Lamentably, just at this crucial juncture when a strong American leader is needed to engage in substantive diplomacy and negotiation with Putin and Xi, we have a shell of a man in the White House who is held hostage by the War Party. The hot-heads in Washington are demanding the United States “stand up” to alleged “aggression” from Russia and China towards Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively. With his social reform programs in tatters, Biden is, therefore, more vulnerable to criticism from hawkish Republicans.Īlready we have seen how Biden’s limited outreach with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China is lambasted by Republicans as a sign of weakness and “appeasement”. That’s because any move by Biden to engage in diplomacy with Moscow or Beijing will be portrayed by his domestic opponents in the GOP and rightwing media as the president being “weak”. It is also bad news for tamping down equally dangerous tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan. The domestic crippling of the Biden administration is bad news for the mounting tensions in Europe towards Russia over Ukraine.

In short, Biden is a lame-duck president who is facing a voter backlash in the mid-term congressional elections next year. It doesn’t help either that his vice president, Kamala Harris, seems to be a walking gaffe machine and a total non-entity without an iota of principle. Grotesquely, they say this is to avoid increasing national debt and inflation when the same lawmakers gladly vote for a military budget of nearly $8 trillion over the same 10-year period.īiden’s poll numbers have already been tanking from the perception that his administration is floundering and ineffectual. Now those promises have turned to dust after a corporate-sponsored senator in Biden’s party joined with Republicans to kill off the president’s $1.75-trillion “Build Back Better” social infrastructure bill. The Democrat president was elected on promises to give working Americans “a break” with “big” (actually, modest) spending commitments for improving social services and helping them against decades of neoliberal economic vices that enriched the oligarchy. The news that Joe Biden’s big-ticket domestic agenda is cratering only adds to deep concerns that the United States is heading towards more conflict with Russia and China.

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