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Biden's Enduring Legacy: Awful. No Worse
If ever there was a searing, sanctimonious self-immolation in presidential politics, this was it and the costs are incalculable.
Feb 01, 2025
It’s time to assess former U.S. President Joe Biden’s legacy. It has been a catastrophe. Or, worse.
Domestically, his most influential legacy is that he turned the country over to Donald Trump, the most repellant, dis-qualified, should’ve-been-easy-to-defeat candidate for president ever. It is the end of the epoch of liberal democracy and the beginning of an era of oligarchic fascism. Nothing less.
Internationally, he lost the U.S.’ proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and scarred the U.S. forever as an unrepentant perpetrator of genocide. It is the end of post-Cold War primacy for the United States and the beginning of its persona as a rapacious, predatory rogue state that objectively disdains human rights, democracy, and the international rule of law. Nothing less.
The combination of the two effects amounts to a massive, unprecedented comedown, an unparalleled destruction for the U.S. in its own house, and in the world. It’s hard to see how either will ever be recovered. That is Biden’s essential legacy.
Domestically, Biden refused to prosecute Trump for his public attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Brad Raffensperger tape was known about on January 3, 2021, more than two weeks before Biden ever even took office. You know the tape, “All I want is for you to find me 11,780 votes.” That is prima facia proof of federal election interference, a felony.
It is the end of post-Cold War primacy for the United States and the beginning of its persona as a rapacious, predatory rogue state that objectively disdains human rights, democracy, and the international rule of law. Nothing less.
Prosecution should have begun on January 20, 2021, the day Biden took office. Instead, Biden waited two-and-a-half years before even opening a formal investigation. It gave Trump more than enough time to run out the clock with his trademark Deny, Deflect, and Delay tactics.
Similarly, the matter of fake electors. They, too were uncovered even before Biden took office, when former Vice President Mike Pence refused to accept them on January 6, 2021. They, too were prima facia evidence of federal election interference, a felony. They, too, were left uninvestigated and unlitigated for two-and-a-half years, an unfathomable dereliction by the only person in world in a place to see that the law was simply enforced.
The damage to the country is incalculable. Trump will never face accountability. If Biden had simply done his job, Trump would now be sitting in an orange jumpsuit in some minimum security federal prison, instead of reveling in his second coronation. Biden ensured that the Rule of Law does not apply to the wily, wealthy, and powerful. In doing so, he undermined the public’s respect for and confidence in that Rule of Law.
Then, Biden’s refusal to step aside for a more able candidate in the 2024 election ensured that no one could mount a winning campaign. The psychotically delusional ego behind it—that he was busy running the world—is insufferable. And it was a conspiracy among all of the top ranks of the Democratic party to hide his infirmity, until it was no longer possible.
Let’s stipulate—with an overabundance of generosity—that former Vice President Kamala Harris did as good a job as she could. The most telling fact of the Democrats’ loss was that Trump won by just over 2 millions votes, while 19 million people who had voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024. By a roughly 3-to-1 margin—nearly 6 million people—those who stayed home reported that they would likely have come out and voted for Harris but for Biden’s support for the Israeli genocide.
There you have it. The Democrats’ own supporters would not support the Democratic nominee because of Biden’s unconscionable, barbaric, intractable policy in Gaza. Biden owns all of the dimensions of his party’s defeat and the loss of all of the branches of government to Trump. THAT is his domestic legacy. Nothing else matters.
Internationally, it is just as much of a debacle.
The Democrats began menacing Russia in 1994, when former President Bill Clinton announced the eastward expansion of NATO to include formerly Soviet-bloc countries. They continued it with the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, in 2014, overthrowing a Russia-leaning government and installing a Western-leaning neo-fascist state. Biden was the Obama administration’s quarterback on that coup.
Biden, on the brink of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, refused to even discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer of a European-wide security framework. It was Biden’s Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, who said that the U.S. wanted “to weaken Russia,” and make this invasion “a strategic failure for Russia.”
And it was the Biden administration that made colossal miscalculations about Russia’s military weakness, the U.S.’ military prowess, and the likely efficacy of economic sanctions. More than 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, and almost $200 billion squandered, for that mistake. To put that into perspective, the U.S., with five times Ukraine’s population, quit Vietnam when, after eight years of fighting (not three years), it could no longer stomach the loss of 58,000 men.
The humiliation of the U.S. loss in Ukraine is not yet fully revealed because a formal settlement encoding the loss has not yet been reached. But most of the world’s nations are happy to have seen Russia bloody the U.S.’s nose.
Of all of the damages Biden inflicted on the U.S., none are as egregious, as unforgivable, or irreparable, as the damage to the U.S.’ reputation for his lusty, unremitting, sadistic support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
For a few weeks after Hamas’ October 7 attack, the Israeli response was framed as “self-defense.” But as Israeli officials publicly declared that they were going for expansion of the Israeli state, to Damascus, Syria, and beyond, it quickly became clear that a genocide was taking place.
The International Court of Justice said that a “plausible case” for genocide had been brought. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the minister of defense. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch declared genocide. The Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, stated that ethnic cleansing was underway.
The worst part was Biden’s and Harris’ claim to be “working around the clock” for a cease-fire, when, in fact, he was encouraging the genocide while precisely working to prevent a cease-fire. A more perfidious, demonic pretense could not be contrived.
Thanks to Biden, the U.S. will never live down that it is a savage, predatory, genocidal state, enforcing by mass murder of innocent, defenseless women and children, the imposition of a Western colonial regime into a third world country in order to steal their land and the riches beneath it. All the world sees it. None will forget it.
Finally, lest anybody think I am some kind of crypto-conservative, I have voted for every Democratic presidential nominee since George McGovern, in 1972. It was the rank and file Democrats of Biden’s own party who expressed their revulsion of that party and Biden’s handiwork by staying away from the polls and handing Donald Trump the presidency and both houses of Congress.
If ever there was a searing, sanctimonious self-immolation in presidential politics, this was it and the costs are incalculable. The damage will reverberate for decades and might never be recovered.
It will be all but impossible for the Democratic Party to accept responsibility for the catastrophe it has inflicted on America, through its head, Joe Biden, and the complicity of all of the party’s upper echelon. It will, thus, ensure that nothing will change. We desperately need a new party that reflects the interests and needs of the American people and not those of the party’s corporate owners. Change cannot come too soon.
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Trump's Imperialism Atop Western Warmongering
The hypocrisy of the so-called "highly-developed" or "rule-of-law" democracies knows no bounds.
Jan 09, 2025
Conflicts across the world’s regions experienced a further surge in 2024, according to data provided by Armed Conflict Locations & Event Data (ACLED)—an independent, international non-profit organization that collects data on real time on locations, actors, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world. While Ukraine and Gaza are considered the two major global hotspots of conflict, violence increased by 25 percent in 2024 compared to 2023 and conflict levels have experienced a two-fold increase over the past five years, according to ACLED. The intensity and human toll of armed conflicts are also on the rise as more civilians are exposed to violence and the number of actors involved in violence is proliferating.
What is also noteworthy about the data on violence collected by ACLED is that neither democracy nor more development appears to constrain violence. In fact, the data collected by ACLED shows that countries with elections in 2024 experienced much higher rates of violence than countries without elections.
As militarism and warmongering are pushed to new heights, the rhetoric of peace also goes into full swing.
Speaking of electoral democracies, warmongering talk is also sharply on the increase in developed nations, courtesy of major leaders of the western world, and comes with a rising militarism. Mark Rutte, NATO’s recently appointed secretary-general, warned last month that “danger is moving toward us at full speech” and that the west must face the fact that “what is happening in Ukraine could happen here too.” He urged NATO to “shift to a wartime mindset” and implored the citizens of NATO countries to tell their banks and funds that “it is simply unacceptable that they refuse to invest in the defense industry.” UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer has zealously endorsed the widening of NATO’s war against Russia and recently gave Ukraine permission to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles inside Russia. And Joe Biden delivered a warmongering rant at his final address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on September 24, 2024, urging an expansion of alliances against Russia and China and threatening Iran.
Warmongering is a constant element in the never ending obsession of U.S. presidents since the end of the Second World War to pursue a policy of what Andrew Bacevich described a few years ago as “militarized hegemony until the end of time.” Indeed, since the breakout of the Ukraine conflict, Washington has been more than eager to wage a proxy war against Russia while the U.S.-led western military bloc (NATO) has increased its military presence in the eastern part of the Alliance, seeks to expand its southern flank to Africa and looks toward the Indo-Pacific as part of its global approach to security. Meanwhile, all major western states have been behind Israel in its destruction of Gaza, offering the Jewish state an extraordinary level of support (weapons, cash and political support) as it carries out war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Of course, as militarism and warmongering are pushed to new heights, the rhetoric of peace also goes into full swing. Western hypocrisy knows no bounds. Biden spoke of the need for a peaceful world in his final address to the UN although he has done everything in his power to prolong the war in Ukraine and ensure Gaza’s destruction. His administration has vowed to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian and has fueled Israel’s war in Gaza, making the U.S. complicit in war crimes in Gaza.
Geopolitical forecasts for 2025 are grim.
The Biden administration did very little to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine as it totally ignored the question of Ukraine’s membership into NATO and has denied massacres, genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza by the Israel Defense Fores (IDF). In fact, Biden himself called the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “outrageous.” The icing on the cake was when Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, who will go down as the worse Secretary of State since World War II, had the audacity to write in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs that the United States is a country that, unlike Russia and China, seeks a “world where international law, including the core principles of the UN Charter, is upheld, and universal human rights are respected.”
Unsurprisingly, geopolitical forecasts for 2025 are grim. ACLED projects an annual increase of 20 percent in levels of violence in 2025. And then there is Trump’s return to the White House which surely adds another layer of unpredictability to an already volatile and highly dangerous world.
Imperialism is still about world hegemony and a struggle for the control of strategic resources.
Trump’s second administration seems set on advancing a new version of Manifest Destiny with threats of retaking the Panama Canal, which the U.S. ceded to Panama in 1999, forcibly buying Greenland, which is controlled by Denmark, and calling Canada “the 51st State,” a remark he repeated shortly after Justin Trudeau’s resignation.
Imperialism seems to be Trump’s new theme, but his overall vision of power is reminiscent of U.S. imperialist attitudes of the 19th century. He seems to believe that territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States would make the country safer, stronger, and more prosperous. Of course, this could all just be a symptom of Trump’s arrogance and ignorance, but there can be no denying that imperialism is embedded in U.S. political culture. The U.S. has been preparing for a future global conflict for quite some time now, first with Russia and then with China.
Imperialism seems to be Trump’s new theme, but his overall vision of power is reminiscent of U.S. imperialist attitudes of the 19th century.
The U.S. set the theater for a conflict with Russia by orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine, treating the country in turn as a NATO ally in all but name and subsequently engaging in military provocations with the hope of inducing Russia to embark on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which finally occurred on February 24, 2022. And it has been following the same scenario in the Asia-Pacific region by making Taiwan and the South China Sea the fuse for conflict.
The truth is that U.S. imperialism never died. And how could it when the U.S. still maintains around 750 military bases in at least 80 countries and territories (U.S. bases represent over 90 percent of the world’s foreign bases) and spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined, which include major powers such as China, Russia, India, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom? There are more active-duty U.S. Air Force personnel in Britain than in 40 U.S. states.
Of course, imperialism has taken new forms in the 21st century and the dynamics of exploitation have changed. But imperialism is still about world hegemony and a struggle for the control of strategic resources. Military and economic/natural resource interests are interrelated, and the major capitalist states are all caught in an inescapable struggle for survival, power, and prestige. In its turn, the U.S. continues to exercise imperial power by using all its available tools and weapons to make the world conform to its own whims and wants as it tries to shore up its declining economic dominance. But with Trump’s return to the White House, and armed as he appears to be with a new version of Manifest Destiny, U.S. imperialism may become more aggressive and even more dangerous to world peace. If that turns out to be the case, the world is headed for an even more violent future.
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Humanitarian Groups Dread 2025 Aid Shortfall as Trump Term Looms
"At a time when the richest people on Earth can go to space as a tourist," said one advocate, "it is incomprehensible that we as an international community are unable to find the necessary funding to provide displaced families with shelter."
Dec 04, 2024
As the United Nations humanitarian agency and its partner organizations launched the annual Global Humanitarian overview on Wednesday to appeal for aid ahead of 2025, officials shared sobering numbers: 305 million people in dire need of assistance, 190 million people the agencies believe they can help next year if funding demands are met, and $47 billion that's needed to help the people facing the greatest threats.
Tom Fletcher, under-secretary-general at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said governments, particularly those in wealthy countries like the United States, face "a choice" as the world bears witness to starvation, increasingly frequent climate disasters, and other suffering in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
"We can respond to these numbers with generosity, with compassion, with genuine solidarity for those in the most dire need on the planet—or we can carry on," said Fletcher at a news briefing. "We can choose to leave them alone to face these crises. We can choose to let them down."
Fletcher and other humanitarian leaders noted that as of last month, just 43% of the $50 billion funding appeal made for 2024 had been met.
Food assistance in Syria has been cut by 80% as a result of the large funding gap, while protection services in Myanmar and water and sanitation aid in Yemen have also been reduced.
Fletcher said that with another major funding shortfall expected in 2025, OCHA and its partners are expecting to be forced to make "ruthless" decisions to direct aid to those most in need—likely leaving out 115 million people.
Fears that funding needs will be far from met in 2025 are arising partially from the election last month of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who pursued significant cuts during his first term to agencies including the U.N. Population Fund, UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
"America is very much on our minds at the moment, we're facing the election of a number of governments who will be more questioning of what the United Nations does and less ideologically supportive of this humanitarian effort that we've laid out in this report," said Fletcher. "But it's our job to frame the arguments in the right way to land and not to give up. And so I'll head to Washington. I'll spend a lot of time in Washington, I imagine, over the next few months, engaging with the new administration, making the case to them, just as I'll spend a lot of time in other capitals where people might be skeptical about the work that we are doing."
Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) Secretary-General Jan Egeland, who led OCHA for three years, toldAl Jazeera that U.S. funding under the Trump administration is "a tremendous question mark."
"Should the U.S. administration cut its humanitarian funding, it could be more complex to fill the gap of growing needs," said Egeland.
The U.S. is the largest humanitarian donor in the world, contributing $10 billion last year—but its donations pale in comparison to its military spending, which was budgeted at more than $841 billion in 2024, and the earnings of its top corporations.
As NRC noted, Facebook parent company Meta earned $47.4 billion—about the same amount humanitarian agencies are requesting this year—before income taxes in 2023.
Without naming billionaire SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—a Trump ally and megadonor who's expected to have a role in his new administration—Camilla Waszink, director of partnership and policy at NRC, called out the widening gap between the world's richest people and those in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.
"At a time when the richest people on Earth can go to space as a tourist and trillions of U.S. dollars are used annually on global military expenditure, it is incomprehensible that we as an international community are unable to find the necessary funding to provide displaced families with shelter and prevent children from dying of hunger," said Waszink. "There is an urgent need for a revamp of global solidarity. Existing donor countries must ensure assistance keeps pace with needs and inflation, and emerging economies should compete to become among the most generous donors in the same way they compete to host expensive international sports events."
"It is devastating to know that millions of people in need will not receive necessary assistance next year because of the growing lack of funding for the humanitarian response. With a record number of conflicts ongoing, donors are cutting aid budgets that displaced and conflict-affected people rely on to survive," she added. "Conflicts and a blatant disregard for protection of civilians are driving massive humanitarian needs. It is essential that donors provide funding, but they must also invest in ending conflicts, bringing violations to a halt and preventing new needs from developing."
Fletcher noted that in addition to conflicts like Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the civil war in Sudan, the climate crisis is a major driver of growing humanitarian needs.
"2024 will be the hottest year on record," said Fletcher. "Presumably 2025 will then be the hottest year on record. Floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires affecting millions. We're on the brink of surpassing the 1.5°C in warming, and that will hit hardest in the countries that have actually contributed least to climate change. It wipes out food systems. It wipes out livelihoods, it forces communities to move from their homes and land. Drought has caused 65% of agricultural economic damage over the last 15 years, worsening food insecurity."
In conflict zones and in regions affected by the climate emergency, said Fletcher, "it's our mission to do more."
"My people are desperate to get out there and deliver because they really are on the frontline," he said. "They can see what is needed, but we need these resources. That's our call to action. And we also need the world to do more. Those with power to do more—to challenge this era of impunity and to challenge this era of indifference."
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