The multiple crises that President Joe Biden faces are too many and too deep and systemic to be tackled in the old way or papered over – they require massive state intervention comparable in scale and character to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s, and embedding in a new global grand bargain acknowledging multipolarity and the effective twilight of the US’s global preponderance. Just like white Americans must accommodate the fact of their ‘majority-minority’ status in 20 years – they will be the largest single racial group but no longer a majority of the population – so must the foreign policy establishment accommodate to the US as the strongest, but no longer totally preponderant, world power.
The American crisis is stark. Look at the US federal capital – with over 20,000 national guard erecting a ring of steel around the inaugural platform. The US Capitol building in Washington, DC, looks increasingly like Baghdad’s Green Zone – with more US troops deployed for a ‘peaceful transfer of power’ than are based in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The FBI is vetting national guardsmen for extreme right-wing links in case an attack should be launched from within the ‘security’ services. It is a state in the centre of a perfect but terrible storm, reaping the whirlwind sown by the hyper-authoritarian, fascistic, Trump regime, but which is also rooted in a range of crises going back several decades.
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President Biden Faces Multiple Crises, Needs Radical Agenda Despite Corporate Opposition
