Historians of liberal democracy and the peaceful, globalized world — where the rule of law exists, where people are free to choose their destiny and protected by a system of social services — will remember Joe Biden as the adult who finally entered the room to clean up and as best American President since Harry S. Truman for all he did in defense of the free world.
Biden has twice already saved American democracy, and with it the West, by stopping putschist Donald Trump first in the 2020 presidential election and then in this November’s midterm elections. In a climate of race relations that has returned incandescent, no other politician could have won over so many white voters and so many black voters at the same time. Biden succeeded.
Sure, he’s disastrously handled the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he’s established a new foreign policy principle with which America has overcome the Democratic messianism of the Clinton-Bush era, Obama’s flagging response, and Trump’s isolationism.
The Biden Doctrine, as George Packer explained in the Atlantic, is a foreign policy always based on liberal values, but decidedly more persuasive abroad and more acceptable domestically (hence the withdrawal from Afghanistan). A foreign policy that is preventing the United States from another traditional shift between a grandiose and a depressing approach to world affairs.
Biden wants to strengthen liberal democracy where it exists and, if necessary, defend it with weapons against foreign aggression. Where a liberal system does not exist, however, Biden offers support for democratic movements but is careful to preserve their autonomy and legitimacy.
In short, Packer summarizes, the Biden Doctrine dictates that American politics be aligned with the universal desire for liberty, without cultivating the illusion that it can easily be promoted.
So Biden saved Ukraine and Europe and will continue to do so until Vladimir Putin is defeated and has not tried to put his hat on the Iranian insurgency.
Thanks to the Biden Doctrine, we realized that the news of the overthrow of liberal democracy in favor of authoritarian and illiberal regimes was grossly exaggerated.
Instead, while Joe Biden is saving democracy in America and the world, Italy is fueling vile political and television chatter about handing over Ukraine to Russian rapists, silencing Iran’s freedom revolution, and focusing on a pathetic political debate about the imaginative mistakes of neoliberalism (a term that is a lazy translation from the English “neoliberalism”, which doesn’t make sense in Italian though because, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, we’ve been using the word “liberismo” to distinguish it from for about a century already “Liberalism”) .
An even more surreal debate when it is explained that the crisis of the democratic left and the alleged corruption crimes of some representatives of the radical left stem from a Florentine Third Way conference (between social democracy and liberalism) in 1999. . All this without considering the logical error of ascribing a phantom indulging in “neoliberalism” to those who wanted to find precisely an alternative route to both public interventionism and the free hand of the market.
But this is the level of Italian public discourse: the liberal-democratic left is considered neoliberal and must purify sin; Italian governments are considered neoliberal and no one can laugh; the regime of the Iranian ayatollahs is also neoliberal; and finally, Putin had no intention of invading Ukraine, while the warmongers, as we know, are the Ukrainians and their Jewish and Nazi President, plus other jokes of similar depth and accuracy.
As the serious intellectual world debates the liberal-democratic rebirth thanks to Biden, Adam Smith is re-examined and revealed that his popular image as a champion of American capitalism and the free market is actually a historical invention (“Adam Smith’s America” by Glory M. Liu: Even Adam Smith wasn’t a neoliberal! Stuff to blow up Twitter), let’s return to talk about the rebirth of liberalism (“Liberalism and its discontents” by Francis Fukuyama) and political culture magazines like the Atlantic and Liberties spread ideas separate from the trash.
The fabulous people of Ukraine and the brave Iranian rioters are the most relevant people of 2022, but old Joe Biden is the most relevant person of the last two years.
Biden “made America great again,” made America a great country again, without the moral imperative to export freedom everywhere, but reminding everyone that if America stops doing America, the world is a less livable place.