America Has a Leadership Problem.
Among both Democrats and Republicans, no single leader seems credible in uniting the nation.
During his arrival on Israeli soil on July 14, 2022, as part of his Middle Eastern tour, Joe Biden stumbled over words again. Referring to the extermination of 6 million European Jews during the Second World War, the American president spoke to “continue to bear witness, to keep alive the truth and honor of the Holocaust” before correcting himself to say “horror of the Holocaust”.
In America, social networks went crazy over this new gaffe. Like Elon Musk, many Republican activists have called on Joe Biden to resign. In their eyes, the president, suffering from senility, is no longer able to properly govern the world's leading economic and military power.
Stumbling over words is not a bar to assuming the highest office of a state. There is undoubtedly some fatigue. That is not enough to invalidate a strategy. The president was successful on his trip to the Middle East, where he had to reassure America's major allies in the region (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman) about security issues, and convince Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production.
In terms of international strategy, Joe Biden has made two important mistakes:
The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The promise, two months before the Russian invasion, not to send American soldiers to Ukraine (the basis of the strategy being to hide one's intentions from one's opponent).
However, he has managed rather well the windfall effect created by the Russian aggression in Ukraine, which has allowed America to dramatically increase its political, military, and economic vassalization of a very destabilized Europe. In the face of the Chinese, the president has also succeeded in strengthening America's ties with Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
But, indeed, Joe Biden seems physically quite fragile to give back to the American nation the leadership he promised during his election campaign. In any case, it does not seem reasonable that the American president, now 79 years old, should run for a second term, which would begin in January 2025.
So, everyone is wondering who would be the best American leader to replace Joe Biden at the head of the United States. The problem is that there is no obvious name. America has not had such a deficit of credible leaders since the Great Depression of 1929.
A credible leader is a man or woman who can bring the American nation together. Not since the Civil War has it been so divided. Its highest institutions are no longer sacred. A riot of Trumpist Republican extremists invaded Congress on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent it from validating the election of Joe Biden as president. The majority of the Republican Party believes - against all evidence - that the November 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud.
On the other side of the aisle, Democratic activists are seeking to physically attack some of the Supreme Court justices since the Court's June 24, 2022 ruling gave the 50 states of the union the freedom to allow or ban abortion in their jurisdictions.
The Democratic Party is failing to generate great potential leaders because it is itself so divided. A cultural divide has been created by wokism. This ideology, which combines an obsession with minority rights and immigrationism, is increasingly rejected by the working class, which is gradually embracing Trumpism.
America being a fundamentally conservative nation, a Democrat can only win the presidential election if he follows a centrist line. Vice President Kamala Harris, who has disappointed many, is certainly not in a position to embody charismatic centrism, as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama did.
The Republican Party is also divided. But here the divide is geopolitical, not cultural. As the last vote in Congress on Ukraine showed, the America First doctrine still permeates the party. Many Republicans do not feel concerned by this war, which they believe is between two equally corrupt and oligarchic Slavic states. They would prefer American foreign policy to focus on the Chinese challenge in the Pacific.
Are voters ready to put Trump back in charge of America, or to put the Trumpist Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida, in charge? This is no longer considered impossible. This potential weakening of the transatlantic link is certainly being watched with relish by those two leaders not subject to the vagaries of elections, Vladimir Putin and his friend Xi Jinping ...
Some reading
The Two Faces of Joe Biden — Effective in International Politics, Self-Effacing in America. The situation is becoming more and more worrisome for Biden as the Midterms take place in November.