Four years ago, the election of Joe Biden as America’s commander-in-chief was celebrated by the left-wing press as the return of sanity to the White House. Trump, it was broadly claimed by the professional commentariat, had placed the world a step away from World War III. The old establishment, aptly personified by a geriatric Biden, would now use its capital of experience to rebuild global tranquility.

The opposite happened—and dramatically so. Instead of a world pacified under the torch of Washington’s leadership, Biden’s inept presidency now appears to have been the final nail in the coffin of the Pax Americana. If the Democrats had wished to preserve the so-called ‘rules-based international order’—that is, the hegemony of the United States under the ideological cloak of liberal internationalism—they can, rather, pride themselves in accelerating its demise. Even the fiercest opponent of the Afghanistan war—as was this writer—will probably recognise that Biden’s disgraceful, Saigon-like evacuation of Kabul did little to reassure the world of the permanence of American power. 

That was the harbinger of disasters to come: a resurgent Russia soon saw an opening to act on its grievances in Ukraine; Beijing has now made its regular sea-and-air blockades of Formosa the new status quo; Hamas struck in Israel in October 2023, as have, repeatedly afterwards, Iran’s long-range missile forces; the Red Sea remains blocked by the Tehran-aligned Houthis, with the U.S. Navy apparently unable to stop them. With Ukraine’s defeat in the battlefield looming ominously near, Biden upped the ante by allowing Kyiv to hit internationally recognised, sovereign Russian territory with U.S.-made missiles—thus putting an already chaotic world one step closer to nuclear armageddon. Trump’s arrival at the White House can’t come soon enough.

Of course, not all of the world’s recent catastrophes can fairly be blamed on Biden and his clumsy entourage. Ultimately, the global order is determined by the balance of power, and that balance had been shifting against the West—and, crucially, America—long before the Democrats won the 2020 election. Back in the 1950s, the U.S. alone was responsible for about half of the world’s entire industrial output; today, China is the world’s first, at around 31% of all manufacturing, and the U.S. is second, with 15%. The People’s Republic is impatiently engaged in the largest naval buildup since the days of Gorshkov and Tirpitz, building the equivalent of Britain’s Royal Navy every 12 months. The nation’s shipyards produce 51% of all merchant shipping in the world; the U.S. produces 0.1%. In 2023, China’s scientists registered almost two million patents. America’s were second, with just over half a million. Indeed, it would have been unthinkable, just twenty years ago, that Europe would soon be begging the Chinese for technology transfers rather than the other way around—yet, as The Financial Times recently reported, that is exactly where we are today. Rumors of Russia’s economic death, too, have been greatly exaggerated—despite worries with inflation, the country’s economy has performed strongly in recent years and will likely achieve a growth rate of over 4% this year.