Joe Biden has now presided over the Great Fracture, which has essentially ended the "global world," thus putting the kibosh on the Davos Great Reset and many other grand plans. "Russia’s war on Ukraine split the world into two camps, nations that condemned Vladimir Putin’s invasion and those that did not. In the years since, the fallout has shifted the flow of investment, with money veering away from countries that chose not to oppose the Kremlin to those that did." The once unipolar world is fractured -- and is still fracturing -- along two fault lines: the line dividing the Great Powers, Russia, the West and China; and the line of civilizations, with Islam on one side and the West on the other. Biden, now over 80, cannot hope to retrieve things in an Obama fourth term.
What Obama's third term achieved was to squander the entire legacy of the Reagan years. The money and power intended to finance the big mansion of history have gone the way of the fortunes of Sam Bankman-Fried and Bernie Madoff. Poof. Washington is in damage control mode. The grand plan to reinvent civilization has been replaced by the more modest hope that Biden may yet avoid WW3. Perhaps nothing captured the tragic absurdity of the present situation more vividly than the AP headline, "Fights erupt outside Museum of Tolerance after screening of film on Hamas." The progresssive coalition is literally at each other's throats.
Obama's vision was beautiful as long as it was untested. Once its construction was actually attempted it collapsed in a heap of ruins, as multicultural coalitions diverged toward disparate cultural norms. There wasn't enough money or hatred of a shared enemy to keep it together. The question is no longer whether the edifice can be repaired but whether work on it can profitably continue. "The economic sanctions imposed by Western countries on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine are unprecedented in scope and scale. The competition between the United States and China, along with the increasing national support for industries considered strategically important, have led to an assessment suggesting the onset of a period characterized by reduced global interconnectedness."
Obama. to be fair, represented an era. The flaws in his vision represent not personal shortcomings but the defects of a worldview, still popular in academia to this day. Wokeism, Transgenderism, and Effective Altruism are all like the dead hand of an ancient curse, conjured in a now vanished world, that once sought to transform everything along the lines of what might be called anticolonial worldmaking. Ironically, this resulted in new wave of trendy cultural imperialism, which "systematically attempted to impose socially liberal policies on economically developing nations, without considering those countries’ traditional cultures and religious beliefs." The old colonialism was replaced by a new missionary impulse dutifully carried forward by Joe Biden and his staff.
Take the White House’s "National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality" ... a priority of the Biden administration will be to push for “gender equity” at home and abroad ... In the same vein, the State Department publicly celebrates the postmodern dogma of gender fluidity. It promoted “International Pronoun Day” by advocating for “pronoun proficiency” and explaining “why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.” The U.S. now issues passports allowing citizens to identify their sex as they wish, including “an X gender marker for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming persons.
Washington did not give up trying to remake the world. It merely changed the template according to which it would remold humanity. "Instead of defending liberty, the U.S. exports eccentric ideas from niche groups in American universities and online." Perhaps the single most ambitious element of the new worldmaking was Climate Change. The Obama Foundation called the Paris Agreement the "best possible shot to save the one planet we've got." Only slightly less ambitious was Obama's nuclear deal with Iran "that [would] ensure Iran's nuclear program is and remains exclusively peaceful." There was only one problem with this edifice: reality rejected it.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has all but upended the Climate Change plan. As the British think tank Chatham House put it, "the war has led to unprecedented volatility in global food prices, increasing hunger and deprivation in other parts of the world. It has also upended global energy politics, with short-term decisions by policymakers increasing the risk of new carbon emissions being locked in for the long term." The world, as it turned out, couldn't live without "fossil fuels."
Beyond its immediate impact on the battlefield and in the cities of Ukraine, the war is affecting global energy politics in ways that will likely reverberate for decades. The war has served as a ‘clarifying moment’ that has exposed the downsides of global interdependencies, particularly for countries like Germany whose economic model relied on low-cost sources of Russian gas. Indeed, it has made the Russian energy resources that much of Europe depended on not only unreliable but unwelcome. Global prices were high before the invasion due to a mismatch of supply and demand, but the actions of Russia made a difficult situation worse. In 2021, Russia was responsible for about 12 per cent of global energy production. It was a major exporter of fossil fuels, accounting (by volume) for around 5.5 per cent of global coal production, 11 per cent of global oil production and 17 per cent of the global gas supply in 2021.28 The European Union (EU) was particularly dependent on Russian piped gas.
Trying to buy off Iran proved an even worse idea. Biden's attempt to revive his former boss' plan in 2020 resulted in an unmitigated disaster. The six-billion-dollar sweetener provided to Tehran just before its Hamas militia launched a surprise attack in Israel outraged even Democrats, forcing Biden to stop payment. The New York Times wrote, "The move comes after harsh criticism that the Biden administration had given Iran a vast sum that freed up other funds for Tehran to provide support to Hamas."
What occurred was that the historical trends went in a direction opposite from Obama's world view in 2016. It zigged when he zagged and reality collided with fantasy. The next few years will have to be spent in damage control, but ultimately the grand strategy that undergirded Obama's worldmaking has to be abandoned. We might survive his Third Term but the Fourth may prove a vision too far.
