As Joe Biden enters the last year of his term as president, it’s hard to remember how important his defeat of Donald Trump seemed four years ago. Trump’s presidency and the way it ended with insurrection in the country’s capital suggested that America, and not just America, had dodged a bullet. As Indians had learnt by then, it is consecutive terms in office that give right-wing majoritarians the license to consolidate their gains and the time to reduce republican institutions like the courts and the apparatus of law and order to instruments of their will.
Another Trump term threatened to deliver Amerika and no democrat anywhere in the world could have wished for that. The cynicism about America’s sense of itself as an exceptional nation, as a beacon of democracy, was dissolved in the relief that a conventional Beltway ancient had seen off this lewd conductor of America’s basest tunes. I remember thinking at the time that to lose the United States of America to Trump and the Proud Boys would enthrone reaction worldwide. Foreigners had a stake in the election simply because we were part of the main and would, therefore, be diminished by the triumph of Trump.
In Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation trilogy, an aberrant political figure called the Mule disrupts the predicted course of a galactic empire’s decline. Hari Seldon, the genius who had charted the future history of the empire, had failed to account for the disruption that a charismatic maverick could cause. In this world, we made the opposite mistake; we assumed that the displacement of a charismatic maverick would return the world to normal, forgetting that successful mavericks embody large shifts in geopolitics and popular opinion and feeling.
Trump’s replacement by Biden was not a restoration. Many of Trump’s signature initiatives were furthered by Biden’s administration. Having pledged to stop building Trump’s wall on the US’s southern border, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, as recently as this October, posted a notice waiving federal laws intended to protect wildlife and the environment to help build more than a dozen miles of wall in Texas on the US-Mexico border. There is a very real strength of feeling against illegal migration that Trump tapped into during his term and Biden has prudently done little to challenge it.
Similarly, Trump happened to give political voice to the unease the US had begun to feel with an assertive China, challenging its economic and geopolitical status as the world’s hegemon. He did this with his characteristic bellicosity but the sanctions he put in place to contain China’s economic and technological advancement have been adopted and extended by Biden. AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom and the US, aimed at containing China in the Pacific, was founded on Biden’s watch.
It isn’t surprising that foundational elements of US foreign policy are backed by bipartisan consensus. The reason I mention the continuities between Trump’s administration and Biden’s is that Biden’s advocates tend to represent him as the Anti-Trump. Biden himself encourages this identification. He recently let it be known that he might not have stood for re-election if Trump hadn’t been a certainty for the Republican ticket.
It is important to acknowledge that Biden’s win bought America’s political centre time to shore up its defences against the nativist populism that brought him to power. The travel ban that Trump imposed on mainly Muslim countries which he himself called the ‘Muslim ban’ was repealed by Biden almost as soon as he took office. It was hard to imagine a Biden administration passing an executive order called ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’. It’s even harder to imagine Biden refusing to concede an election defeat, throwing a hissy fit and encouraging right-wing lumpen to storm the Capitol. But for the non-Western world, it increasingly seems that the difference between Trump and Biden is aesthetic, not substantive.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Biden’s enthusiastic sponsorship of Trump’s Abraham Accords, an initiative intended to normalise relations between Israel and the Arab world’s petrostates and finesse the Palestine problem by simply ignoring it. The decision to transfer the US embassy to Jerusalem with its attendant symbolism was affirmed and Trump’s policy of sidelining the Palestinians and shelving the peace process enthusiastically embraced.
The behaviour of the Biden administration ever since Gaza blew up in its face in October with Hamas’s monstrous slaughter and rape of civilians on the 7th and Israel’s genocidal violence thereafter has been a revelation. It wasn’t Biden’s embrace of Israel and Binyamin Netanyahu in the immediate aftermath of October 7 that was startling. Biden has been a perfervid supporter of Israel from the time he was a young thirty-two-year-old senator. Nor was it surprising that Biden endorsed Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. In all his time in American politics, there’s never been a war involving an American ally that he hasn’t supported. No, what has astonished even cynical critics of America’s military-industrial complex has been Biden’s enthusiasm for arming Israel, giving it carte blanche and enabling, proportionate to Gaza’s population, the most indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, women and children this century.
After over twenty thousand Palestinian deaths, the unhousing of Gaza’s population, and the near-complete destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, Biden’s national security adviser has indicated that he anticipates months of war. Biden has twice used the US veto to block ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council. Biden’s principal Western allies, the UK and Germany, have, if anything, been even less moved by Palestinian suffering. Germany has launched a kulturkampf against every writer, artist or citizen who has dared to criticise Israel.
Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ begins to seem less of an aberration when set against Biden’s utter indifference to the pulverisation of Gaza. Biden has acknowledged in statements that Israel’s assault on Gaza has been indiscriminate while simultaneously rushing weaponry to the Israel Defense Forces using emergency provisions. Given the West’s eloquent concern for civilian life in the Ukrainian conflict, it’s impossible not to read in this indifference to Palestinian deaths the belief that Muslim lives come cheap.
The containment of China, the defence of Ukraine and the destruction of Gaza/Palestine — there is a pattern here. The West is circling its wagons and its humanitarian concern is reserved for those who it calls its own or for those who have been granted honorary membership of this tightly-drawn circle. Like Ukraine or Israel. In Europe, this sense of siege is part of a great fear, a building panic about non-white immigration as climate change and famines and wars set people on the move. Europe’s centre-left leaders are re-inventing themselves as anti-immigration hawks. In Germany, the startling hostility of Green Party leaders towards any sign of solidarity with Palestine is patently driven by a suspicion of Germany’s Muslim citizens, the fear of an enemy within.
For the State apparatuses headed by Sunak, Biden and Scholz, Israel’s ‘predicament’ is a glimpse of a possible future: the West trying to defend its integrity from enemies without and within. One way of understanding Israel’s war in Gaza and the unqualified support given to it by the US, the UK and Germany is to see it as a real life war game, a test case to see how far the West can go in defending its interests and its own. Gaza is a dry run, a lecture demonstration and a punishment beating, all in one. For those of us outside the West, the lesson is that we are, whether we like it or not, on Gaza’s side — not Israel’s — of this great divide between the West and the Rest. For our sector of the world, it makes no difference whether the 48th president of the US is Biden or Trump.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
