'A Dying Empire Led by Bad People'

Joe Biden is stuck in (an imagined) 20th century, his country and the world have moved on

Joe Biden’s visit to Normandy last week reminded me of a conversation I’d had in the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I was a guest expert on some radio talk show, on which I was booked by the good people at TIME’s p.r department, where the host was ranting about France’s ostensible “betrayal” for quite sensibly opposing what was predictably going to be a(nother) disastrous U.S. misadventure.

“If it wasn’t for us,” the host said of the French, “they’d be speaking German now!”

Russian, I corrected him. I think you mean they’d be speaking Russian now.

(Silence, imagined sound of jaw dropping…)

“What?! You mean… No! You don’t mean you think the Russians would have beaten Hitler without us?!!”

Yes I do, because they effectively did.

"What?!!! No, you can’t be serious!”

As any decent history of WW2 would confirm, more than a year before D-Day the Red Army had broken the back of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. And by the time the U.S., British and Canadian troops landed in France to open a second front, Hitler’s forces had been put to the sword by the Soviets and were in an uninterrupted retreat that ended less than a year later in Berlin. The numbers tell the story: At no point after the summer of 1941 — even after the D-Day invasion — did the Soviets face less than 80% of the Nazi military regime.

So, while the New York Times again last week proclaimed D-Day “the pivotal battle” of WW2, in reality the second front opened by the Americans with the Brits and Canadians in tow was just that — a second front, rather than the primary one. As the late, great Mike Davis wrote in a piece he called “Saving Private Ivan”:

This "great military earthquake", as the historian John Erickson called [the Red Army’s summer 1944 offensive, Operation Bagration] , finally stopped in the suburbs of Warsaw as Hitler rushed elite reserves from western Europe to stem the Red tide in the east. As a result, American and British troops fighting in Normandy would not have to face the best-equipped Panzer divisions.

But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.

By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.

Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 "Ivans" died for every "Private Ryan". Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.

Don’t tell that to the U.S. media commemorating the day they imagine America saved the world. Or to Joe Biden, who went to Normandy to mark the 80th anniversary of a battle that occurred months before his fourth birthday, hoping to deliver what a “Reaganesque” speech to rally allies foreign and domestic behind his reelection and his preferred wars.

Biden appears to live in a 20th century imaginary in which the U.S. leads a global crusade to defend and advance democracy and freedom against tyranny. Of course, most of the world has long seen through the multiple fictions underlying that rhetoric, and even many of those he counts in his “democracy” column prefer non-alignment, working with the U.S. as well as with China and Russia as circumstances and national interests demand. Biden’s Manichean Cold War sensibility has fewer and fewer takers in the 21st Century — and Washington’s enabling of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has rendered hollow and cynical any U.S. claim to the moral and even the legal high ground, internationally.

As Nigerian writer Chris Ngwodo writes in his excellent piece offering an “African View of Israel’s War in Gaza”

It is not merely the innocents of Palestine that are dying in Gaza. We also face the demise of the certitudes that have been the normative tapestry of the world order for almost a century. Israel, long indemnified against censure by its invocation of the Holocaust, and its casual weaponization of charges of antisemitism against any criticism of its policies, can no longer hide its extremism towards Palestinians.  

… The ongoing assault on Gaza – the latest and the harshest in a long series of punitive expeditions against the Palestinians - purportedly in a bid to destroy Hamas – has exposed the colonial nature of the occupation... It is also clear that Israel’s relentless prosecution of atrocity and its defiance of international law could not have been possible without the complicity of its Western supporters. Whatever assumptions of Western moral legitimacy, let alone superiority, that somehow survived the catastrophic war-profiteering frauds of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, they are now coming to a gruesome end in Gaza. The haste with which France and Germany swept to Israel’s defense at the ICJ merely replicated the litany of Euro-American vetoes of any attempt to censure Israel at the United Nations and Israel’s capture of mainstream political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.  

Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi ever did in Benghazi. In that case, it was the threat of a looming massacre that supposedly triggered a NATO intervention in 2011, ostensibly to protect the civilian population but which rapidly morphed into a regime change operation that killed Gaddafi, dismembered Libya and destabilized the Sahel. Regardless, Israel’s Western backers have continued to ply it with weapons and to defend its right to “self-defense.” The contradictions are self-evident. The rest of the world, watching and learning from the carnage in Gaza, will no longer acquiesce to the trademarks of Western sanctimony – hypocritical double standards and selective invocations of international law…

The tragedy unfolding in Gaza has also exposed the inadequacy of the post-1945 international system, the decaying foundations of Euro-Atlantic dominance and colonialities that have passed their sell-by dates.  

Netanyahu seems aware that the global consensus won’t tolerate Israel’s racist criminality. That’s why appeals constantly to “the civilized world”, meaning the same Euro-Atlantic colonial/neocolonial powers Ngwodo notes carry diminished influence beyond their own self-serving circles.

Of course, Biden’s crusade for democracy today may be driven predominantly by domestic political concerns, for which the Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided a convenient foil. Biden’s reaches for the Cold War packaging in hopes of restoring that era’s more disciplined governing consensus in Washington, when “partisanship ended at the water’s edge” and the President was commonly referred to as “the commander in chief” and “leader of the free world”. His fantasy of restoring ‘civility’ and consensus on Capitol Hill simply highlighted his inability to comprehend the nature of the changes that had taken root in the U.S. system in his dotage.   

“Our democracy” as a term of identity for the U.S. system is rooted in the Cold War moment that followed WW2. America was not exactly a democracy at the time, nor was its conflict with the Soviet Union a clash of “democracy vs. authoritarianism” — the majority of U.S. Cold War allies were anticommunist dictatorships, after all. But Cold War domestic political imperatives opened the way for progress (through bitter struggle) towards greater political rights — fear of the turbulence created by Black grievances weakening America on the home front certainly reinforced the incentives for the U.S. system to respond more positively to Civil Rights demands, for example. 

Cold War domestic governance also valorized the principle of bipartisanship — on the basis of a national-security consensus — in domestic governance. The GOP’s nationalist turn towards scorched-earth partisanship was visible within three years of the collapse of the USSR – Newt Gingrich set the scene for Trump who buried what was left of the Cold War spirit, even if GW Bush’s “war on terror” had briefly, disastrously, resurrected a bipartisan national-security consensus. A key reason the Democratic Party establishment is unable to grasp, much less respond effectively, to today’s crisis, is, as Jeet Heer noted, its fatal addiction to the illusions of Cold War liberalism.

The electorate, of course, doesn’t seem to share that addiction. That much was clear when Barack Obama thwarted the 2008 anointing of Cold War liberal Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party candidate — by running as an anti-Iraq War insurgent. Then, eight years later, Donald Trump did the same to the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton: He thrashed Jeb Bush, while castigating the Washington foreign policy establishment for the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Today, the smart money would bet against Biden rallying young voters by standing on the beaches of Normandy and making speeches about democracy. A recent opinion study reported by Semafor had some shocking news for the Democratic Party establishment, which might be hoping young voters will be moved to action by the President’s calls to arms:

Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor.

The sour mood points to potential trouble for Joe Biden, who is struggling with Gen Z and younger Millennials in polls compared with 2020, and needs to convince them he can be relied on to improve their lives.

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

…“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”