As the Daily Beast Website purports, we don’t know exactly who won, but there are already a couple of losers in the U.S. midterm elections.
There was no red wave in the U.S. elections; the leader of the free world is not a lame duck, so he is free to manipulate the world system to entrench his country’s global leadership position. This is one of the facts we know. Another thing we know is that we owe this to none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Thanks to him, Americans approved President Joe Biden’s new declaration of global hegemony.
Yes, it is a fact that U.S. voters rarely act with international relations in mind; these midterm polls, in particular, came loaded with domestic issues like the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe versus Wade in June, inflation, Medicare funding, etc. The possibility of former President Donald Trump’s interpreting a red wave as a green flag for his running again for president in 2024, and – God forbid – his winning it was a factor strong enough to make the U.S. voters pay attention to foreign policy. Trump’s winning and filling the seats in the Capitol with election deniers running on his coattails sounds like a domestic issue at first glance. However, when you carefully consider the arguments of commentators and especially those of Senate and House candidates who, even if they were on the Republican ticket, were not considered a Trump crony, they refused to be tied to Trump and his team's ties with Russia. They were mainly moderate politicians. But Trump kept “bragging about his deep and enduring bond” with Putin, as Russia’s vain and diabolical occupation in Ukraine, rapes and murders of Ukrainians by the Russian soldiers continued.
The ultra-conservative National Review’s Jim Geraghty assessed the midterm results as “an eye-opening call for Republicans to move on from Trump.” The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman thought both Putin and China’s communist leader Xi Jinping, as well as the supreme leader in Iran, also lost last Tuesday night because the U.S. voters did not want their regime to be associated with those international characters in any way. Friedman explains this behavior of the American people as deep-seated but not always displaying a love of democracy.
I lived in the United States; I know Americans. A great majority of Americans do not have a deep-seated or superficial love for any ideology. Regular voters in America do not even care who is in power, and who is not. Most of them even don’t know anything about the neoconservatives’ global policy of trivializing Russia by dismembering its federation and their plan to provoke Putin into occupying Ukraine, thus opening the “road to Peking” physically. But the easily manipulated Putin not only got himself into trouble but also scared the Europeans and Americans.
However, Friedman seems to be right when he wrote that “our enemies would be wise not to leave us for dead”; because, he says, “we’ve locked in the best going forward.” That is, the U.S. would “build back (its) strength.” Biden, in his post-election celebration of this unexpected turn of events, said he is not changing anything for the remainder of his term, domestically or internationally.
Boosted politically by the midterm results, Biden is going to the G-20 summit in Bali to declare his global leadership. He is going to meet Xi at the summit to discuss U.S.-China “red lines.” “Look,” he said. “I’m not willing to make any fundamental concessions,” when asked if he would tell Xi whether the U.S. would defend the self-ruled island from a Chinese attack. Of course, not! Xi is not going to have Putin at that summit to back him up. Putin is not participating in the G-20 summit because he is in deep mud up to his ears with the Ukraine issue. In a significant blow to his overall Ukraine policy, Putin ordered troops to withdraw from Ukraine’s Kherson. With this move, the great military genius Putin’s dream of occupying the area west of the Don and Dnieper rivers comes to an end; he ends up where he started this adventure. The question is then why did Putin start the conflict? Ukraine is partially in ruins as well as the reputation of Russia. Why? Has he achieved anything? In fact, he antagonized even most of the ethnic Russians in the Donbass region; he managed to have Swedish and Finnish people give up their historical neutrality and apply to be a member of NATO. Sweden is even changing its cherished Constitution to make this membership a reality. France and Germany were about to create their “own room with a view” not looking over the Atlantic! Even the British were ready to be unleashed from the U.S. reins. Thanks to Putin, now all 30 members are singing “Hallelujah” and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine are counting the days until full membership.
So, Xi is going to get his ears pinned back by Biden. He owes obedience to the one and only hegemon of the globe. All this because the establishment in the U.S., rejecting a multi-polar world, succeeded to line up all political power brokers behind the idea of “political unity and solidarity” and the “fraternity of the people” in the face of the “imperialistic Russia” and “their new tsar.” Even those who were ready to disown Biden if the "red wave" were realized, began touting praises to him for “withstanding historic and political headwinds in the midterm elections,” and “staving off resounding Republican wins as his presidency is entering a new period.” They are not even paying attention to the fact that the country is now headed to a divided government and having anything passed in Congress depends on the Democrats’ filibuster skills. Xi, on the other hand, might be the ruler of the Communist Party in China, but China is not a communist country anymore! It is only the supply chain and logistic specialists of the U.S.
In every meeting with the European leaders, Biden told them, “America is back.” They used to ask, “For how long?” Not anymore. G-20 heads of state and government summit in Bali tomorrow will witness the declaration and celebration of, in Biden’s words, a “new version of the U.S. role in the world.”
Only a month ago nobody would assume Biden could rerun for the presidency, now almost everyone agrees that he will win in 2024. The Washington Post reported that Biden and his aides are already planning a 2024 reelection strategy.
The silver lining of a dismal midterm performance, according to another columnist of that conservative review I mentioned, is that now “Trumpty Dumpty” is buried in the dustbin of history. Another dean of the American right, John Podhoretz, calls him “Toxic Trump.” He writes: “If the former president had any self-knowledge or even the slightest ability to be self-deprecating, he might consider giving himself this alliterative nickname. Toxic Trump is the political equivalent of a can of Raid.”
It is not “Joe” but “President Biden” again; we owe this to “Vlad.”
