Four years of Biden have left the world in flames

President Joe Biden’s abject failure to provide effective global leadership is well illustrated by the fact that even as his time in the White House is ending, the US is scrambling more forces to the Middle East.

The Pentagon has announced that extra troops are being deployed to the region, while America’s naval presence is to be augmented by the arrival of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, which left port in Virginia on Monday accompanied by two destroyers and a cruiser.

With the recent dramatic escalation in hostilities between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist movement threatening to spread into a major Middle Eastern war, the deployment of the new naval battlegroup means the US will soon have two carriers operating in the region, with the USS Abraham Lincoln currently conducting operations in the Gulf of Oman.

A significant factor in the upsurge in violence has been the malevolent role Iran has played. This includes providing Hamas with the funding and military support that enabled it to conduct the worst terrorist outrage in Israel’s history and providing Hezbollah with the missiles that are now being fired at Israel on a daily basis.

Yet, rather than holding Tehran to account for establishing its network of Islamist terror groups – the so-called “axis of resistance” – Biden has bent over backwards to revive the flawed Iranian nuclear deal.

The Biden administration, moreover, has pursued this hopeless quest at the expense of maintaining relations with long-standing US allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, which opposed the original deal negotiated by former US president Barack Obama.

This has led to a precipitous decline in Washington’s influence, with the Saudis pivoting towards rivals such as Russia and China, while Biden’s fraught relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been instrumental in frustrating US efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.

Thanks to his own self-inflicted setbacks, Biden now faces the prospect of leaving the White House having failed to secure the Gaza ceasefire deal in which his administration has invested so much political capital. Instead he finds himself overseeing the largest American military build-up in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq, with the entire region teetering on the verge of collapse.

This disastrous state of affairs certainly stands in stark contrast to the US president’s valedictory address to the United Nations General Assembly this week, when Biden had the audacity to suggest his presidency had succeeded in re-establishing America’s leadership role on the world stage following the “crisis and uncertainty” he inherited when he took office.

Biden was primarily referring to the Covid pandemic and the aftermath of the Capitol riots, rather than the altogether different challenges posed by hostile states such as Iran, Russia and China.

As with the rest of the world, Biden is right to say that “Covid no longer controls our lives”. But the suggestion that he has restored Washington’s leadership role is nothing short of delusional.

Conveniently overlooking his hapless track record in the Middle East, Biden used his address to highlight the key role his administration had played in ensuring the survival of Ukraine following Russia’s unprovoked invasion in February 2022.

“At my direction, America stepped into the breach,” he declared. As a result, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “core aim” to conquer Ukraine had failed.

Ukraine may have survived Russia’s onslaught, but Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is in the US lobbying Washington, might take a different view. Ukraine’s survival has been achieved despite Biden’s constant dithering on providing military support for Kyiv.

For, rather than providing unequivocal support, Biden has often appeared more concerned not to provoke Putin. This has delayed the provision of vital equipment, and resulted in tight restrictions on the use of what has been supplied.

One of Zelensky’s key aims during his US visit, indeed, is to persuade the White House to give authorisation for Ukraine to use long-range missiles against targets within Russia.

In the meantime, Russia continues to make dogged progress along Ukraine’s eastern front, raising serious concerns in Kyiv.

It is debatable, of course, whether Putin would even have dared to invade Ukraine had it not been for Biden’s disastrous handling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 – another issue conveniently overlooked in his UN address – which left the indelible impression of a great power in terminal decline. Within weeks of this humiliating debacle, we now know, Putin gave the mobilisation orders for the Russian military to prepare to invade Ukraine.

Biden’s presidency has not restored America’s global leadership, as the president claimed at the UN. It has been an unmitigated disaster, and he will leave office with the world in a far more dangerous state than when he entered the White House.