invade Ukraine! No doubt, Biden is deliberately provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin to do just that! Since it became known that thousands of Russian troops have been conducting military exercises in their own national territory adjacent to Ukraine, Biden has been ramping up vile propaganda against Russia and its leader. His trenchant anti-Russian rhetoric, accusing Russia of every imaginable evil, and daily amplified by the popular Western media outlets, carries the danger of backing Russia, a powerful nuclear state and a preeminent military superpower, into a tight corner from which a peaceful escape without loss of face might prove difficult. This was exactly the kind of scenario John F. Kennedy warned against after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, describing it as an invitation to collective suicide for the world. Doing this to Russia at this critical juncture in world history makes Biden a mortal danger to global peace.
Although never been known all his political life —— as US Senator for thirty-something years and Vice President for another eight —— to be as eccentric and unpredictable as his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, but President Joe Biden is increasingly and unquestionably turning out to be even more dangerous. The mercurial Donald Trump once went before the United Nations General Assembly to threaten North Korea with nuclear annihilation, boasting before a watching global audience that he had a much bigger nuclear button than his arch-nemesis, Kim Jung-Un. I adopt here Merriam-Webster’s definition of mercurial which refers to a person “characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood” to describe Trump who is reputed for his sometimes inexplicable mood swings. It is an apt characterization as, for after all his huffing and puffing before the UN, he would later warm up (suck up actually) to the same President Kim whom he had earlier mocked as “the little man rocket man” on account of the latter’s provocative ballistic missile tests. Trump’s initial sabre-rattling and offensive daily tweets however nearly provoked a nuclear showdown with North Korea whose leader, despite his youthfulness and limited experience in global affairs, seemed infinitely more focused and calculative than the flaky Trump who was all bluster.
Why do I consider Biden to be more dangerous than Trump? As said above, President Trump was merely a rude, empty barrel who could have carelessly taken America to war by his infantile fumbling and bumbling than by any rationally calculated policy. Mercifully, the world was spared a nuclear holocaust because those around him ensured that his eccentricities did not include toying with the nuclear button. Biden is currently weak and clueless at home but acting gung-ho abroad, trying to show toughness in external matters instead.
Unlike Trump, Biden is an experienced politician. Being more knowledgeable about domestic politics and foreign affairs, he is expected to be also much more focused and make deliberate choices. This makes him dangerous, because he can start a war by deliberate choice than by accident, and he will be able to cook up all the necessary excuses to justify it, as his war-mongering predecessors had done.
One year into his presidency, his job approval rating has plummeted so precipitously —– most Americans actually think he’s doing a lousy job. His domestic policies and agenda are not flying, being blocked or frustrated by the opposition GOP still crudely beholden to Donald Trump, and by fellow Democrats not yet persuaded by them. And America remains dangerously divided in every sense, Americans now view all issues through bigoted lenses and the centre is no longer holding as before. That is a major cause for concern to him as leader of his party whose Senators and Congressmen will face midterm elections in November 2022. Will he be able to lead them to retain their seats or will they surrender Congress to the opposition?
To compound his headaches, he has a ubiquitous and indefatigable nemesis in Donald Trump who is doing all he can not only to delegitimize his election as a fraud, labeling his office as a stolen presidency, and brazenly de-marketing the US government in the eyes of the whole world. Biden’s main problem is Trump who, in a hostile takeover, has succeeded in turning the GOP into the party of Donald Trump. The fear of Trump has therefore become an intractable headache for Biden.
Buffeted as he is at home by lacklustre economic performance, and dogged everywhere by Trump, Biden is turning increasingly to foreign policy to shore up his presidency. In that regard, he is stoking bellicosity in every known US adversary, notably Iran, China, and Russia. Failing woefully at home, he would like to appear tough outside, although his chaotic and inept troop withdrawal from Afghanistan last year badly damaged his credibility. Moreover, not wanting to appear to Trump as wimp, it is not totally inconceivable he might foment a major crisis as a distraction. For example, he would want to show that he is not soft on China; that he is standing up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin; that he is as tough as any US President could be; to prove that America is once again back in the saddle of global leadership.
Consequently, he has not only plagiarized Trump’s tough rhetoric on China, engaged in highly provocative military maneuvres in the South China Sea and encouraged anti-China recalcitrance from both Hong Kong and Taiwan; he has lately been drawing the red line which he believes Russia must not cross, warning of dire consequences should Russia invade Ukraine, and sending massive military armaments to Ukraine more to provoke Russia than to defend Ukraine. These are undoubtedly dangerous provocative moves, dangerous because the veritable adversary is also a military super power with immense nuclear capabilities to resist Biden’s bully tactics, threats and ultimatums. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile Crisis of 1962, John F. Kennedy wisely warned “… while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to the choice of either a humiliating defeat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy —- or a collective death-wish for the world.”
I had thought that Trump’s infantile eccentricities could provoke nuclear war, but I seem now firmly convinced that Biden, in his desperation to shore up a flagging presidency, could do much worse. Though he has restored America to the path of multilateralism that Trump had tried to destroy, he has yet to make any real progress on the Iran nuclear deal. He has not gone back to the negotiating table with Iran and the other JCPOA countries, but has continued to take the hard-line against Iran. Russia’s massive troop deployment near the Ukrainian border has provided him the casus belli, a lifeline to prove his ‘toughness’ and restore some respectability to his falling approval ratings at home. In my view, playing hardball with foreign policy to divert attention from his woeful failures at home, and prove that he is not a wimp, makes him much more dangerous. Let’s hope he would remember Kennedy’s aforementioned wise exhortation and not deliberately provoke Russia to invade Ukraine.
On this score, it behoves the current leaders of the principal European states not to allow their countries to be goaded into needless and destructive confrontations with Russia, not become uncritical and willing tools to shore up America’s waning global hegemony. Boris Johnson, Britain’s embattled Prime Minister, also facing political storms at home and desperate for some lifeline, has stupidly chosen to play sidekick to Biden, issuing warnings to Russia that Britain, a second rate power, does not possess the capacity to enforce. Let wise counsel and diplomacy prevail in the face-off.
Prof. Fawole teaches International Relations at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.