resident Joe Biden makes his fourth time and final speech to the UN General Assembly as president of the United States. Picture: UN Photo
By Wesley Seale
Chatting with cousins about the upcoming United States presidential elections, one opined that probably for the first time in the history of US presidential elections, at least in the last century, neither candidate from the two major parties were strong.
In an imperial world what happens in the US affects all of us.
It is for this reason, for example, why Chinese postgraduate students in international relations spend six months studying US foreign policy.
But these presidential elections personify the dearth of American leadership in orthodoxy and pragmatism.
The lack in American leadership was exemplified again this week with US president, Joe Biden’s, address to the 79th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
For example, in the same context three years ago, the US president had said of the Palestinian question:
“I continue to believe that a two-state solution is the best way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic state living in peace alongside a viable, sovereign, and democratic Palestinian state.
“We’re a long way from that goal at this moment, but we must never allow ourselves to give up on the possibility of progress.”
Three years later and with Biden’s swansong at UNGA, the world remains “a long way from that goal,” and there has been literally no “progress” at all.
In fact today the entire Middle East region is worse off than it was three years ago and while Biden may have spoken out against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, as he mentioned in his UNGA speech, he fails to speak out against apartheid in Israel today.
Much attention by Biden and his administration has been paid to the ‘diplomatic solution’ to the genocide in Gaza and attacks on Lebanon.
Yet it is the same administration that deters conducive conditions for those diplomatic efforts.
The only decision Biden could praise about his administration’s foreign policy was pulling out of Afghanistan nonetheless morally they had no choice but to withdraw.
Still, the epitome of American lack of leadership lies in successive administrations’, since the Second World War, determination to abandon the founding principles of American foreign policy.
It was no one less than George Washington who in his 1796 farewell address to Congress warned his nation of the moral duty not to form “permanent” alliances with any country for any cause.
It would be foolish, suggested Washington, “to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her [European] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
“Our detached and distant situation,” continued America’s founding father, “invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”
Washington’s world views on foreign policy would be cemented less than three decades later when his successor as US president, James Monroe, articulated the Monroe Doctrine.
The doctrine, though at times narrowly defined as prohibiting interference by European powers in the domestic affairs of the Americas, would be described holistically by Monroe’s secretary of state at the time and later a US president himself, John Quincy Adams.
Adams had said: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
“But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
“She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
“She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
In other words, America leads when it minds its own business and stops playing policeman in the world.
The US would therefore have done well if it had stuck to the policies of the settler-colonialists Washington, Monroe and Adams and formed no permanent alliances with Israel and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato).
If anything, this is umbilical cord between the US and Israel: that they are both born from settler colonialism and today Israel simply takes its cue from the US in attempting to annihilate the people indigenous to that soil, the Palestinians, as had happened in the US three centuries ago with the genocide of the people indigenous to North America.
The reality is that in today’s world and with the Biden administration the centre, the UN, has simply not held.
Anarchy is being loosened upon the Middle East region while the rogue state of Israel, under Bibi Netanyahu, continues to inflict all-out war in the region.
According to ‘Biden-doctrine’, everybody else must be held accountable for their actions in the region and act with restraint while Israel acts with impunity and moves on to destroy Lebanon as it has destroyed Gaza.
According to Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the UN is paralysed, crises are piling up one after the other while world leaders are “going around in circles”.
Yet the description of the president of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, best describes what is happening in the world when he insisted that “in Gaza, not only are children dying, but also the United Nations system. The values the West claims to defend are dying, the truth is dying, and the hopes of humanity to live in a more just world are dying – one by one.”
Nearly four years of a Biden administration, the US has allowed this dying.
In the face of Netanyahu’s tyranny and brutal oppression of not only Israelis, Palestinians and all in the Middle East, the US has, in the words of Adams, given its “heart, her benedictions and her prayers.”
As we in the rest of the global community prepare for a post-America world, the words of the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, also at this year’s UNGA, gives the most hope:
“…we confront a world in trouble. But the good news is that we can do something about it…step by step, solution by solution, we can re-build trust and faith in one another, and in what we can accomplish through collaboration and solidarity.”
A better world, in which the outcomes of a US presidential election do not matter, is possible.
* Dr Wesley Seale has a PhD in international relations.
** The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media